Boosting Sales by Using Technology to Streamline Worksite Product Enrollment

Many employees don’t realize just how important it is to protect their financial future with optional products such as disability, critical illness, and accident insurance.  Financial education is crucial when it comes to helping them understand the roles played by these important lines of coverage, but education isn’t all it takes to help increase enrollment.

Making it easy for employees to sign up is equally crucial. Insurers can increase the opt-in for optional products by streamlining the enrollment process with modern technology.

Let’s take a look at four ways use of technology can increase enrollment through greater efficiency and awareness.

1. Provide quotes through the enrollment system. The fewer barriers to entry that employees have, the more likely they are to sign up for optional products. By having quote data sent through the enrollment system, you remove the necessity of employees having to enter data multiple times. They can get quotes and sign up for benefits through the same system. Providing instant quotes and more options for plan comparisons reassures employees they’re getting a good deal.

2. Have a portal site for opt-in. With a specially designed user-friendly worksite portal, you can automate quoting, proposal generation and enrollment. When employers make enrollment mandatory and employees are required to log in to the portal site, they are more likely to review the options available to them and sign up even if they initially intended to simply opt-out. Opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell worksite marketing material and optional individual products on the employee enrollment portal site allow employees to select what products they require and the desired payment method.

3. Allow for digital signatures. Providing authenticated signatures on multiple paper documents can be frustrating for employees and employers. Digital signatures are the perfect tool for collecting authenticated signatures on multiple documents while saving time and reducing waste. The technology is pretty standard and straightforward once you’ve made the commitment to digital signatures.

4. Ensure electronic data delivery for medical underwriting. In some cases, medical information is required for underwriting worksite products. This can be difficult and time-consuming to collect and dispense unless you allow electronic data delivery. Electronic data delivery also shortens the interval between underwriting and quote delivery, ensuring a better customer experience. Achieving electronic delivery requires integrating various systems and making sure they have seamless connections. It takes work, but isn’t a massive project.

Insurers that have invested heavily in legacy systems are often resistant to change, but these systems cause problems that are costly and time consuming to fix—and can cost them clients. (According to Claims Journal, 59 percent of senior executives surveyed in 2015 admitted that they had to spend “considerable amounts of time” dealing with IT issues in legacy systems). If your legacy system won’t let you streamline enrollment, it’s time for a change.

No matter how you choose to increase awareness and participation in worksite optional products, having a strong technological infrastructure in place will ensure the speed, efficiency and accuracy of product enrollment. It makes a big difference.