How to reduce policy churn
Most retention advice is unfalsifiable. This page publishes the whole rule we score renewals with, including the weights, so you can argue with it.
Two of the four signals are things you control this week. One is partly in your hands. One is not a lever at all, and treating it like one wastes the quarter.
Decide which churn you are measuring
Policy churn and client churn are different numbers and brokerages routinely quote one while meaning the other. A client who drops one of three policies has churned a policy and not a client. A client who moves all three has churned once, not three times.
Pick one, write the definition down, and use the same denominator every quarter. Renewal reporting and KPIs covers the denominator most brokerages get wrong, which is the part that makes a retention rate meaningless without anyone noticing.
The four signals, and the arithmetic
Every open renewal starts at 25. Each signal adds or subtracts, and the result is clamped between 5 and 98 — never 0 and never 100, because a rule should not claim certainty it does not have.
| Signal | What it adds | Lever? |
|---|---|---|
| Premium increase at renewal | Up 20% or more adds 35. Up 10% or more adds 25. Any increase adds 15. No increase, or no quote recorded, adds nothing. | Indirect |
| Client held less than 12 months | Adds 20. Nothing after the first year. | Structural |
| Number of active policies | Three or more subtracts 15. Exactly one adds 20. Two is neutral. | Direct |
| Time since contact was logged | Never logged adds 15. Over 180 days adds 12, over 90 adds 8, over 30 adds 4. Within 30 days adds nothing. | Direct |
A worked example: a client of eight months, holding one policy, quoted 12% up, last contacted 100 days ago scores 25 + 25 + 20 + 20 + 8 = 98. A client of six years with three policies, no increase, spoken to last week scores 25 − 15 = 10.
What to actually do, in order of what moves
- Log contact, and do it within 30 days of renewal. This is the largest swing available to you: 15 points for a client nobody has ever logged a conversation with, down to nothing inside 30 days. It is also the one most brokerages fail on by accident, because the call happened and nobody wrote it down. An unlogged call is, to every report you will ever run, a call that did not happen.
- Move single-policy clients to two. One policy adds 20; three or more subtracts 15, a 35-point spread. That is the cross-sell argument stated as retention rather than revenue, and it is the more honest version of it.
- Record the renewal quote early, and have the increase conversation first. A 20% rise adds 35 whatever you do. What you control is whether the client hears it from you with an explanation, or sees it on a renewal notice. Recording the quote is also what lets the score see the increase at all.
- Treat the first year as its own workflow. New clients carry 20 points for twelve months and then stop. You cannot shorten that; you can make sure the first year is not silent. A 90-day onboarding checklist is the cheapest version of that.
What this score is not
It is a rule, not a prediction. Nobody trained it on brokerages that left, and we publish no accuracy percentage because we have not measured one. A vendor quoting a retention-model accuracy figure should be asked what it was measured against and over what period.
It also degrades quietly on thin data. A book with no quotes recorded and no contact history produces uniformly low scores that look like good news and are simply an absence of information. That is why every score carries a separate completeness figure and names which of the four inputs were missing.
Treat a high score as a prompt to look at the file, never as a reason to act on the client. Retention is a judgment call about a relationship, and the arithmetic above is only there to decide whose file you open first on a Monday.
Seeing it on your own book
CovioIQ scores every open renewal on these four signals and shows the reasons beside the number. The demo runs on sample data, so you can look at the scoring without importing anything.
Related: renewal reporting and KPIs, the 90-day renewal checklist, all guides.