There’s a Better Way: The Secret to Delivering Superior Service to Your Benefits Clients

Keeping up with consumer demand for instant service is vital in the digital age of insurance. Are you sure your agency is taking advantage of every chance to automate servicing and improve customer satisfaction?

Year-over-year, demand to increase connectivity across the insurance lifecycle – from finding markets to binding policies to servicing and renewals – continues to grow from both insurers and agencies. According to the latest IVANS Connectivity Survey, agencies can save nearly two hours per employee per day when using automated download services.

Handling of Benefits information by agencies and insurers introduces more complexity into the insurance lifecycle. It requires all parties to accept new challenges and responsibilities such as consulting about costs and client needs, addressing compliance issues, and developing plans meant to improve the overall satisfaction of the insured.

The Challenges Facing Agents Today

Here is a look at the existing challenges agencies face when manually handling Benefits information exchange between their insurer partners, their own agency management systems and their clients.

Wasted Time
Agencies have to navigate to multiple insurer portals, retrieving information from each one and matching policies and codes across portals and documents to ensure information is getting to the right system. Contacting insurers and retrieving information from email can lead to unexpected delays.

Inefficient Proposal Process
Paper is a major factor in time wasted at an agency. Managing inbound physical paperwork as well as retrieving and printing numerous policy documents prevents an agency’s staff from focusing on directly servicing clients and discovering new business.

Greater Data Exposure
Security is a matter of utmost importance in insurance and manually sharing information back-and-forth between insurers, your agency and clients leaves room for exposure and loss of data integrity.

Increased Workload
Benefits information often requires multiple members of staff to manage. There are more document types and a larger number of them in comparison with P&C. This means an increased workload for your staff who have to pull, retrieve, and process files available in multiple formats from your insurer partners.

Decreased Customer Satisfaction
The last hurdle in the process of getting information to clients is manually sending them the files. When all of the challenges add up, your clients may not be getting documents in a short enough time period. This can lead to lower client satisfaction at your agency.

A Better Way to Service Benefits Clients

There’s a better way to manage Benefits information and it involves automated servicing with eDocs and Messages download. eDocs and Messages download is a secure way for insurers to automatically deliver benefits documents from their systems directly into your agency management system.

eDocs are file attachments related to the insured’s policy or billing – typically PDFs, Word or Excel docs and images. Messages are text-based memos that keep an agency informed on the status of their policies. This information flows securely through the IVANS’ network. With eDocs and Messages download, there are no concerns about paperwork or emails delayed, or worse, lost in transit.

Once in your agency management system, eDocs and Messages can be set up to trigger client servicing activities or be pushed to client portals automatically. All of this can happen behind the scenes, without any manual intervention by your staff.

The following types of eDocs can be received from insurers:

• Summary of Benefits & Coverages
• Census Information
• Commission Statements
• Proposals
• Plan Level Documents
• Renewal Proposals
• Claim Summary Reports

The following types of Messages can be received from insurers:

• Status updates, e.g. adding new employees and changing employee information

eDocs and Messages download for Benefits is now available in IVANS and leveraging it can greatly improve your agency’s ease of doing business.

Why Automated Servicing Is the Solution

Now is the time for agencies to opt into eDocs and Messages download for Benefits. Doing so automates the complete exchange of policy information from insurer to the insured, enabling you to receive a variety of messages and documents from insurers directly to your agency management system and providing a secure and managed alternative to email, mail and faxes.

Taking advantage of automated servicing means eliminating a long, difficult process of logging into insurer portals, downloading individual documents, organizing those documents, and then manually attaching them into the agency management system. Instead, you benefit from an automated process where documents are transferred directly into your agency management system when they become available, and your agency doesn’t have to lift a finger to manage the process.

Let IVANS do the work. As a complimentary service for independent agents, we’ll reach out to your Benefits insurer partners to get you set up to receive automated eDocs and Messages download.

Automated Servicing, Agents, 2019