BrokerSuite offers turnkey service and support for employee benefit portals

January 30, 2006 BenefitNews.com
By Bruce Shutan

Some employee benefit brokers and advisers may need to be careful what they wish for. Consider the case of portals, which can be customized to meet a client’s specific needs for the delivery of benefits information.

Most portal providers tend to offer software tools that require labor-intensive chores such as gathering data, logging into the system and learning how to operate the product. But BrokerSuite has figured out a way around any workflow or carrier dilemmas that may arise, distinguishing its service by offering a turnkey solution with meaningful sales, marketing and technical support. This allows brokers to focus on their core competencies without having to be technically inclined or devoting time to branding a client’s Web site.

“Better than offering a tool, we offer a service,” explains Jim Giglio, president of BrokerSuite, LLC. “We do all the work associated with building and maintaining the system. I hear over and over from brokers that they don’t want to be technology experts, nor do they even know how to roll out the service to clients We have to remember that first and foremost, they’re salespeople with little or no time for these issues.”

A marketing partner

Not only does BrokerSuite handle all the technical issues around designing and managing employer benefit sites, it even provides brokers with marketing support that helps describe and sell the finer points of the service to employers.

“Without this level of service,” Giglio says, “brokers will often purchase solutions that they can’t figure out how to get their customers to adopt. In those cases, they waste their money. By providing tools and professional assistance, we make sure our customers get the most from their investment in us.”

BrokerSuite offers a custom-branded communication solution featuring materials that are personalized in such a way that the marketing piece appears to be coming from the broker. “We do the same with demonstration Web sites that are branded with a broker’s logo,” Giglio adds.

Trained account managers are available to accompany brokers to client meetings, which may include a product demonstration. Their involvement is invaluable considering how busy brokers can be. In addition, Web designers and software developers ply their skills on a user-friendly format that’s also highly sophisticated.

Invisible assistance

Indeed, critical back-office functions such as Web site and portal design, hosting and administrative services that include usage reporting and notification, daily backups, functionality improvements and systems security are available at no additional cost to BrokerSuite clients.

The turnkey arrangement of this service is highly appealing to BrokerSuite’s customer base. The service seems to work well for any broker looking for a competitive differentiator without the overhead of expensive software and time-consuming training.

Greater awareness

About a third of employers offer an employee benefits portal, with another quarter expecting to do so by 2007, according to a recent Forrester Research study done in conjunction with Employee Benefit News.

One explanation for the market traction is an increased comfort level with Web-based tools across both corporate and popular cultures. Giglio no longer sees resistance to posting client information online. He recalls a recent conversation with one particularly cynical broker’s fear about vendor access to this data giving way to excitement about the possibility of tracking all client info on the Web beyond the benefit portal application. “That’s a huge change for someone who was so skeptical just a year ago,” he says.

When BrokerSuite’s sales effort kicked off primarily in the metropolitan Boston market in the fall of 2004, only about 10% or 20% of brokers knew about employee benefit portals. A year later, the awareness level climbed to about 50%. Giglio sees similar trends increasing throughout the country.

Content is king

From a content standpoint, BrokerSuite initially made available basic plan information with a link to summary plan descriptions. But nowadays brokers are making all sorts of requests on behalf of their corporate clients. For example, there’s an HR-specific module that includes information on vacation or sexual harassment policies and even enables employees to click an icon acknowledging that they have carefully reviewed and accepted their internal corporate policies.

“As clients get these benefit portals up and running, we’re finding that they’re using them to communicate other parts of their HR function and overall business,” Giglio observes.

Portals, no doubt, are becoming much easier to use and an increasing number of them feature links to multiple benefit carriers. “We’re aggregating these services, which will lead to process improvements over time,” he reports. “Employee benefit portals will become more powerful as all these carriers make it easier to transfer data and communicate information.”

Unlike other benefit portal providers, BrokerSuite does not sell insurance products, so the company doesn’t compete with its customers. On the contrary, BrokerSuite isn’t interested in advertising to broker customers and would much rather serve as a secret weapon for success behind the scenes. By giving brokers all the credit, the service provider is able to help clients differentiate themselves from competitors.

“They like the idea of being able to attend a prospective client Meeting with a demo and say this is theirs,” Giglio says.

Bruce Shutan, former managing editor of Employee Benefit News, is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.

Source: BenefitNews.com • October 2006