Contact overview

PolicyCenter defines a contact as either a person or a company. A contact exists outside of any role it happens to play. Generally, PolicyCenter requires that you enter standard data for a contact regardless of the role that the contact is assigned to. After defining a contact, you can add additional roles to it.

A contact that is set up from the Account File can be used by all policies within the account. One contact can play multiple roles on the account and on the policy. Take a personal auto policy for example. A contact can be the holder of the account, the primary named insured on the policy, and a driver of a vehicle insured by the policy.

You can access contacts through accounts and policies, which provide a centralized view of all contacts on the account and policy files. Some contact information is shared across policies. An update to the shared information propagates across all unbound usages of a contact. Other information is policy or usage specific, and does not propagate to other policies.

You can also access contact through the Contact tab on the tab bar.

The benefits of sharing contacts between accounts and policies include:

  • Avoiding data reentry and errors
  • Allowing the same contact to play multiple roles on the account and policy, such as account holder, named insured, or billing contact
  • Allowing you to configure which pieces of contact information to revision
  • Associating Contact to other entities such as Location or Vehicles

Centralized view of contacts on the Contact tab

The Contact tab provides a central place to view information associated with a contact such as:

  • Details including name, phone, date of birth, addresses, and other information
  • Accounts
  • Policies
  • Work orders
  • Claims if PolicyCenter is integrated with claims system
  • Billing if PolicyCenter is integrated with a billing system

Using the Contact tab, you can create new contacts, search for existing contacts, or select a recently viewed contact. You can also create an account for the contact.

Sharing contacts with a contact management system

A contact management system maintains contacts in a central location. These contacts can be shared across applications. The default configuration of PolicyCenter includes an integration with Guidewire ContactManager. You can also integrate PolicyCenter with the contact management system of your choice. In the default configuration, the integration with ContactManager is not enabled.

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Contacts and roles

In PolicyCenter, one contact can have multiple roles. In some cases, an edit to the contact is synchronized or propagated across the contact and its roles. In other cases the change affects only the particular role. For example, Joe is the account holder (in the account role), billing contact and secondary contact. If you edit the address for Joe, then you generally expect to see the change in all of his roles.

In addition to standard contact information, some contacts have role information that needs to be collected. For example, a contact that is in a personal auto driver role needs to provide the year first licensed. A role does not need to have role specific information to be a defined role. For example, a billing contact only requires standard contact information.

A contact can play multiple roles. For example, a contact on a personal auto policy can have the roles of named insured and driver on the policy, as well as account holder on the associated account.

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Types of contact information

The kinds of information that PolicyCenter stores about a contact are:

  • Contact information that is used across roles, such as address and phone information.
  • Role-specific information on the account level that is consistent everywhere that a contact plays that role. Some examples would be year first licensed for a driver role or an industry code for a named insured role.
  • Role-specific information on the policy level that could be different anywhere the contact plays the role such as a driver percentage on any given vehicle for the driver’s role.

Linking an address between multiple contacts

Two or more contact often have the same address. For example, a personal auto policy has four drivers: the husband and wife and their two teenage children. Each driver on the policy has separate contact information with an address. Because all drivers live at the same address, the address information is the same. In PolicyCenter, to avoid retyping the address, you can link a group of addresses that are the same.

If you change the address information for one contact, you can:

  • Update the address for all contacts in the linked group.
  • Update the address for this contact only, and remove it from the linked group. PolicyCenter removes the linked group if only one contact remains in the group.

You can update linked addresses from an external system. The API provides methods for updating the linked address on a contact.

In the default configuration, you can link to addresses on the following types of contacts:

  • Primary named insured
  • Account holder
  • Named insured

You can configure PolicyCenter to link to other types of contacts.

See also