You excel in your ability to help your clients understand their benefits programs. You're navigating the complexities of renewals, contribution strategies, rate changes, benchmarks, funding mechanisms, forecasting and reporting requires a thorough understanding of the market and environmental factors—and you've got it. But do you understand your own business? Can you make sense of your forecasts, revenues, expenses and business processes? Do you have visibility into workflow and capacity issues? Do you have an effective means of finding and recovering missing revenue?

With the right tools in place, these questions can be answered with a resounding “yes.”

It's a simple solution: Externally focused benefits management system + inward-facing content management tools = unprecedented insight into your agency's strengths and weaknesses.

Management systems built specifically for employee benefits brokers contain powerful tools to raise your understanding of your business. If you know your clients, there will be no surprises. You'll be able to track your time and activities, manage renewals, create stewardship reports, run book of business reports, monitor sales opportunities, record new and lost business and quickly access reports and benchmark studies.

With a state-of-the-art reporting and business intelligence tool, you can understand, analyze and monitor your business like never before. With this type of insight, tasks such as comprehensive financial reporting, managing policy renewals, auditing your business, tracking and managing employee practices, measuring and balancing workloads, comparing actual revenue to expected revenue, monitoring compliance requirements and creating commissions statements are as easy as a few simple clicks.

These tools provide you with the ability to:

Catch errors instantly and recover/reconcile uncollected revenues
Understand which clients are at risk and perform a corrective action
Import carrier statements automatically to avoid hours and days entering and re-entering revenues
Use benchmarking tools to compare how your offerings rank against industry benchmarks
Pull book of business reports by carrier, producer, client or line of coverage
Retain your customer knowledge, experience and business intelligence long after your key personnel leaves.

Benefits management systems typically support all of these functions, allowing you to increase your engaged selling time, improve market share and ultimately increase profits.

They allow you to take a deeper look into the central nervous system of your business. Is everything flowing efficiently? Is the business humming? Getting your salespeople and account managers more focused on engaged selling time rather than on time-consuming service issues will have a profound impact on your success.

And here's where the content management piece comes in: Once you have a management system in place to do the heavy lifting, a content management system is all about optimization.

While document management focuses on the best place to put things, content management is the best way to do things. Think about managing content—such as e-mails, paper documents, renewal notices or broker of record letters—so workflows are triggered simply when you receive the documents. No additional work is needed, which can drastically improve employee productivity. Processes are triggered automatically and work is routed through your agency based simply on the characteristics of the document.

With these standard workflows in place, business process reporting provides detailed insight into bottlenecks and roadblocks, which can then be eliminated. So instead of spending time on tedious task and administrative-type activities, your staff can spend more time on activities that directly affect the bottom line.

Combining the external focus of your benefits management system with the inward-facing emphasis of your content management not only makes processes easier and tasks more streamlined, it gives your business everything it needs to thrive.

Special Reports /

6 Ways to Use Management Systems for Tracking Benefit Programs

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