Case Study
How Vantage Point Risk Cut Client Back-and-Forth by 60–70%
How Vantage Point Risk cut client back-and-forth by 60–70% with a standardized intake process
About Vantage Point Risk
Vantage Point Risk is an independent insurance agency based in Eugene, Oregon, serving Eugene, Springfield, and clients across the West.
The agency offers commercial and personal insurance, with specialized commercial programs for real estate investors, commercial property owners, real estate services, contractors, restaurants, trucking and transportation, and professional services.
Vantage Point takes a proactive approach to insurance, reviewing clients’ existing coverage, comparing options across dozens of carriers, and helping identify gaps and areas where clients may be overpaying. Rather than looking at policies individually, the agency focuses on understanding the full picture of a client’s risk and providing clear guidance around their options.
We sat down with founder and principal advisor Richard Sweet to discuss how Vantage Point standardized its intake process, made specialized knowledge accessible across its team, and reduced client back-and-forth by 60–70%.
The challenge: Getting the right information the first time
Commercial insurance can require a tremendous amount of information, and the questions change considerably depending on the type of risk.
Without a standardized process, producers and service team members have to remember which questions to ask for each submission. Missing even a small piece of information can mean another phone call, text, or email to the client.
That problem only becomes more difficult as an agency grows.
“If it’s one person sitting at a desk and you can remember every question you gotta ask every single time and you write it down, great,” Richard explained. “But then you add another person.”
“If it’s one person sitting at a desk and you can remember every question you gotta ask every single time and you write it down, great. But then you add another person.”
For Vantage Point, the goal was to create a process that consistently captured the information needed to quote a risk, regardless of which team member was speaking with the client.
Building intake around the way Vantage Point actually works
Rather than relying on generic forms, Vantage Point began building custom intakes in Sembley around its specific lines of business and workflows.
For specialties like trucking, transportation, and real estate investment, that means collecting the information Vantage Point knows it will need before the team gets to a carrier portal, ACORD application, or underwriter.
The process isn’t static.
When a team member encounters a question in a carrier portal that wasn’t included in the intake, Richard adds it. As the agency learns where information is being missed, the intake evolves so the same problem is less likely to happen again.
For example, when Vantage Point rebuilt its personal lines intake, team members identified additional questions they were regularly encountering while quoting. Those questions were added to the intake, giving the entire team access to them going forward.
That ability to continually improve the process has helped Vantage Point build intakes around the realities of its business rather than forcing its business into a predefined form.
60–70% less back-and-forth
The impact has been substantial.
Richard estimates that since Vantage Point began building and refining its custom intakes, the agency has reduced the back-and-forth required to collect information from clients by 60–70%.
Instead of realizing later that a date of birth, property detail, or risk-specific question was missed, the team has a consistent intake to work through from the beginning.
And when something does get missed, it becomes an opportunity to improve the process for the next submission.
“As I hear about things, I’m like, we need to get that on the intake so we don’t miss that next time.”
“As I hear about things, I’m like, we need to get that on the intake so we don’t miss that next time.”
The result is fewer follow-up calls, emails, and text messages for the agency and a faster, easier process for its clients.
Making specialized knowledge accessible across the team
Standardization has also changed who can handle an incoming opportunity.
Vantage Point writes several specialized classes of business, but not every employee is an expert in every one of them. With the right intake in place, they don’t necessarily need to be.
Richard gave the example of a CSR who doesn’t specialize in trucking. If a trucking prospect calls, the CSR can open Vantage Point’s trucking intake in Sembley and work through the questions needed to get the quoting process started.
The same applies when a personal lines producer receives an inquiry about a real estate investment property or commercial building.
“He opens the trucking app, the Sembley app, and he knows all the questions to ask,” Richard explained.
“He opens the trucking app, the Sembley app, and he knows all the questions to ask.”
Instead of immediately handing the prospect off to someone else, team members have a repeatable process that allows them to capture most of the information the agency needs.
Better intake, faster quoting
For Vantage Point, collecting better information upfront isn’t only about reducing follow-ups. It affects everything that happens afterward.
The agency uses the information collected through its intakes across its CRM and quoting workflow, avoiding the manual re-entry that Richard believes unnecessarily slows down the process.
For standard personal and commercial business that can be quoted through carrier portals, Richard says Vantage Point can typically turn around quotes within an hour, including quoting eight to ten carriers in some cases.
“It starts with the intake being complete.”
“It starts with the intake being complete.”
Vantage Point has even developed relationships with underwriters who will use its agency-branded intake to provide an initial indication.
Instead of assembling information across multiple applications before approaching the market, the team can send a single organized intake containing the details the underwriter needs to evaluate the risk.
Bringing intake and applications into one workflow
Before Sembley, Vantage Point had experience building forms through tools like Gravity Forms. But those forms existed separately from the rest of the submission process, creating another system the agency had to manage and another place where information could get stuck.
Sembley gave the team a way to bring its custom intake process into the same platform it uses to build insurance applications.
Richard also points to Sembley’s Document AI as one of the biggest improvements for his team. Instead of manually retyping information from documents they already have, Vantage Point can upload documents such as dec pages, emails, and spreadsheets and use that information to begin building applications.
“The ability to upload documents that we had from wherever and parse it out and start to build the application...that was probably the biggest thing for us.”
“The ability to upload documents that we had from wherever and parse it out and start to build the application...that was probably the biggest thing for us.”
For Richard, combining document ingestion, custom intake, and application building in one place has helped reduce the amount of manual work required to move a submission forward.
A process that gets better with the agency
Richard doesn’t view intake as something an agency builds once and considers finished.
His advice to agencies is to start with the business they’re already writing and pay attention to the follow-up questions their teams repeatedly ask.
Look through the emails going back and forth with clients. Look at text messages. Look at the questions producers realize they forgot to ask once they start quoting.
Those interactions show an agency where its intake process is falling short.
From there, those questions can become part of a standardized intake so the next person doesn’t have to chase down the same information again.
For Vantage Point, that approach has turned intake into an evolving operational system: one that captures what the agency learns, makes specialized knowledge easier to share across the team, and removes unnecessary work from every submission that follows.
