The Secret to Generating More Benefits Business for Your Insurance Company

In today’s digitally connected world, we all have certain expectations for service and access to information from companies we do business with. When these expectations are not met, businesses can pay a price. For an insurance carrier, that price could be in the form of lost customers, reputation, broker partners, premium income, or even the business itself.

The importance of customer experience is at an all-time high. That’s why more and more brokers are becoming digital businesses. They want to take advantage of every chance to automate servicing and delight their clients. However, with a benefits book of business, there is more complexity and sensitivity to managing risk information during the insurance lifecycle than other lines of business. It requires both carriers and brokers 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 insureds.

Challenges Benefits Carriers Face Today

Benefits carriers face many challenges when manually handling the exchange of benefits information such as policy details, coverage, minimums, premium payments, and commissions among other information between their businesses and broker partners.

Challenges include:

Wasted Time
Handling one-off requests for client data from multiple brokers via phone calls and email wastes significant time that could be spent on more profitable activities.

Inefficient Proposal Process
Paper is a major factor in time wasted at an insurance company. Managing outbound physical paperwork as well as retrieving, printing and mailing or faxing numerous policy documents prevents carrier staff from focusing on servicing clients and discovering new business.

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

Increased Workload
Benefits policy-related information often requires multiple members of staff to manage. There are more document types and a larger number of them compared with P&C. This means an increased workload for your staff who have to pull, retrieve, and process files available in multiple formats for your broker 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, the end customer is not getting service in a timely manner. This can lead to lower client satisfaction – and sometimes even the loss of renewal business.

A Better Way to Service Benefits Clients

There’s a better way to manage benefits policy-related information exchange and it’s with eDocs and Messages download. eDocs and Messages download is a secure way for your insurance company to automatically deliver benefits documents from your system directly into broker management systems.

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 brokers informed on the status of their policies. With eDocs and Messages download, there are no concerns about paperwork or email delays, or worse, lost in transit.

Once in your broker partners’ management systems, eDocs and Messages can be set up to trigger client servicing activities or be pushed to client portals automatically. All of this happens behind the scenes, without any calls or emails to your staff.

In 2019 alone, there were more than 200 million digital transactions between insurance carriers and P&C brokers. But there is demand from brokers for this type of automation in their benefits operations too. By delivering benefits documents digitally to brokers, you can generate more business and increase policyholder satisfaction and renewals.

Benefits documents that brokers would like to receive include:

• Summary of Benefits and Coverage
• Census Information
• Plan Level Documents
• Commission Statements
• Proposals
• Claims Summary Reports

So How Do You Get Started?

Taking advantage of automated servicing means eliminating a long, difficult process of receiving one-off, individual document requests, and then faxing, emailing or mailing them to multiple broker partners. Instead, the latest benefits policy information is securely sent via eDocs and Messages download and available in a timely manner to brokers and insureds.

Leading P&C carriers and brokers use IVANS to automate servicing, and IVANS is ready to expand its benefits partnerships. IVANS cloud-based software automates the complete exchange of policy-related information from carrier to the insured and empowers your business to:

• Operate within a single, open platform for the daily exchange of benefits policy-related information
• Provide a secure and managed alternative to email, mail and faxes with data encryption while in transit and at rest
• Minimize the number of phone calls and emails coming into your support team
• Ensure the latest benefits policy-related information is available in a timely manner for broker partners and insureds

Learn more about eDocs and Messages, and what IVANS can do for your benefits business.

Automated Servicing, Carriers, 2020