Keeping up With the Evolving Landscape of Employee Benefits

Employee Benefits are no longer just perks that come with the job. They're a key cornerstone of an employee's overall satisfaction, well-being, and loyalty.

As new trends emerge and expectations rise, insurance brokerages have an opportunity to create value and reimagine their strategies. But how can you tailor your offerings? What trends do you need to be aware of? Understanding how Employee Benefits are changing and how you can stay ahead will help you advise customers to make the best decisions and benefit your business as well.

Trends in Employee Benefits will continue to evolve. To be the best advisors to your clients, you need a flexible system to help adapt during these changes. It helps you remain competitive, attract top talent, and support your clients.

What We Hear from Brokerages

We have the benefit of working with brokerages of all sizes and representing a broad mix of portfolios. While there are many things that make each agency unique, what stands out most is how many things they have in common. Let’s take a look at some of these common themes, and some tips on how to incorporate them into your business.

Achieve More Efficient Operations

In Applied’s 2024 Voice of Market Survey, 45% of agency respondents ranked achieving great operational efficiency as their number one focus.

The results are not surprising. A common theme we hear from our customers nearly every day is the need to improve operations as a foundation to deliver better customer outcomes. A dependency on manual processes, an abundance of siloed, legacy systems, and the need to rekey information across technologies, are just a few challenges faced by brokerages. This is further complicated by accelerated M&A activity, which, if not properly integrated, compounds the problem.

Technology can and does play a critical role here. While there are inevitably different capabilities that shape an agency’s technology stack, a properly used agency management system (AMS) can act as the hub of an agency’s operations, bridging technologies together and displacing legacy tools and processes. Once all information is properly captured and intuitively displayed in an AMS, brokerages are best positioned to support their customers throughout their journey, from adding and renewing plans, to servicing customers year-round, to tracking and ensuring commissions and fees are properly captured.

Consider the Power of a Single System

The benefits of a single, centralized system are not specific to only Benefits lines of business.  In fact, the value is compounded when a single system is used to manage plans and policies, and centralize accounting processes, across the entire business including property and casualty.

In our same Voice of Market 2024 survey, 85% of executives rated having a single system for all lines of business (including Benefits and P&C) as “very valuable” for achieving operational efficiency. The importance of a single system was shared across roles, including sales, servicing, finance/ accounting, and operations. This makes sense as a single system can provide a holistic view of customer relationships, profitability and health, and these views matter across the entire business.

How can a single system enable better outcomes for an agency?

• Enhanced cross-sell and up-sell capabilities: Having all your customer and plan data in a single system can provide a view of your customers in a single click. This, coupled with intelligent insights, can uncover opportunities to expand coverage and thus customer relationships.

• Improved servicing: Customers rely on you for a breadth of questions and support. It’s time-consuming, but it’s a critical role that brokerages play. A single system reduces time spent on searching for information, driving better efficiency and improved customer satisfaction.

• Streamlined finance and accounting processes: A holistic view of a customer’s financial health, coupled with the tools to ensure commissions are paid and received on time and in full, is foundational to an agency’s growth.

• Standardized technology stack: Operating on a single system delivers significant efficiencies from a maintenance, support and training perspective.

The Role of Technology in Enhancing Agency Operations

The technology you use can make or break your productivity. Efficient technology reduces the back-and-forth conversations and streamlines processes that often eat up too much of an agent's time. Done right, it not only improves the customer experience, but also your employees’ experience and your bottom line. It's a win-win-win. At Applied, our ambition is to be the technology platform that supports the Digital Roundtrip of Insurance for brokerages. To achieve this, we help brokerages drive more efficient operations across the customer journey from plan management, to quote-to-enroll processes, to financial management.

Technology as an Enabler

With Applied Epic® and our Benefits-optimized capabilities, we focus on delivering better outcomes for brokers by:

• Making servicing easy and streamlined, by capturing the information you need – across a breadth of plan types – upfront, and making it intuitive to access this information when you need it

• Embedding intelligent automation, to help you through high-impact workflows, such as renewals and commission and reconciliation processes

• Delivering actionable insights, by providing intuitive dashboards and views to help you better understand your book of business from a financial and operational perspective, and giving you tools to analyze your business and track your goals

What’s New at Applied for Employee Benefits

Our latest release introduced a brand new, Benefits-optimized experience for Benefits users, accessible within our single system, Applied Epic. Users are able to access key account information, plan information, account activities, and more from a centralized experience.  Further, users have access to customizable and searchable views that make finding and acting on information even easier. We’re excited about what we’re hearing from users – this new experience has “cut down significantly on the number of clicks” – and in fact has reduced clicks by 75% for some common tasks.

This added efficiency helps Epic Benefits users find information faster and service their book of business with more efficiency.

Releasing AI-Powered Tech

AI has opened the door to accelerated innovation in insurance broadly, and we’re staying on top of it to ensure that Benefits brokerages have the tools they need to capitalize on this value. We’re excited about the value our customers are recognizing from automation capabilities like AI-powered email content generation and summaries to quickly compose customer communication and intuitively summarize long email threads.

And we’re even more excited about what comes next on the Applied AI journey. AI-powered accounting automation via Automated Statements will unlock significant value to finance teams; the ability to extract data from carrier statements and automatically map it to plans in Epic will replace manual processes to record transactions. The ability to leverage AI to extract plan information from plan documents transforms a highly manual (and error-prone) process of keying information into a system. This is where Applied’s industry expertise gives you an edge. Our Vertical AI approach is purpose-built for the insurance sector, ensuring we develop tools that truly work for brokerages.

Unlock Analytics and Insights with Dashboards

The way an agency views their data informs their business decisions, and ultimately how they support their customers. We're making sure they're able to access and understand their data with the value that Epic Dashboards brings. When data is centralized and consolidated, it makes it easier to access and analyze information. And, it happens all in one place. Dashboards data-driven insights allow users to understand and identify performance trends, organizational productivity, and other business drivers.

How Does Applied Support Benefits Brokerages?

Applied Epic provides a centralized platform that enables of all your business to operate in a consistent and streamlined way. By providing a comprehensive set of capabilities to facilitate plan management, financial management, workflow and insights - all in one system - we provide a hub for an agency’s end-to-end operations. Whether you are servicing customers directly, or managing commissions and financial processes, Epic can provide a full set of capabilities to make you most efficient.

Applied Benefits Designer™ extends Applied Epic and streamlines and automates the quoting and proposal process to enable faster quoting and renewals. Because it’s tightly integrated with Applied Epic and Employee Navigator®, data flows automatically across systems to deliver significant efficiencies in the quote to enroll process.

Adapting and Succeeding in the Employee Benefits Landscape

Employee Benefits are changing, and brokerages need to change with it to remain successful. Being aware of trends and learning how to stay ahead helps your business and the customers you serve. What do your customers need, and how can you provide that? This mindset supports the growth of your agency and also helps you attract and retain top talent.

By embracing technology and innovation, brokerages will thrive in the ever-evolving landscape of Employee Benefits. Learn more about how Applied leverages technology to support your Employee Benefits needs and transform your workflows.