Open for Business

Your Web site is the electronic entrance into your company, and opening this portal to customersboth agents and policyholdersis the preferred way of doing business for many carriers. Making sure the proper tools and data are available now are business requirements insurers cant ignore.

By Robert Regis Hyle

Web portals is a pretty broad term, according to Matt Josefowicz, manager of the insurance group with Celent Communications. We [at Celent] tend not to use it. We tend to use e-business. But the fact is everybody uses the term. Basically, all it means is some Web-based tool. A portal is an entranceway, and a Web portal allows customers to enter through your Web site. Its a portal into your systems through the Web, says Josefowicz. Its a term that meant a lot of different things for a while. Yahoo and AOL were positioning themselves as portalsthey were the first door onto the Internet. After that, a portal was a single site that gave you access to multiple companies. The next view was something very specific from a technology point of view.

For Aetna Dental, the portal is a single site on a platform such as Benefit-Point that allows the carrier access to a potential group of customers it may have had trouble reaching otherwise. For UnumProvident, one of the largest disability insurers in the country, it is an enterprise portal that allows the companys help desk to assist agents in their policy needs.

On the Lookout

Aetna Dental has been on a constant search for ways to expand its distribution capabilities, reports Bryan Geremia, Aetnas regional manager for the western United States. When Aetna received a request for a proposal from the e-business platform BenefitPoint, Geremia says Aetna viewed it as a way to attach another arm to its distribution. It put us in a position where we could reach brokers in areas where we typically do not have that face-to-face interaction, he says. We put together what we thought would be an appropriate winning strategy. We also thought it would be of interest to BenefitPoint as far as value to its platform applications.

BenefitPoint is an intermediary or liaison between brokers, consultants, and carriers. BenefitPoints value to Aetna was to bring to that equation a cost-effective, efficient way to process requests for proposals. There are data-producing capabilities and record-producing capabilities, and details that can be provided to brokers or the carriers themselves that can help as far as managing the operations, says Geremia. The BenefitPoint platform has established itself as a Web-based intermediary thats been in operation since 1999. Aetna saw it as an extension of ways to reach our broker constituencies in areas we dont have that reach, he adds.

What BenefitPoint is doing is letting benefit managers manage their interactions with Aetna, according to Josefowicz. Its a third-party portal, he explains. [Users] are pulling data from your systems. [BenefitPoint] is being a gateway to your own system, but [carriers] are not responsible for maintaining [the platform] and managing all the user IDs. Benefits managers try to manage relationships with multiple companies. So, if you can deliver your data through this tool they already are using, you make yourself easier to do business with.
In the Mix

UnumProvident has a mixture of providers it uses to sell its insurance, according to Dan Amsden, programmer analyst for UnumProvident. We like to do large group or some of the higher-end small group, he notes. The carriers distribution network is classically styled with some direct sales. We have national accounts distribution that uses our providers to seek eligible employee groups or employers that have groups of employees that may be able to work with us to buy a product that is lucrative for both them and us, he says.

The way UnumProvident uses its portal is to give providersits agents, be they small agencies or large agent groupssupport in the carriers policies and procedures. All the information resides inside the portal system and is supplied to the help desk. The help desk then uses the system to answer questions from the agents. We call it a field help desk, says Amsden. Our field office agents can be providers and actually seek direct clients, but very often they work with other agents who have their own smaller offices. Those field agents can see the portal, and they can answer questions directly, but very often people will call up our field help desk, and [the help desk] will look up the answer for them inside the portal system.

Thats an enterprise portal, states Josefowicz. Its an internal system that pulls together information that lives in a lot of different back-end systems. It pulls it together in a single acceptable system for the support rep, he indicates.

Forward into the Past

With a 160-year-old track record, Unum-Provident doesnt want to rid itself of the past. This whole network of talking to people and being able to pick up the phone and directly ask someone a question is not something people want to get rid of, maintains Amsden. We offer, on occasion, some electronic documentation to our providers directly, but its not usually through the portal. The portal is more for our internal people. A lot of people have been doing this for so many years they dont want to change the way they do business. So, instead of the help desk people keeping the paperwork around or having loosely managed documentation you have to know like the back of your hand, they put it into the portal system.

Such systems deposit in one place all the information support reps need. They dont have to log in to the LPC [Linear Predictive Coding] system and check that for the policy information, Josefowicz says. Or log in to the billing system to check whether the bill got paid. Or log in to the CRM system to see whether the customer has called recently. It pulls together information from a bunch of different systems and lets [users] have a consolidated view. It makes the information easier to find and makes it easier for [support reps] to do their jobs.

UnumProvident believes it is important to put the information into the hands of its help desk. These are people who have a vested interest in the company, so they are going to stick with whoever calls in to help the caller through the rest of the sale no matter what, says Amsden. When calls come into the help desk, [the CSRs] are going to try every way they can to understand the situation the field agent is in. After understanding that problem fully, they usually can dig through the repository using the search tool. Or if [the CSRs] know exactly where [the data] is in a kind of hierarchical structure we allow them to organize their documents in, they can find it that way.

The help desk then will provide the information directly to the agent either by e-mail or fax, or the CSR will dictate it to the agent over the phone. The only person who actually is seeing the data repository is the help desk person. The document gets out through that help desk person, says Amsden. [The CSRs] are just like a stop off.

Originally, UnumProvident had a static intranet site. You had to have system intervention to contribute content to that portal, recalls Amsden. That just becomes unwieldy. Were expensive people, systems folks like me. We like our little toys, and we like our procedures to make sure were not getting stuck implementing something we cant support. That becomes difficult to do manually.

Direct Benefits

UnumProvident found the direct benefit of using the Stellent software solution is the system is extremely flexible in any type of environment. Were very much a Microsoft shop here at UnumProvident, but Stellent is written in Java, and it still performs incredibly well, says Amsden. Ive seen systems not perform well when they got in our environment, and seeing this one perform well even though its architecture is so different from what were used to is very surprising to me.

Another advantage is this system is a single repository, and the carrier can set up all sorts of logical divisions within the repository to separate things. You have versioning, you have central point of contribution, and you have people contributing to the Stellent system and they are not IT people, says Amsden. They dont need to know HTML, because it has conversion utilities; they dont need to have PDF converters on their desktops, because [the system] has those utilities.

The system is flexible in how UnumProvident can pull out information. You can use search or you can pull out the items directly if you know the path to a particular document, explains Amsden. Thats an advantage to us. Everything always is where its expected to be. The ability of business to take control of publishing its own content is the biggest factor in our using the content management system.

Still another benefit is the ability to set the life cycles of content that goes into the system, both for regulatory compliance and for general internal purposes. A document that is four years old is not going to be something you want people to find when they are searching, Amsden says. The Stellent system allows the carrier to set expiration dates on certain documents by notifying someone when [the documents] are getting old. Are they still valid? Can we keep them around? We have 12,000 items in our repository, but realistically weve had more than 20,000 in there. This has allowed us to make sure only what is valid is what people find. Thats a big deal because policies change year to year, he adds.

Letting agents into the system is the way most of the industry is going, Josefowicz believes, but that doesnt mean enterprise systems arent effective. They are not mutually exclusive, he says. Agents are going to call, they are going to go online, they are going to fax, they are going to do whatever they want to do, and if they are high-value agents, you pretty much have to let them do whatever they want to do. An enterprise portal makes your internal people more productive. An agent portal makes your agents productive if they want to use ityou have to make it easy and advantageous for them to use.

Feed the Portal

Typically, the BenefitPoint portal allows brokers to request a proposal and then feed it to carriers they feel they want it to go to. That is handled electronically through BenefitPoint, says Geremia. Aetna puts together the appropriate proposal response, and thats fed back through the BenefitPoint platform to the broker. The advantage we saw in this application were dealing with now is Aetna Dental is whats considered a preferred vendor, meaning if Im a broker in Des Moines, Iowa, and I dont understand dental that much or I dont understand how to put together a proposal for dental, its going to direct me to a Web page within the BenefitPoint platform that is going to talk specifically about Aetna Dental. There is a marketing aspect here as well as a furthering the distribution aspect from our standpoint.

Aetna is working on some enhancements with BenefitPoint to further the portals value, but most of what Aetna has been doing is providing the portal with contentproduct content, information content, and some pricing tools. Once the proposal would come in through BenefitPointif we sell the case to the employer or through the brokerthen it is handled like any other case we have at Aetna, says Geremia. BenefitPoint does not get involved in any claims processing, adjudication, or pricing.

From our perspective, this gives us another front to market our products, says Geremia.

Our dental products are sold through our general sales force. There are certain areas of the country, just by the fact theyre not big medical markets, where we dont have that reach or that interface with some of these brokers, particularly the smaller brokers. What this helps us to do is reach some of those brokers because in those markets it might be a good dental market.

E-Trends

Celent Communications insurance division manager Matt Josefowicz
lists five trends in life/health e-business today:

1. E-business accounts for about three to 15 percent of L&H IT spending. Celent estimates roughly seven percent of L&H industry IT spending is related to e-business, or
$788 million in 2004.

2. Most e-business systems are homegrown, not software packages. Only nine percent of respondents to a Celent survey reported their e-business systems were based primarily on a vendor-provided package.

3. E-business is tilted toward agents, but policyholder portals are important and growing. Respondents reported spending 56 percent of e-business budgets on agent systems and 22 percent on policyholder systems.

4. Agent portal use is strong and creating value. An average of 65 percent of respondents agents use their portals, and 46 percent of respondents view their portals as key
differentiators.

5. Portal-using agents are higher-value agents. Ninety-two percent of respondents reported their active users were better agents than nonactive users.