A client calls to renew their public liability. You process it, send the documents, move on. That feels efficient. But is it good broking?
Most brokers would describe themselves as advisers. The day-to-day reality, particularly when you’re time-poor, often looks more like order-taking – responding to what the client asks for without fully understanding the business or the risk behind it. The gap between those two things is where problems are created and where reputations are lost.
84% of clients trust that their broker acts in their best interests and that their advice is free from self-interest. That trust is conditional on brokers actually behaving like advisers. When you’re processing requests rather than understanding businesses, that trust is on borrowed time.
What happens when the right questions aren’t asked
The gaps that surface at claim time are almost always traceable to assumptions made at placement. Nobody set out to underinsure the client – it just wasn’t caught because the right questions weren’t asked early enough.
Around 70% of Australian businesses are underinsured, with an average shortfall of 30% across property and assets. The root cause is almost always inadequate discovery, not deliberate under-coverage. Some of the most common underinsurance pitfalls are property sums, business assets, business interruption, liability, and cyber – and these are all issues that a thorough question process can surface and address before a claim, not during one.
There’s also a client perception problem running alongside this. Only 43% of Australian small businesses believe they are fully covered from insurable business risks. Most of your clients are probably carrying risk they haven’t disclosed – not because they’re hiding it, but because nobody asked. Better Broker’s piece on the underinsurance gap covers how market conditions are making this more acute.
Asking more doesn’t slow things down
There’s a common assumption that a thorough discovery process adds time to every transaction. The brokers who’ve built this into their practice will tell you the opposite: asking better questions upfront means spending less time managing problems later.
When you understand the business before you place the risk, you write better submissions, reduce back-and-forth with insurers, and cut the frustrating cycles of supplementary information requests. Knowing what underwriters need upfront – and what risk factors to address proactively – is a real competitive advantage in a softening market where placement quality matters more than it did when rates were doing the work for you.
Chris Varkoly’s 20+ years of underwriting experience is part of what Better Broker members draw on through placement support – understanding what questions to ask because you understand what insurers are actually looking for is a different level of preparation than working from a standard fact-find.
The questions that actually matter
Good discovery questions don’t ask what cover a client wants. They ask how the business actually works.
Three types of question are worth building into every client conversation:
Business operations questions get at the mechanics of how revenue flows, who the business depends on, and what’s changed in the past year. How does income move through the business – is it project-based, contract-based, transactional? Who are the third parties this business relies on, and what happens if one of them fails? What’s changed in the last 12 months that the current policy doesn’t reflect?
Pressure point questions surface what keeps the owner up at night – the stuff that rarely makes it into a standard renewal. What would a bad month look like for this business, and has anything like that happened before? Are there contracts with insurance requirements that haven’t been reviewed recently? What does the owner worry about that they’ve never been asked about by a broker?
Forward-looking questions catch the risks that are coming rather than the ones already there. Are you planning to take on staff, expand premises, or enter new markets this year? Has the value of stock or assets been reviewed since the last renewal?
These aren’t just good service. They’re the foundation of proper risk identification, which is a core professional obligation under the NIBA Code of Practice.
Where authority in a client relationship actually comes from
Authority isn’t claimed. It comes from the quality of the conversation – specifically, from surfacing risks the client hadn’t considered and explaining trade-offs in terms that make sense to them rather than to an underwriter.
The brokers clients describe as trusted advisers are those who lead the conversation rather than follow it. 95% of heavy broker users – those in frequent, engaged relationships with their broker – are satisfied with their claims experience, compared to significantly lower satisfaction among clients with minimal broker contact. That gap is largely a function of how well the broker understood the risk in the first place.
When clients feel understood rather than processed, retention strengthens and referrals increase. The broker becomes genuinely difficult to replace – not because of price, but because of what they know. Better Broker’s piece on building authority without becoming a 24/7 helpdesk is worth reading alongside this.
Making it a habit rather than a one-off
Better questions only create consistent value if they’re embedded in your process – not just pulled out for complex risks or large clients. The brokers who do this well typically have a structure behind them: peer groups to pressure-test approaches, mentors who’ve seen the same client types across different market cycles, and enough operational support that they’re not rushing every discovery conversation.
That’s a large part of what the Better Broker collaborative network is built around – knowledge sharing that’s deliberate rather than accidental, in a group small enough that the conversations are actually useful. And it connects directly to the broader question of what it takes to run a brokerage, not just broker well.
The actual shift
The best thing you can do for a client – and for your own business – is slow down long enough to ask the right questions. Not every client will give you the time. But most will, if you ask in a way that makes it clear you’re trying to understand their business rather than fill in a form.
That’s what separates an adviser from an order-taker. And that shift, once it’s made, tends to be permanent.
If you want to build a practice where this is the standard rather than the exception, it’s worth a conversation.