Efficient quoting means more effective benefit consulting
OneDigital delivers strategic advisory consulting services to more than 100,000 employers nationwide, helping their clients develop a customized, strategic, and effective suite of employee benefits.
OneDigital has more than 180 offices nationwide, and each needs to manage A LOT of its data from health insurance carriers to sell and renew benefits plans. The ongoing growth within OneDigital’s business made it difficult to maintain pace with the hours previously required to produce quotes and renewal presentations.
“Business isn’t slowing down or pausing while we’re determining new and innovative ways to serve our clients,” said Holly Forest, Vice President of Client Services at OneDigital’s Atlanta office.
Margins are key for Holly’s group, which handles small and midsize employers, covering ACA/metallic medical plans and ancillary products such as dental, vision, life, and disability. Field offices and broker partners refer business to OneDigital to manage their books of business. OneDigital receives a percentage of revenue for managing these books of business, and they operate on tight margins. As a result, everything Holly’s team does must be scalable, accurate, and cost-effective.
Most notably, Holly saw that manually keying carrier data into a spreadsheet was not scalable when working with thousands of employers. Her team’s time was better spent engaging with clients and providing quality consulting.
They needed another way. Enter PerfectQuote, the leading-edge health benefits quoting platform that helps companies like OneDigital sell and renew employee benefits faster.
How OneDigital made quoting substantially faster with PerfectQuote
If OneDigital is quoting ACA plans for an employer, a team member can quickly run a census in PerfectQuote and receive and sort through hundreds of plan options available, saving them days of work. But the big lift for their team is leveraging PerfectQuote’s Proposal Reader tool.
Here’s how it works: PerfectQuote’s Proposal Reader quickly and accurately scans and extracts plan details and rates from any medical and/or ancillary carrier proposals. The application leverages its proprietary optical character recognition (OCR) technology, allowing OneDigital to upload carrier proposal files and summaries of benefits and coverage (SBC). Once the data is extracted, the application displays all relevant information and creates a unique analysis and presentation experience—without requiring the user to manually key in data.
“What PerfectQuote has offered OneDigital is ease of interaction,” said Holly.
One of Holly’s team’s favorite features is the ability to generate custom, branded outputs that match their offline presentation template. “PerfectQuote has been extremely accommodating to us with their custom output, and really open-minded to our feedback to what they are seeing in different markets and using that info to iterate the PerfectQuote product.”
Top tip for implementing a quoting solution: start early
OneDigital renews 50% of its extensive book of business in Q4, which makes that time of year even more stressful. Because of this, they must implement any significant changes to OneDigital’s tools or processes in the first half of the year.
Holly’s advice? “Look at the seasonality of your business and how much time it typically takes to roll out a big change. Factor that change management into the process to include documentation updates, training, and ensuring you’ve set your team members up for success—so when the volume starts to hit they’re comfortable with the new systems and processes you’ve put into place.”
And if you’re moving your book of business to a benefits administration technology that integrates with PerfectQuote, “you can start to see some really incredible lift that you may not be considering now, that can really help you get things done faster and more cost-effectively.”
The future of health insurance quoting
With so many clients to manage, PerfectQuote allows the OneDigital teams utilizing the software to prioritize relationship building and strategy, not data entry. “The more we can lean on technology to do the transactional work, the greater opportunity we have to strategically guide our clients amid a constantly evolving workplace and insurance climate,” said Holly.
“We want people focused on relationship building and strategy.”
About OneDigital
OneDigital is a steward of business growth and people potential. Their insurance, financial services and HR platform provides personalized, tech-enabled solutions for a contemporary work-life experience. Nationally recognized for their culture of caring, OneDigital’s teams enable employers and individuals to do their best work and live their best lives. More than 100,000 employers and millions of individuals rely on their teams for counsel and access to fully integrated worksite products and services and the retirement and wealth management advice provided through OneDigital Investment Advisors. Founded in 2000 and headquartered in Atlanta, OneDigital maintains offices in most major markets across the nation. To learn more, visit www.onedigital.com.
About PerfectQuote
PerfectQuote is a group insurance quoting platform that helps benefits brokers and general agents procure, analyze and sell benefits insurance faster, error-free and without any need for data entry. PerfectQuote is cloud-based software used by Top-50 agencies, regional, local firms and general agencies operating within the employee benefits industry. PerfectQuote is proud to call Austin, Texas home. For more information about PerfectQuote, visit www.perfectquote.io.
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