RESEARCH AND FEASIBILITY STUDIES
Tilford Consulting brings a unique mix of skill sets to this portion of our service menu. In addition to being a former Chief Underwriter, William M. Tilford, FLMI, CLU, FALU was also an Assistant Survey Director at the National Opinion Research Center prior to beginning his insurance career in the 1980s. In the 1990s, in addition to insurance consulting projects, he also assisted on a project basis with data collection and database editing for federally-funded studies of consumer finances and medical expenses. If your company has need of research related to its underwriting activities (especially if the assistance of an objective external source would be helpful), we can work with you to perform research and pilot studies specially tailored to your needs.
AUDITS, QUALITY ASSURANCE AND PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS
The audits performed by MIB and your reinsurers tell you a few important things about the general performance of your underwriting department in terms of meeting their standards and needs, but is that really all you need to know? For your internal quality needs, we offer both the traditional general quality audit and specialized analysis projects to help monitor departmental consistency and review specific areas such as performance for specific impairments and the results of business submitted by specific agents/brokers. If you need to examine a specific aspect of your department's performance, we can help. Our results are both candid and confidential.
SPECIALIZED WRITING AND EDITING PROJECTS
Tilford Consulting offers a variety of educational and technical writing services for life and health insurance underwriting departments. We do not sell you 'boilerplate'. We work with you to assure that we do our best to take the special nuances of your company's products, markets and experience level into account when producing your materials.
PRODUCTION UNDERWRITING SUPPORT
Selecting risks is fun, so we keep doing it even though we also market several other services at higher rates. Getting our hands dirty keeps us firmly grounded in the day-to-day realities of our business, and this in turn helps us keep our other services focused, realistic and practical. We do not attempt to provide the cheapest contract underwriting service in the industry, but we are confident that those who have used us in the past would agree that we are among the best for providing both quality and quantity.
LITIGATION CONSULTING
We vend this service to attorneys rather than to insurance companies. We do not market it aggressively, we are extremely selective about our clients for this service, and we refuse most of the case referrals that come our way. We do not accept cases involving past, present or possible future clients for our other services. Also, since our professional credibility is critical to the success of our core business, we must be thoroughly convinced of the validity of the matter about which we are testifying before we will accept a case. These two filters quickly screen out most of the inquiries that we receive for this service. In cases which can clearly pass both of these tests, we do provide a full range of expert witness services for both plaintiffs and defendants. We have also provided expert assistance in cases concerning the effects of a medical event on possible future insurability.
UNDERWRITER TRAINING AND MENTORING
We do not aggressively market this service because we believe that underwriter training is best done the old-fashioned way: internally, using the apprentice system combined with the industry's educational programs. This is the way that we learned our trade, and we still believe in it. However, the modern economic realities of many underwriting operations can often make this difficult and occasionally even nearly impossible. In addition to his past experience with training underwriters, Mr. Tilford has also provided training and educational presentations in many non-insurance settings including non-profit groups, high school students, musicians and political activists. We do not vend a prefabricated program to the industry, but if your company is having underwriter training issues and lacks the resources to resolve these on your own, we can work with you to help determine what can be done to improve your situation.