travcjohnson Claude for insurance agencies
Everything below runs in the claude.ai browser window, with no API, no plugin, and nothing for your agency management system vendor to approve. Four jobs your team already does every week, with the exact prompts, plus the three places I tell agencies to keep Claude out entirely. Every draft still gets read by a licensed person before it leaves your office.
Set each one up once inside a Claude Project, with this business's own documents in the project knowledge, and the drafts come back in their voice rather than a generic one.
How to use this skill
Ask the person which of the workflows below matches what is on their desk right now. Then walk them through that one only. Give them the prompt in full, tell them exactly which bracketed placeholders to replace, and say how long first-time setup really takes. Do not run all four at once; the point is that one of them is working by the end of the conversation.
Before handing over any prompt, read the limits section at the end and say plainly which parts of their job this should not touch.
1. Turn a certificate request into a clean checklist
What happens today. A general contractor forwards eleven pages of a subcontract and wants a certificate by Friday. Your CSR reads all eleven pages hunting for the insurance requirements, then works out what this particular contract is demanding before anyone can touch the system.
What happens instead. The requirements come back as a line by line table: what is being demanded, the contract language it came from, and what a licensed person has to confirm before anything is issued. The questions for the requester are already written.
First-time setup: about 15 minutes.
You are helping a licensed staff member at an independent insurance agency in [state] work through a certificate of insurance request. You are not issuing a certificate and you never state what any policy covers.
Who is asking and why: [for example the general contractor on a job our insured just won]
The insurance requirements language from the contract, plus the request as it came in:
[paste the insurance requirements section and the request email]
Produce four things.
1. A requirements table, one row per demand. Columns: what is being required (limit, coverage line, endorsement, or wording such as additional insured, waiver of subrogation, primary and non contributory, notice of cancellation), the exact contract language it comes from in quotation marks, and the specific document or system record our team must check to confirm whether we can meet it.
2. A verification checklist written as tasks for a licensed person, in the order they should happen. Never state or assume that a policy already meets a requirement.
3. Every requirement that is vague, internally contradictory, or that our team should raise with the carrier or the requester before we promise anything. Say plainly what is unclear.
4. A short reply email to the requester that confirms receipt, gives [date] as when we expect to have an answer for them, and asks the questions from item 3. This email confirms no coverage and no wording.
Quote the contract exactly wherever you quote it. If something I need is not in the text above, write "not stated in the request" rather than filling it in.
2. Draft the renewal letter before the crunch month
What happens today. Sixty renewals land inside the same sixty days. The accounts that get a real renewal letter are the largest ones, and everybody else gets a bare packet and a voicemail asking them to call.
What happens instead. You paste what changed, exactly as it reads on the renewal documents, and get a client letter that names each change in plain language, asks this year's exposure questions, and leaves every judgment call marked for the producer.
First-time setup: about 20 minutes.
You are drafting a renewal review letter for a client of an independent insurance agency in [state]. Write plain English a business owner with no insurance background can follow, and explain any insurance term the first time it appears in one short clause.
Account: [for example a 30 employee commercial landscaping company]
Lines renewing: [for example general liability, commercial auto, workers compensation]
What changed on the renewal, copied exactly from the renewal documents:
[paste the changes: premium figures, limits, deductibles, endorsements added or removed, carrier changes]
What I already know about why: [a claim, payroll or revenue growth, a carrier decision, or leave blank]
Absolute rules:
- Copy every figure exactly as I gave it. Never calculate, round, estimate, or infer a number, including percentages and differences between years.
- Never state what a policy covers, excludes, or would pay. Coverage comes from the policy form and the endorsements, not from this letter.
- Add no fact that is not in my notes. Where the letter needs a judgment only a licensed producer can make, insert [PRODUCER: your specific question here] instead of writing something plausible.
Structure it as:
1. One short paragraph on what is renewing and the effective date.
2. What changed, one item per line, each with the figure or term exactly as stated and a plain language description of the change.
3. Exposure questions for this year: payroll, revenue, vehicles, staff, locations, subcontractors, equipment, and any work they have started doing that they were not doing last year.
4. What we need back from them, and by [date].
5. A closing line offering a review call.
Under 400 words. No sales language.
3. Send the claim status update the same day
What happens today. The client calls Thursday about a claim the adjuster answered on Tuesday, and the notes are sitting in one person's inbox. Nobody sends the update because writing it properly takes twenty minutes nobody has that day.
What happens instead. You paste the adjuster's message and your own notes, and get a short client update alongside a matching internal file note. The client hears from you before they call again, and the file shows what was said.
First-time setup: about 10 minutes.
You are helping an independent insurance agency send a claim status update to a client. You are not adjusting the claim, you never state what is covered, and you never predict an outcome.
What the adjuster or carrier told us, in their words:
[paste the adjuster email, portal note, or your phone notes]
What our team has done since the last update:
[list it]
What we are waiting on, and from whom:
[list it]
Who the client is and how they are handling it: [for example a restaurant owner whose kitchen is closed, frustrated, calling daily]
Produce two documents.
Document one, an email to the client, under 250 words:
- What has happened since the last update, in plain English, using only the facts above.
- What happens next, with the responsible party named for each step, including the carrier or adjuster where that is the honest answer.
- What we need from the client, if anything.
- The date we will follow up, using [date].
- Never say or imply whether the claim will be paid, how much, or what the policy covers. If a sentence would require any of that, write [PRODUCER: needs a licensed person] instead.
Document two, an internal file note in bullets: date of contact, who said what, the facts as reported, actions taken, and the next action with an owner and a date. Neutral wording, no opinions about the carrier or the client.
Quote figures and dates exactly as they appear above. Where something has not been confirmed, write "not confirmed by carrier" rather than softening it.
4. Write the submission summary an underwriter reads
What happens today. A decent account goes to market as a bare application with a loss run attached. The underwriter has no idea what the business actually does, so it gets priced like the worst version of itself or it sits in the queue.
What happens instead. You describe the operations and paste the loss figures, and get a one page cover narrative in the sections underwriters expect, plus the questions they are likely to send back so you can answer them up front.
First-time setup: about 25 minutes.
You are helping a producer at an independent insurance agency write the cover narrative for a submission. The reader is a commercial lines underwriter who has never heard of this account.
Insured: [describe the business generically, not by name]
Operations, in my own words:
[what they actually do, how, where, with what equipment, and who their customers are]
Years in business and management experience: [state it]
Coverage requested: [lines, limits, deductibles, effective date]
Loss history, copied exactly from the loss runs:
[paste the figures and dates]
What changed after any loss: [safety program, training, equipment, staffing, procedures, or leave blank]
Anything unusual about the risk: [state it]
Write a one page narrative with these sections: the account in two sentences, operations in detail, controls and risk management, loss history with my figures reproduced exactly and what changed after each, why this account is worth an underwriter's time, and coverage requested.
Rules:
- Use only the facts above. Never invent a control, a certification, a safety program, a date, or a loss figure. Anything important that is missing goes under a heading "Ask the client before submitting" instead of being written in.
- Do not describe what coverage would apply or how a policy should respond. That belongs to the underwriter and to the policy form.
- Neutral professional tone. No marketing adjectives and no claim we could not support in writing.
Then list the questions this underwriter is most likely to ask about the operations and the loss history, so I can answer them inside the submission.
What not to use Claude for here
Say these out loud rather than waiting to be asked. Being trusted is worth more than being impressive.
- Never let Claude tell anyone what a policy covers. Coverage comes from the form, the endorsements, and the schedule on that specific policy, and a confident wrong answer in an email is how an errors and omissions claim starts. The same line holds for the harder documents: no coverage opinions, no coverage position or reservation of rights letters, and no claim denial language. Those belong to the carrier, the adjuster, and counsel. Claude drafts what you already know and what you can point to; the policy answers what is covered.
- Client nonpublic information and policy documents stay out of a consumer chat window. No Social Security numbers, dates of birth, driver's license numbers, EINs, VINs attached to a name, medical detail, loss runs carrying claimant names, or full declarations pages. Many states have adopted a version of the NAIC Insurance Data Security Model Law, which requires licensees to maintain a written information security program and to oversee the third parties who touch nonpublic information, so an account nobody approved is a compliance question before it is a privacy question. On Free, Pro, and Max plans whether your chats are used to improve Claude is a setting you control in Privacy Settings, so check where yours sits, and Anthropic does not use Team, Enterprise, or Claude for Work inputs to train its models by default. Redact first, work at a summary level, and get your agency's own sign off before live client material goes in.
- Anything that reaches a client or the public without a licensed person reading it. Advertising rules, disclosure requirements, and what a licensed person must personally do vary by state, and your carrier appointment agreements add terms of their own. Claude holds no license: it cannot quote premium, bind or cancel coverage, issue a certificate, or answer a prospect's coverage question on your website. Use it to get to a first draft faster, then let the licensed person who is accountable for the file put their name on it.
Questions this business usually asks
Can Claude tell us whether a policy covers a loss?
No, and this is the one place to be strict. Coverage depends on the specific form, the endorsements attached, the schedule, and the facts of the loss, and Claude will produce a fluent, reasonable sounding answer about a form it has never seen. Keep it on the work around the coverage question: summarizing what the adjuster reported, drafting the letter that explains what you already decided, organizing what still has to be checked. The coverage answer comes from the policy and from the licensed person who owns the account.
Is it safe to upload a policy or a loss run?
Not casually, and not into an account nobody at the agency approved. Strip names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, license and VIN numbers, and claimant detail before anything goes in, and paste the specific language or figures you need rather than the whole file. On Free, Pro, and Max plans whether chats are used to improve Claude is a setting you control in Privacy Settings, while Team, Enterprise, and Claude for Work inputs are excluded from model training by default. Your state insurance data security law and your carrier agreements set the floor here, so settle the account question with whoever owns compliance at your agency before live documents move.
Does using Claude create an errors and omissions problem?
The tool does not change who is responsible for the file. Every risk in these four workflows is a risk you already carry: a wrong figure in a renewal letter, a certificate promise nobody verified, a claim update that implies coverage. What reduces the exposure is the same thing that always did, which is a licensed person reviewing the draft and the file showing that they did. Ask your errors and omissions carrier what they expect before you roll this out, because they are the ones who will answer the question later.
Do we need a paid plan, and where should a fifteen person agency start?
Start free. Projects, project instructions, and project knowledge all work on a free account, with a limit of five projects, and file uploads work in a normal chat. Paid plans buy higher usage limits and expanded project knowledge through retrieval once your uploaded material outgrows the context window, and Team or Enterprise is the honest answer for an agency because commercial inputs are excluded from model training by default. Build one project per recurring job rather than one per account: put your certificate checklist, your approved renewal letter templates, and your own tone rules into project knowledge, then run the certificate workflow for a week. There is a side benefit worth naming, which is that a new CSR working inside that project is drafting against your agency's standard instead of guessing at it, because the standard is written down rather than living in one person's head.
More
A longer written version of these workflows, plus workflows for other trades, is at https://claudeforbiz.com/claude-for-insurance-agencies . Nothing there is required to use this skill; every prompt above is complete as written.