Your New Notifications Page
Welcome to your new Notifications Page! Here, you’ll find everything you need to stay up to date on your contractors’ certificates of insurance, and action items that your team can take to expedite the compliance process. The notifications page has three sections: Waivers, Activity Log, and Non-Responsiveness. We’ll discuss each section below and, as always, please feel free to reach out to your account manager with any questions you have!
The notifications tab has reduced functionality in Free Bunker Accounts. Reach out to your Account Manager to discuss upgrade options or start your free trial!
Pending Waivers
The Pending Waivers section gives you a quick way to review insufficient coverages, limits, or language, and decide whether or not you’d like to make an amendment to the contract requirement on a case-by-case basis. This information mirrors what you’ll see in the View Coverage panel for a specific insured, with a few key enhancements.
WAIVER NOTES
You will now be able to view notes that have been added to a waiver by our advisors or a member of your team. For example, if a Contractor was approved by legal to have a $2 Million Professional Liability policy rather than the required $3 Million, you’ll be able to make a note of this directly on the waiver. You can also use this field to filter out common waivers like Statutory Workers’ Compensation, and focus only on amended requirements. The notes field also pulls into your Waiver Report, providing an important layer of detail for legal reviews, insurance audits, or requirement updates.
PENDING WAIVERS
Pending is the default status for a waiver. Essentially, this means that one or more elements on a certificate of insurance do not meet their contract requirement. At this point, you can choose to ‘waive’ the insufficient elements (i.e. amend the requirement), ‘reject’ the waiver (i.e. confirm that the contractor must meet the original requirement), or place the waiver ‘In Review.’
IN REVIEW
In Review is a new status that we’ve added, to better align with multi-step workflows that often precede ‘waiving’ required elements. For example, if your team needs to get approval from the legal department before amending requirements, you can place the waiver ‘in review’ while the new contract terms are negotiated. From a communication perspective, placing a waiver ‘In Review’ essentially stops all communication between Bunker and the insured, while your team determines internally whether the current COI will be acceptable.
REQUESTED WAIVERS
Requested Waivers are a new feature designed to streamline communication between your team, your contractors, and our insurance advisors. These waivers have been specifically requested by one of our insurance advisors, because of nuanced insurance details or specific requests from the insured.
For example, if a contract requires Auto Liability, but a contractor has informed us that they will not be using a vehicle in any way as part of the contract, you would receive a waiver request to formally waive the auto requirement, including notes on the context. Other examples could include difficult contractors who are pushing back against the requirements, where we may want your input before continuing communications with the insured.
Activity Log
Your activity log keeps you up to date on the progress of your insureds, including important changes like new compliance statuses, non-responsiveness, expirations, and new COI uploads. We are actively in the process of creating custom notification emails which will alert you to these changes in real time. In the meantime, you can filter your activity log by date to see the changes that took place since you last checked your Bunker account, or filter by ‘Action’ to find specific metrics. When you export your activity log, the report that’s generated will have the filters you’ve selected.
COMPLIANCE STATUS CHANGE
This will include anytime that a contractor moves to a new compliance status. You can see their new status in the Current Status column.
Important Caveat:
In some cases, compliance is verified by our team of Advisors, so the ‘Current Status’ may not update immediately. For example, if your team waives all of the non-compliant elements on a contractor’s COI, you may see ‘Waiver Accepted,’ with a current status of ‘In Review.’
This is because an advisor needs to verify that all nuances are accounted for before marking a contractor ‘Compliant.’ In this case, you can click ‘view coverage,’ and you will see that all line items are either green, indicating that they meet the requirement, or gray, indicating that they have been waived.
NEW COI UPLOADED
This will help you keep track of your contractors from the very beginning of the compliance process. It can also be a helpful way to stay on the same page with your team members, if you regularly upload COIs on behalf of insureds.
WAIVER ACTIONS
This will help you keep track of your contractors from the very beginning of the compliance process. It can also be a helpful way to stay on the same page with your team members, if you regularly upload COIs on behalf of insureds.
PRO TIP:
At the Pro Tier, you can have unlimited users in your Bunker account. Invite your key point of contact on the legal or compliance teams to your account, and you’ll be able to approve, deny, or review waivers all in one place. When the time comes for a legal review or insurance audit, you’ll be able to use your Waiver Report as a single source of truth, with notes from each touchpoint to provide context.
Non-Responsiveness
Non-responsive indicates that we have reached out to an insured the maximum amount of times specified in our SLA, and we have not heard a response. For example, if an insured uploaded a noncompliant certificate of insurance, but didn’t respond to any of our attempts to help them fix the errors, they would show up as ‘Not Compliant’ and ‘Non-Responsive.’
This section of your notifications page is designed to make it as easy as possible to re-engage these contractors.
HOW TO RE-ENGAGE YOUR CONTRACTORS
Bunker is unique to other certificate management services in that we work directly with insureds to update their certificates of insurance. Insurance brokers and agents receive mountains of COI requests each week. They don’t always have a vested interest in providing COIs quickly, and can be slow to respond to non-customers. However, your contractors know that they need a verified certificate before they can begin (or continue) working with you.
Even so, insurance is usually the last thing on a small business’ mind. If we’ve reached out to them repeatedly and haven’t gotten a response, a gentle nudge from your team can significantly expedite the process!
STEP ONE
Simply copy and paste the list of emails into a BCC list or email automation tool. For larger lists, you can also download the information as a CSV with your Non-Responsive Report.
STEP TWO
We’ve provided a templated message based on what has worked well for our members in the past. You can copy / paste the text right into your message, or work with your account manager to craft one specifically tailored to your insureds.