[Infographic] 5 Ways to Prepare For & Manage Annual Group Enrollments

What Your Small Group Benefits Agency Should Be Doing Every Enrollment Season to Ensure Your Clients Are Taken Care Of

Each enrollment season, your group benefits agency is busy with everything that goes into enrolling your employer groups into their plans by the end of the year. From gathering quotes and creating proposals to collecting employee elections and finalizing paperwork, it’s a lot. In fact, we’ve found that brokers spend an average of 18 hours per small group per year servicing their clients.

Because of this, it can be hard to keep track of everything and cover all of your bases. Taking the time to evaluate your processes and see where you can make improvements is imperative to making sure the busy season goes as smoothly as possible.

This infographic outlines five steps your small group benefits agency can take to prepare for enrollment season and streamline your processes to save your agency time and money.

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1. Earn Certifications, Gain CE Credits, and Prepare for Enrollment Season

Since enrollment season only happens once a year, it’s a given that healthcare legislation, carriers’ offerings and plans, rates, and more are bound to change. That’s why reviewing changes that may have occurred over the last year is essential so your team is prepared for what is ahead. If you can, start reviewing these things early, so there is less of a chance for delays during enrollment season.

For many agents, completing certifications, obtaining continuing education (CE) credits, and just generally preparing for the enrollment season can help you get up to speed with any industry changes quickly.

Once you have a good understanding of any changes that may affect any plans your clients currently offer their employees, bring this information to your employer groups when you start meeting with them.

To make your proposal processes even more efficient, use a quoting and enrollment platform that automatically creates proposals your team can immediately take and present, like the one in Quote+, an AgencyBloc solution. The proposal generator in Quote+ allows you to:

• Create customized proposals that can be edited to fit your company’s brand
• Quickly show potential plan options side-by-side
• Show extensive plan information, like total and monthly employer costs, employee breakdown of cost, age-banded rates, and more

2. Organize Your Agency Before Open Enrollment Begins

It’s essential to be organized before the busy season begins. This will help guarantee your team doesn’t miss any important deadlines or reachouts. The last thing you want is for Open Enrollment to begin and have to spend precious minutes manually sending emails or searching for information.

One of the best ways to ensure your agency is organized is by taking advantage of technology, like an agency management system (AMS) or a CRM. With an AMS or CRM, you can:

• Automate communications sent to your prospects and clients
• Keep track of any compliance-related documents or recordings
• Access vital information regarding your groups, policies, and more in seconds

If you already use an AMS or CRM, quickly assess the state of the data in your system and see if improvements can be made. After all, what you get out of your technology is only as good as the information going into it.

3. Assess Your Health Insurance Enrollment Process

Is your current enrollment process the most efficient and best it can be? Or are there areas for improvement? Take some time to evaluate your process and see if there are areas that could be streamlined.

Evaluate if any steps in your group benefits enrollment processes could be done automatically (or made more efficient) with the help of automation tools. For example, set up a workflow to send out an email to your group benefits clients when their policy’s renewal date is approaching.

In addition to making your processes more streamlined, how can you reduce the number of tech solutions in your stack and eliminate pesky data silos? After all, the average agency has at least six pieces of tech in its stack. Finding a tech partner that can manage your agency end-to-end is crucial. Some features you might look for are:

• Lead vendor integrations
• Automated lead routing
• Marketing and sales automation
• Built-in VoIP system
• Compliance management
• Quoting and enrollment vendor integrations
• Policy & agent management
• Commissions processing
• Data analysis & reporting

When all of your agency’s data is in one centralized location, your organization can become more efficient and access information and data significantly easier.

4. Ensure Clear Communication with Your Clients

Reiterate to your groups how they can contact you during enrollment season. Someone will inevitably need last-minute assistance or miss important information about Open Enrollment. But the more proactive you are, the more likely enrollment season will go smoothly.

Consider offering informational webinars to your small groups with the information they need to know. Make it easy for employees to contact their assigned broker — provide their email address, phone number, and an automatic email scheduling link where they can easily set up a time to chat without any back and forth.

5. Simplify the Enrollment Process

Of course, you want enrollment season to go as smoothly as possible for your team. But you also want to ensure your groups’ enrollment experience is seamless. Adopting a technology solution that breaks down the steps and centralizes data can be a game-changer.

When it comes to quoting medically underwritten plans, gathering accurate employee data in an efficient manner is key. But, how is that possible? Take advantage of technology that has an employee health data collection component to make sure that information you have is correct. This can significantly speed up the quoting process, plus you don’t have to worry about declined carrier applications due to messy handwriting or wrong-colored ink.

For community rated, ACA, and fully-insured plans, using a quoting and enrollment tool that can bulk assign plan elections takes a lot of the stress out of enrollment for some employees, such as those participating in passive enrollment, those not making any changes to their existing health plan, or those waiving coverage. Then, when it comes time to send applications to carriers, speed up the process by using a tool that can automate carrier form submissions. That way your team doesn’t need to remember what the submission guidelines and rules are for each carrier, worry if the submitted forms will be rejected, and more.

Plus, an enrollment solution that breaks down the process into steps, is guided, and is broker-controlled can make the experience for your employer groups much more painless.

How AgencyBloc's Plus Suite Can Help Streamline Your Group Benefits Agency's Enrollment Season

Enrollment season always provides many challenges and opportunities, but AgencyBloc’s AMS+ and Quote+ solutions can be invaluable tools for group benefits professionals. With robust features, including customizable employer-ready benefit proposals, workflow automation, a secure medical health questionnaire, automated carrier form submissions, and more, these solutions can streamline your processes and boost productivity.

Using AMS+ and Quote+ can cover every aspect of your enrollment season workflow. Using the lead generation, sales enablement, and agency management tools in AMS+ together with the quoting and enrollment tools in Quote+ can further enhance efficiency, making your organization’s operations smoother than ever. Plus, integrating AMS+ and Quote+ guarantees that your data remains accurate and up-to-date.

AgencyBloc’s Plus Suite can allow you to focus on what truly matters: providing exceptional service to your clients. Take advantage of these robust solutions and make this enrollment season your most successful yet.

Posted by Sarah Rosonke on Tuesday, August 20, 2024 in Group Benefits

1. insurance automation
2. open enrollment
3. productivity
4. quoting