"In 2006 some 6,000 independent agents provided 27,000 ratings of property and casualty carriers across the country. To help carriers better understand the role of EDB as a competitive strategic differentiator, we've created several reports that describe what agents want and how carriers perform," said Nort Salz, co-founder of DCC.

"These reports document EDB performance broken out in several useful ways," explained Paul Croke, another DCC co-founder. "For example, there are benchmark groups of national carriers, very large regional carriers, medium-sized regional carriers, and small carriers."

Other data groupings include survey results by geography, by line of business, by respondent role (Principal, Producer, and CSR), and by agency size. In addition to the Importance and Performance ratings, the reports include the Ease of Doing Business IndexSM ratings, which measure the improvement opportunity in each of the ten EDB Factors.

Also included in the reports is a listing of the top ten EDB performers overall and in each of the ten EDB Factors.

Independent agents view EDB as critical because it has a profound effect on their productivity and profitability as well as on the quality of their work lives. In turn, this makes EDB important to carriers since the agent is the primary decision maker about which carrier gets a piece of the business. DCC specializes in helping p-c carriers achieve profitable growth by measuring and improving their EDB performance.

For further information, contact Salz at Nort.Salz @ deepcc.com , Croke at Paul.Croke @ deepcc.com or check the DCC website at www.deepcc.com

Contact: Nort Salz (978) 263-6100