How Virtus Insurance Uses Outmarket AI to Eliminate Busywork, Win New Business, and Empower Brokers

Stats at a Glance

• 30 Mins to 2 Hours: Time saved per task performed by Outmarket.

• 1 Week to 30 Seconds: Turnaround time reduction for tasks previously outsourced.

• Thousands of Hours: Estimated time saved per year across the client base.

Company Overview

Company: Virtus
Key Stakeholder: Adam Kroeger, Senior Vice President of Operations
Specialization: Property and casualty commercial insurance, private client (home, auto, valuables), and employee benefits.

About

Virtus is a Top 100 brokerage firm headquartered in Overland Park, Kansas. As a young, hungry, and tech-forward 12-year-old firm, Virtus was built from the ground up to be as innovative as possible in an industry largely reliant on outdated tools. They focus primarily on key industry verticals, including construction, private equity, food and beverage, hospitality, and real estate.

Challenge

In the insurance industry, even highly educated and skilled consultants often spend up to 70% of their day on administrative busywork, such as spreading quotes or re-entering data into spreadsheets. Virtus wanted to flip the script, allowing their team to spend time delivering real consulting value and building client relationships rather than doing grunt work.

Furthermore, Virtus recognized that simply giving employees access to a generalized AI tool without direction or standardized processes would yield poor results. They needed a highly accurate AI solution capable of being seamlessly integrated into their existing Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) without requiring complex prompting from end-users.

The Solution

After evaluating ten different competitors, Virtus chose Outmarket. Following a successful six-week beta test with 12 employees, Virtus completely revamped their entire sales and service process, known internally as the Virtus Arc, around their new AI capabilities.

Outmarket is now embedded into every step of the agency's workflows, from pre-renewal meetings to client onboarding. By leveraging tools like the policy comparison and gap analysis modules, Virtus empowers its staff to execute complex reviews significantly faster and with greater accuracy.

The Process

Virtus approaches AI adoption through meticulous process mapping. They build comprehensive SOPs and standard multi-step checklists for their client success teams. Once a process is standardized, leadership identifies which Outmarket modules can cleanly slide in to replace manual tasks.

By doing this, Outmarket actively eliminates manual steps. For example, a traditional 35-step renewal workflow is continuously shortened as Outmarket takes over three to five steps at a time. Virtus also maintains a tight feedback loop with Outmarket's executive and engineering teams, rapidly turning their own consulting ideas into new platform features in a matter of weeks.

The Outcomes

The integration of Outmarket has profoundly impacted operations, client success, and employee satisfaction at Virtus:

• Reclaiming Thousands of Hours: Virtus saves between 30 minutes to two hours on specific tasks. Multiplied across their entire client base, this equates to thousands of hours returned to their team annually.

• Bringing Work In-House: Virtus completely eliminated the need to outsource administrative work to third-party vendors. What used to take a week to turn around is now completed in 30 seconds internally.

• Overturning Denied Claims: Using Outmarket to analyze a complex denial letter for a large prospect, Virtus discovered a claims adjuster had mistakenly copy-pasted exclusions from a different client's policy. The prospect used this insight to successfully overturn the decision and get their claim paid.

• Winning New Business: For a large restaurant prospect, Virtus ran policies through Outmarket's gap analysis tool and uncovered a hidden exclusion for salmonella outbreaks. Pointing out this multi-million dollar exposure allowed Virtus to win the account and fix the coverage gap.

• Boosting Employee Happiness: By removing repetitive data-entry tasks, employees spend more time directly consulting with clients. This shift has not only driven greater value for clients but has noticeably improved overall staff satisfaction.

In Their Own Words

"Our job as an agent is to give them the tools to make those decisions, give them recommendations and consulting advice. By eliminating admin tasks behind the scenes, we can actually spend more time consulting and actually doing things to give our clients value." — Adam Kroeger | Senior Vice President of Operations, Virtus

1. On Solving the Core Problem of Manual Work

"An insurance professional, somebody who went to college, they're incredibly knowledgeable about insurance [and] likely spends 70% of their time doing administrative busy work. At Virtus, we're trying to flip the script for our consultants. We don't really want them doing busy work, we want them giving value to clients."

2. On Scaling and ROI

"It also allowed us to quit outsourcing. We would outsource certain tasks to a third party company to help us with some of the grunt work [. . .] Now we're doing it in house and the turnaround time is not one week, it's thirty seconds."

3. On Employee Satisfaction and Retention

"What Outmarket's allowed us to do is change the dynamic of how much time we're spending doing busy work versus how much time we're actually delivering value to our clients, which not only makes our clients happier but actually makes our employees a lot happier to work here."

4. On Winning New Business

"We ran into a very large restaurant group where we analyzed their policies through Outmarket. And we were able to find that they actually had an exclusion for essentially a salmonella outbreak [. . .] Through that process we were able to win the client and ultimately give them direction on how to fix their policies."

5. On Fostering a Culture of Innovation

"What we found is that AI doesn't work super well if you don't have a standard process in place. Once you have the process written, it's actually very easy to eliminate steps and make that process stronger, faster, quicker, more accurate."

Call-Outs

The "Time-to-Value" Call-Out: "What we found is, on certain tasks, that OutMarket performs, we would save anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours per task."

The "Direct Revenue" Call-Out: "Outmarket is not only speeding up our process of data entry it's also giving us really good consulting ideas."

The "Quality Control" Call-Out: "Literally, you just put the documents in, give it a little context, hit generate, and it gives you the results you want without much work on the user's end."