I’m guessing most of you reading this publication might be expecting something life insurance facing. Well, that simply isn’t the space I cut my teeth in, so I’ll speak to tech and the health space.
It does amaze me how some industries can be very tech-forward and others not so much. I’ve seen quite a bit of advancements in the life insurance arena with some BGAs bringing out their own tech platforms for quoting and enrolling term life insurance and this is great news for that transactional business. For the more complicated sales, paper may still be the way to go; file building, talking to underwriters, setting up the purpose of the coverage is very important.
When it comes to health lines…well it leaves a bit to be desired. Necessity brings innovation and that is exactly what has happened in the Medicare world.
When CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid) decided that agents could no longer access the Medicare website to run prescription drug plans and Medicare Advantage plans, the tech world got busy. It started getting very crowded, noisy, disruptive and competitive for all alike. Fast forward three quick years and you are seeing all kinds of quote/enroll platforms for MA/PD and PDP plans.
For those of you not in this industry, you might be the lone ranger. Everyone quickly realized the potential for renewable, compounding commissions and decided to take a look. That’s when we really started to see the innovations. Some platforms are proprietary meaning you must have carrier contracts with a BGA to have access, some you can buy, and even some you can white label.
What this means to the agents is efficiency for comparing plans that change every year—saved time so you can spend less time with chit chat and more time getting to plans and pricing—and easier access to see and save your clients’ data year after year. This is critical as you could easily have a client base of 100+ and getting to each of them in a short 54-day window can become challenging, especially when keeping up with new mandates facing them this year. Call recording and maintaining that call record for 10 years is required for this selling season so that’s forced more innovation in being able to make this as easy as possible for the agents. And if you don’t understand the importance of this, how about one-third to one-half of your annual production in the Medicare space will be done in a quick 54 days! Efficiency is the name of the game!
In the Medicare industry challenges must be seen as opportunities because there are some, if not a lot, of agents that will give this up due to mandates, so this creates an opportunity to grow your book of business not to mention those retiring agents that need a trusted agent to come in and help serve and take over for the clients.
With the release of this publication we will be almost halfway through AEP (annual election period) so to those of you navigating the sea of Medicare beneficiaries, I applaud you and wish you the best of luck and finish strong!
Happy selling!
Image by Joshua Woroniecki from Pixabay
