Is Streamlining Health Insurance Quotes a Priority?

No one wants to wait anymore. For some things, waiting even a single minute seems too long. Imagine having to wait one minute to load each of your favorite websites over the course of the day. Actually—don’t bother, because according to studies done in 1999, most users abandon sites if they take more than ten seconds to load. Whether the ten-second wait is caused by an Internet problem or a design flaw doesn’t matter, because the user has clicked away and gone to another page—one that loads in less than a second. Which means the first page, the slow loader, has lost them.

Times have changed and insurers aren’t immune to this. People may not expect group health insurance quotes in a minute or less but that doesn’t mean they don’t want quotes fast. If an insurer isn’t able to streamline its process in order to meet these expectations, it won’t take long before clients start getting quotes elsewhere. Whether it’s a member of the general public accessing individual health quotes or brokers and underwriters doing large group quotes, all participants want a quick response.

Key Points for Effective Quote Streamlining

When streamlining your quoting system, you can’t sacrifice accuracy for speed. The two are equally vital to your company’s success. You have to expect that a more expedient system can still help manage risk effectively and be quickly updated with underwriting and regulatory changes. Which means you need a system designed for accuracy and built for speed.

Likewise, security is an issue. Streamlining doesn’t mean taking the easy way out, leaving huge security gaps that put your client data at risk.

Perfect Streamlining = Better, Faster, More

• Quote streamlining is especially challenging when other benefit products are added, such as ancillary benefits. Employers want to offer these supplemental benefits in order to help attract and retain the best employees. This added complexity makes it even more important that you choose a robust, responsive platform that allows for instantaneous plan comparisons while presenting all potential employee benefit options with the appropriate rate for each division and class of employee. When possible, you may want to use census data to get a more accurate rate and to aid in straight-through processing to a proposal and enrollment.
• Quoting health insurance sometimes seems more like an art than a science.  But if you boil it down to its essential steps, there is a definitive rules-based process that can be built into a responsive algorithm. This is the best method to providing comprehensive, quality quotes, fast.  By streamlining the entire process you ensure there are fewer touch points into various systems, which makes for a faster, more accurate experience. This in turn provides more usage, which ultimately leads to writing more business in less time.

When your company can provide this level of detailed, accurate, rapid service, you remove yourself from the crowd and enjoy a better client capture rate and retention level.

What are your company’s biggest concerns about streamlining the quoting process?