Running Your Employee Benefits Brokerage Remotely

Employee benefits brokering in the world re-shaped by COVID-19

Even on a good day, benefits brokerage can be a tough business! Work from home (WFH) because of COVID-19 only serves to ratchet up the stress levels. While the ability to WFH or other locations remote from the office has been a growing trend, most benefits practices rely on in person contact with both customers and colleagues to deliver what they consider to be their differentiators or ‘secret sauce’.

For the world re-shaped by COVID-19, WFH is now a necessity. One of the big questions is does your organization just ‘muddle through’, or does it take the initiative to lead during the crisis, and set itself up to come out on the other side stronger than ever?

To truly thrive in this new environment, you need strong leadership, a cohesive action plan and the correct tech tools to support your consultants and connect your clients.

Other than using video apps, such as Zoom, Teams, and GoToMeeting, clients don’t expect service to be radically ‘different’ during this crisis. Most brokers can probably get away with emailing spreadsheets and half effective remote collaboration. When it comes to technology and our ‘digital footprint’ with clients, essentially, most customers recognize the insurance industry is just behind other parts of the financial sector. After all, we have done it this way for decades!

But what if things could be ‘different’ in a meaningfully ‘better’ way?  A way that connects your team, binds you tighter to your clients, and elevates your organization and its ability to service your clients both remotely, and when we get back to in person.

Employee benefits in the cloud

A key headline benefit of the cloud – working anytime, anyplace you choose – is a perfect match for situations where you need to work remotely from the office. Vertical Fox is in the cloud and  purpose-built for employee benefits procurement. It’s completely in tune with the way employee benefits brokers need to work during the COVID-19 crisis.

It is a management platform that organizes your information and provides the right features to let you get the job done faster. Essentially, it puts the right information at your fingertips when you need it.

Vertical Fox helps you effectively collaborate with clients and colleagues, perform your day-to-day activities faster, and have confidence in the accuracy of your numbers. For your clients, the platform provides an impressive boost to the customer experience and your use of it provides them with leadership they trust.

This is most apparent at renewal time when you need to interface and work closely with your clients who may be working from home too. Vertical Fox lets you model complex scenarios in real time. You can look at the overall effect of tweaking variables within a benefits plan package, instantly.

This saves the weeks of going back and forth with spreadsheets and binders that you currently endure. You can show the effects of changes to the program live, in a virtual renewal meeting on video with the key customer stakeholders, accelerating the renewal cycle.

More to WFH than software!

Of course, it is one thing to have the tools to work online, but quite another to optimize WFH practice.

In geographical isolation, individuals develop their own habits, like working irregular hours and in their pajamas! Inevitably, this undermines team cohesion and performance. Experts agree there is a need to optimize WFH by standardizing operating procedures, and developing best practices for a virtual setting.

This includes essentials such as scheduling each day’s activity and demonstrating productivity with output, something that might be obvious in an office, but less so WFH. And what about renewal time? What’s the plan for successfully renewing business when you have to work remotely? The Vertical Fox platform enables greater team collaboration and provides management with real time dashboards to meet key client deliverables.

Ultimately, there needs to be a strong focus on maintaining strong client relationships when you can’t manage accounts by taking clients out to lunch or sit down F2F (face-to-face) in-person.

More effective remote employee benefits brokering with Vertical Fox

Sometimes, we just have to wait for things to blow over. But COVID-19 isn’t like that. We can’t wait this one out. It’s not going to fade away before Q4 so we can get back to how things used to be. Vertical Fox lets you adapt and evolve to be better and stronger than you were. It has a major role to play in helping employee benefits brokers like you successfully manage your renewals for 2021.

The functionality of Vertical Fox is built by brokers for brokers. We designed it to solve the problems of which we have first-hand experience (and the frustrations!).

Get the cost and efficiency benefits of the cloud. And overcome the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic with the flexibility of anytime, anyplace working. Why not book your personalized demo today to see what it could do for your employee benefits brokerage?

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