The successful employee benefit adviser will build or cobble together best-in-class technologies that allow the brokerage or consulting firm to electronically process all needs of the employer with a value-added spin.
This technology colossus will drive selling style, sales production and customer retention. Customers will look to employee benefit advisers not just as sellers but as key consulting relationships that can help a company with a wide range of needs.
Payroll providers
You have probably noticed that big payroll vendors are selling benefits and other human resource products and services to their payroll customers, your customers. That is a threat to you.
The good news is that, albeit temporarily, they don't have the selling and service aspects down yet. They tend to churn and burn accounts. It is just a matter of time, however, until they get their sea legs in the benefits business. Their strategy is simple. They have the payroll data to parse and dole out to insurance applications, online enrollment and others that need it to do their work.
Online enrollment vendors
Online enrollment vendors connect the dots in the fragmented employee benefits data flow. They touch eligibility data, enrollment elections, payroll and EDI files sent to insurance carriers. Data collected by online enrollment vendors can be used to perform ongoing benefit administration functions, COBRA outsourcing and other services that employers want to get off their plates. Needless to say, insurance applications can be completed and worksite marketing services performed once the data is captured.
You should have a relationship with an online enrollment vendor for those clients who want to go electronic with their benefits business. As costs come down for online enrollment and efficiencies grow, you should expect that clients who take a pass on online enrollment today will want to buy these services tomorrow. Start talking about it with your prospects and clients if you are not already doing so.
Insurance carriers
Carriers have been a little slow out of the gate with electronic data interchange, but that is changing. More and more carriers are accepting and transmitting enrollment, claims and other information electronically. You will be well-served to get in the middle of the electronic transmission to control who gets what and when.
Employers
Gone are the days when every organization had a professionally trained and experienced person in employee benefits and human resources. Those buyers are few and far between today, particularly as you scale down to smaller groups. That is an opportunity for you.
The proliferation of good software and Web technologies offers employers a panacea when it comes to management of paper-based information turned into electronic data. The whole phenomenon of business process outsourcing means that more employers every year run their benefits and human resource functions electronically with data flowing through software-as-a-service technologies on the Web and CD-ROM software products.
Agency management systems
Agency management systems have come a long way in their ability to provide data management and data exchange with a host of employee benefit-related technologies. Gone are the days when agency management systems just provided data management for P&C coverage and personal lines. Today, a handful of agency management systems cater specifically to employee benefits.
Tomorrow, these systems, and the newer generation systems that come along, will place the broker/consultant in the middle of the data control cockpit.
Value-added sales technology
Value-added selling seems to be all the rage today. The problem with many value-added sales tools is that they don't talk electronically to systems made by other manufacturers. That is changing. The advent of the application protocol interface, or API, allows programmers to make disparate systems send and receive data from various systems where the data are singularly uploaded at one point. Say goodbye to duplicative data entry.
In the middle of it all
In the benefits marketplace of tomorrow, you will be a broker of all these vendors. You will be a broker of technology not just insurance and related products. Get ready. The transition will be painful for some, but it will also be sweet for those who understand and respect the power of employer data.
Davidson is founder of Davidson Marketing Group and can be reached at craigd@davidsonmarketing.com.
