Moving Beyond Agency Management Systems

Although traditional Agency Management Systems leave much to be desired, that doesn’t mean technology can’t help improve brokerage workflows. We know that an effective tool must be 1) user-friendly, 2) sticky, 3) collaborative, and 4) integrated into existing workflows. But what does that look like in practice?

Benefits workflows are incredibly complex, so being “user-friendly” is a tall order for a brokerage team. Questions you should ask of any Agency Management System provider to ensure they are user-friendly include:

1. How easy is it to get data into the system? With each client you onboard, there is a whole mess of plan and rate data that needs to make its way into the system accurately. A successful Agency Management System will provide tools to make this easy and error-free. For example, PlanYear provides SBC readers to automatically pull plan data into the system without having to do hours of manual data entry.
2. How easy is it to get data out of the system? If an Agency Management System doesn’t give you the option to easily export data from the system, run. The last thing you want is to hand over the keys to your data to a third party. What happens if they go out of business? Get acquired? Terminate the contract? You get the picture.
3. What sort of measures do they have in place to ensure your data is error-free? At the end of the day, we are all human and therefore prone to error. Make sure to ask what protections the Agency Management System has in place to ensure that, even if your team makes a silly mistake, the system will catch it.

For example, PlanYear has automated protections in place to ensure that you are unable to upload the wrong files to the wrong client. Imagine accidentally sharing one client’s sensitive data with another. Even with the hardest working, best-intentioned teams, these kinds of mistakes can happen. But technology can help catch these errors before they can impact your business.

Sticky

The goal here is that the tool is so valuable to your team that they prefer to use it over their existing workflow. In other words, the system drives engagement by design. One of the most impactful ways to do this is to automate manual & error-prone processes. These are both the most frustrating and the highest-risk activities for brokerage employees.

Collaborative

Agency Management Systems have historically excluded 75% of the parties involved in managing a successful benefits program.

As you can imagine, this leaves a massive gap for carriers, employers and employees. All of whom have an outsized impact on whether you win and/or retain a client. Until recently, the only option brokerages had was to stitch together multiple disparate systems that separately met the needs of either their team, their clients, or their clients’ employees. Since none of the systems can be integrated, it only resulted in exponential work for the brokerage teams and diminishing returns for all involved parties.

There’s a Better Way

It doesn’t have to be this way. A successful Agency Management System can and should provide an integrated, collaborative experience for all parties involved in running a successful benefits program. Let’s explain what this means for carriers, employers, and employees.

Carriers

The single greatest motivation for carriers is gaining and retaining business. The status quo, however, is that brokerage teams don’t have the bandwidth to market each group every year. So, many renew “as is” without any visibility into the rates they could have gotten with other carriers. The cost of healthcare goes up and brokerages run the risk of losing their clients if they don’t mitigate costs over time.

Without technology, the only way to manage seasonality is to deprioritize the groups that seem relatively unphased by their renewal and only market the groups with high renewals. With technology, however, you can create a true marketplace view for all clients and create competition between carriers. This results in lower rates for clients, a better experience for carriers, and a reduced workload for brokerage teams.

PlanYear’s technology enables brokers to invite carriers to bid on an RFP on the platform. The RFP is then conducted similarly to an auction. Brokers place a deadline for all offers to be submitted and carriers continue to bid on the business and gain insights into how far they are from the lowest offer until the RFP is closed.

Employers

Clients want visibility. In order for an Agency Management System to be successful, it must provide an employer experience that provides insight into all of the work they are doing with their broker team, how their population is trending, and the entire renewal process. A few examples of this include:

• Issue Tracking: Most brokerages rely on inboxes to keep track of client issues that can span multiple months. There is no way to enforce SLAs, and many issues get lost in the mix. Automated issue tracking creates tickets for each issue that comes to your team via email, so it never gets lost.
• Claims Analytics and Insights: Employers want to know how their claims are trending relative to their premiums so they aren’t surprised come renewal time, and so they can plan well in advance with their internal stakeholders.
• Renewals: Giving HR teams visibility into carrier offers not only gives them back a sense of control, but it also allows the broker to showcase all of the work they are doing on behalf of their client. If a client feels like they don’t know what is happening with their renewal, they are much more likely to introduce another broker into the mix to try to gain back control of the situation. 

Employees

There are generally two types of support employees need relative to their benefits program: 1) open enrollment support and 2) ongoing benefits utilization support. For an Agency Management System to effectively meet these needs, it needs to offer employees on-demand resources to help them choose the right plans for their needs and to use the benefits throughout the plan year.

There are a number of different factors that an employee considers when choosing a health plan, but the most important questions that need to be answered are:

1. What plan(s) keep my doctors in-network?
2. What is the lowest-cost plan option that meets my healthcare needs?

An effective Agency Management System will provide employees with the tools they need to answer those questions: doctor search/lookup, decisioning support or a plan recommendation engine, and the ability to book 1:1 benefits consultations with a benefits expert if needed.

On an ongoing basis, employees generally need:

• Mobile ID cards - easily referenceable on their mobile device when they are at the doctor’s office.
• Claims resolution support - give them an easy way to get in contact with specialists who can help, whether via phone, email, or video chat - ideally all three.
• Information about all their benefits - modern benefits programs offer a number of options beyond traditional medical/dental/vision/life/disability. Employees need a one-stop shop where they can find information about all of their benefits. Ideally, this is a living resource that can be updated throughout the plan year vs a static PDF file. 

Your Agency Management System can and should provide all of these resources. If they don’t, your teams are doomed to be duplicating manual data entry across multiple systems. We’ll talk about this more in the next section.

Integrated

There are two facets to an integrated Agency Management System. The first is that it must be integrated with your team's existing workflows so there is no friction to adoption.

For example, we discussed issue tracking in the section above regarding collaboration with employers. Beyond the visibility issue tracking provides to both the brokerage team and the employer, the most important quality of the tool is that it allows teams to reap the benefits while operating as they normally would in their inboxes. They don’t need to change a single thing to significantly improve their experience and their clients’ experience.

The other, perhaps more challenging facet of an integrated Agency Management System is that the workflows within the tool need to be integrated with each other (or, if the system doesn’t support the workflow, it needs to integrate with another system that does).

Let’s look at a specific example to add color to this point. In order for a broker to bring on a new client at their renewal, they need to negotiate all of the new plans with the carriers. Then comes plan spreading and contribution modeling. Not to mention that this data ultimately needs to make it into a benefits guide and open enrollment presentation. There is a ton of manual work and back and forth that happens to make the final product come together.

But what if the entire workflow was integrated from start to finish? The benefits of a truly integrated and streamlined workflow are too numerous to detail, but the key advantages include:

• Data is entered one time
• Reduced probability of human error
• Do more with less

Conclusion

Despite the historical shortcomings of Agency Management Systems, there is a clear path to efficient brokerage workflows.

A successful brokerage workflow solution is one that employees actually want to use. Engagement can’t - and shouldn’t - be forced. Although some buyers may dismiss user experience as frivolous, the usability and the utility of the tool to the end user is the key to driving engagement. It is therefore hugely important that end-user feedback is considered as a part of the evaluation process for any brokerage tool, so you can ensure they’ll actually use it. The only way to get value out of software is to use it, otherwise, you’re throwing money down the drain.

Engagement ensures that the tool has the opportunity to provide value, but as with any investment evaluation, a critical factor is not just the value but the potential ROI. Therefore, when considering software solutions for brokerages it is vital that the tool supports revenue-generating activities. More specifically, workstreams like collaboration with clients and carriers are critical to revenue growth and therefore must be enabled by brokerage technology if you want to ensure a return on investment.

In order to accelerate adoption and drive operating efficiency, the last critical component of brokerage software is integration with existing workflows and tools. Adding technology should enable your teams to do more with less effort, so you can’t ask them to duplicate their existing workflows in another system and expect a greater output. Automate where possible, and integrate the full lifecycle so they are able to focus on strategic work instead of administrative tasks.

In summary, the immense complexity of brokerage workflows requires a streamlined end-to-end benefits lifecycle solution that both decreases operating costs and enables revenue generation.

Keep on the lookout for the next blog post in the Agency Management System series to understand how you can solve your brokerage workflows while attracting and retaining a modern book of business.

Or, click here to get your copy of the full whitepaper "Why Agency Management Systems Fail" now.

Want to elevate your employee benefits experience? Schedule a demo of the PlanYear full-lifecycle benefits solution.