Recap: October Lunch and Learn—Commercial Intake, Email Intake, and the New VIN Scanner
This month's Lunch and Learn was all about meeting prospects where they already are. Megan from our Customer Success team walked through commercial intake, email intake, and the brand new VIN Scanner.
A quick note on plans: commercial intake, email intake, and the VIN Scanner are included with every plan. To check which plan you're on, open Settings in your dashboard and click the Billing tab, or send a message to our support team.
Commercial Intake: The Same Easy Experience for Business Prospects
Canopy Connect is best known on the personal lines side, and commercial intake brings that same experience to your business prospects. They can sign in with their carrier, upload their documents, or fill out a form, and Canopy Connect extracts the key information into the layout you already know. We support about 90% of standard commercial carriers for direct login. Non-standard carriers often don't offer a consumer portal, so for those prospects, document upload is the way to go, and Canopy Connect still pulls out the details.
Set up a dedicated commercial link. Megan keeps a separate link for commercial prospects so she can ask questions that only matter for businesses, like years in business, number of employees, and annual revenue. Driver fields can be set as required on this flow too, so if the carrier doesn't return something like a license number, the prospect gets prompted to fill it in. Prospects with policies at more than one carrier can click Import Another Carrier at the end and repeat the process for each one.
What comes back to you. Commercial submissions follow the same layout as personal ones, with contact information at the top and every policy listed below with its premium and dates. Expand a commercial auto policy to see the named insured, vehicles with VINs, coverages with limits, deductibles, and premiums, plus mileage, use, and lienholder details. BOP and workers' comp policies show the named insured, address, and full coverage breakdown, and property data is available for commercial addresses as well. Expect a bit less property detail than on the personal side, though you'll still see items like year built and square footage. Below the policies you'll find listed drivers, loss events from the carrier, and answers to any custom questions, with anything skipped marked as No answer.
Preliminary loss run summaries. When a prospect signs in directly with their carrier, Canopy Connect automatically generates loss events data files alongside the usual dec pages, ID cards, and renewal forms. These preliminary loss run summaries let you start prior quoting right away, so you can hold off on contacting the current agent until you actually need the official loss run. When that time comes, the agent of record information is right there in the submission. Keep in mind that loss events come from the current carrier, so if a business has only been with that carrier for a year, you'll see a year of history.
Where commercial submissions can go. Commercial submissions can currently be sent to HawkSoft, AgencyZoom, and Assembly. Commercial support for EZLynx, Applied Epic, and PL Rating isn't available yet, and the team is checking with our integrations group on what's ahead. We'll share any updates in the follow-up email.
Email Intake: Turn Any Email Into a Submission
Plenty of prospects will email you a dec page long before they ever click a link. Email intake makes that email useful on its own. Every link can have its own unique email address, and anything a prospect sends there, including documents, photos, attachments, and notes, flows straight into Canopy Connect and gets extracted the same way a document upload would. That saves your prospect the step of uploading, and saves you the step of creating a new submission by hand.
Turning it on. Go to your Links page, find the link you want to use, and click Turn On next to email submissions. In the link editor, check Allow Email Submissions, copy the email address that appears, and save. You can share that address with prospects or forward documents to it yourself.
What it looks like. Email submissions arrive in your Submissions page with the usual email notification. Along with contact information, you'll see the subject and body of the original email, so any notes the prospect included stay with the record. Policies, vehicles, coverages, drivers, and mortgagee information with loan numbers all appear just as they would on any other submission, and every attachment is saved in the Documents section. You can also click Fetch Enriched Property Data on home policies, though some addresses, particularly in rural areas, may not have property data available from our third party provider.
Because this information comes from a document and not directly from the carrier, the policy shows an Unverified label. That's your cue to confirm the details with your prospect before quoting. From there, you can send the submission to EZLynx, PL Rating, HawkSoft, Applied Epic, and your other integrations as usual.
Email intake is rolling out to all eligible accounts the week of October 19. If you'd like it enabled sooner, use the support button at the bottom right of your dashboard and our team can turn it on for you.
VIN Scanner: No More Typing
Typing a VIN on a phone is nobody's favorite task. The VIN Scanner helps prospects who are entering a vehicle manually, whether they're adding a new car or chose not to connect an insurance account. On the vehicle page of their flow, prospects tap Scan VIN, point their camera at the VIN, and Canopy Connect fills it in automatically. In the demo, it read a VIN off the driver's side doorframe even when the phone was held upside down.
The VIN Scanner is live now on all plans. You'll see it in the Vehicles section when you edit any flow, and it means more complete, accurate vehicle information on the submissions you receive.
FAQ: Questions From the Session
If a prospect leaves out driver information, can they go back and add it? Prospects can't reopen a completed submission without starting over. You can add or edit drivers yourself by clicking the pencil icon next to any driver, or use Edit at the top of the submission.
Is there a Canopy Connect mobile app? There are no current plans for one, but there's a handy workaround. Open the Resource Hub at the top right of your dashboard and find the guide called Send a Link in Three Keystrokes. It shows you how to set up a keyboard shortcut that pastes your link for you, and how to add Canopy Connect to your phone's home screen as an app icon.
Does Canopy Connect support life insurance? Yes. When you edit a link, you can choose which carrier types to show: personal, commercial, or life. Many agencies keep these on separate links, since some carriers use a different portal for each line, which helps prospects pick the right one.
If a prospect doesn't know the answer to a custom question, can they skip it? That depends on how you've set up your flow. Every field and question can be marked as required or optional. Required fields show a red asterisk, and prospects will need to enter something like "I don't know" or N/A to continue. To change a question, open your flow, click the question, and check or uncheck Required. The Driver page works the same way, and you can also turn on hidden fields as optional or required.
Mark Your Calendar: November 10th
Next month we're going back to basics with a flow refresher. Join us for our November Lunch and Learn on November 10th at 1:00 PM Eastern to learn how to edit sharing paths, create a new link flow, and use conditional navigation. We'll also share an in-depth look at recent changes to our AgencyZoom integration.
As always, the recording and slides go out to everyone after the session, along with a setup walkthrough video. And if a question comes up in the meantime, our live support team is a message away using the support button at the bottom right of your dashboard. See you in November!