|
MARKETING
Create a "service experience"
MyWave Elements enables agencies to craft branded, customized Web portals that provide commercial clients online access to data, resources and service
By Len Strazewski
“It’s about control,” says Eric Ferraris, partner at Tooher Ferraris Insurance Group in Wilton, Connecticut. “Our clients want the power to access information about their risk management and employee benefits programs directly, whenever they want it. And when they provide information to their employees, they want to be able to brand it with their company identification.”
Multinational companies and their jumbo insurance brokers and consultants can afford to build their own information databases and Web portals, but just about all other commercial insurance customers rely on their local agents and brokers to provide them with access to information and communication services, he says.
Tooher Ferraris isn’t a jumbo broker and in the Connecticut-New Jersey-New York tri-state market, it isn’t even one of the larger regional insurance firms. With only 20 employees and two partner producers, Ferraris says the firm successfully competes with larger agents and brokers by offering customizable, branded Web-based information services to its clients as a value-added service.
The agency is an early adopter of the new MyWave Elements™, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based Zywave, Inc., an insurance industry technology company that specializes in Web-based products for commercial agents and brokers.
MyWave Elements is a modular Web portal that allows agents and brokers to create branded Web applications for their commercial insurance customers. A portal can be configured in a myriad of ways such as focusing on customer service and support centers that allow clients to access risk management, compliance and safety program information; niche industry expertise portals that provide specific industry risk management information; management portals for captive insurance companies and risk retention groups; and multi-office or single-office intranets for risk and employee benefits management functions.
Brokers can use MyWave Elements to give their clients access to online service requests, essential account documents, risk management and human resources-related resources, legislative and regulatory advisories, risk assessment tools, claims analysis tools, insurance industry news, and OSHA and safety compliance forms and program information. Agencies can also integrate their own Web-based software applications into the portal alongside Zywave-hosted applications.
Brokers can also use the technology for account management and account team communication, and networking with other insurance and service professionals, according to Zywave.
Tooher Ferraris has been a Zywave customer since 2002, using the company’s property/casualty content library product and its earlier editions of the MyWave information portal for its clients. The agency began implementing the new MyWave Elements product earlier this year as a value-added service to its clients, rolling out the technology to its commercial clients with support from Zywave.
“The original MyWave was terrific at the time it was released. There was nothing like the technology and its capabilities for brokers and clients. The product has really matured over the past five years, and the new Elements has an even more streamlined approach and can be completely customized for every client or even multiple client uses,” Eric Ferraris says.
Ferraris says MyWave “has really transformed the way I do business. Today, we really consider ourselves to be a risk management company. Zywave products allow us to keep our commercial clients as they grow and develop a need for greater sophistication, as well as sell to new clients as they outgrow brokers that have not kept up with the industry.”
Tooher Ferraris introduces a new topic to its portal accessed from the Zywave content library each month, allowing its MyWave Elements users to explore and add information to the Web portals the firm provides. “This has allowed us to alert our customers to new risks that they should be evaluating and new insurance products that they have not previously considered,” he says.
Recent features have included fuel and energy risks, directors and officers liability, and contracting and construction risks.
“We insure a lot of large construction companies and subcontractors who have a need for immediate access to risk management and insurance information in order to comply with contract requirements. They want and need access to this information 24/7. With Elements, we can package that information and make it available online to them wherever and whenever they need it,” he explains.
“Elements allows us to put together a lot of different concepts for our clients and really differentiate ourselves in the way we sell. It really reflects the high-end way we provide service.”
Mortenson, Matzelle & Meldrum, Inc., in Madison, Wisconsin, is another recent adopter of the MyWave Elements product. A larger agency with 165 employees and five offices, the firm was founded as a life and health insurance agency in 1972, and now reports revenues divided about equally between commercial property/casualty insurance and employee benefits.
Executive Vice President of Insurance Operations Michael Moore says the agency has rolled out MyWave Elements-based portals for six of its largest clients earlier this year to a great reception. The agency utilizes Zywave’s agency management system, adding Elements to provide value-added services externally.
“Elements gave us exactly what we wanted, a customizable approach to providing Web-based information to middle market and larger clients, which allows them to get information about their risk management and employee benefits programs whenever they need or want it.
“Business leaders are hard workers and can’t be limited to regular office hours. They expect the same from their advisors, and this technology allows us to provide that level of services,” he says.
Bill Haack, Zywave president and chief executive officer and a former broker principal, agrees. He says the needs of agents and brokers have evolved dramatically since his own agency management days.
“What has changed is the fundamental role of the broker,” he explains. Previous generations of agents and brokers focused exclusively on bidding out the annual renewal of their insurance contracts and getting prices for their customers. But in the past 10 years, price competition in both property/casualty insurance and employee benefits has eroded as fewer insurers using the same underwriting information produce very similar quotes for clients.
As a result, agents and brokers need new ways to differentiate themselves in the eyes of their clients. Contemporary agents and brokers must not only create results for their clients—price and coverage—but also “create an experience” of service and resources for their customers that continues throughout the year.
“What we are doing with technology creates new ways for brokers to be efficient and to pass that efficiency along to their clients,” he says. “We continue to find ways for the broker to demonstrate who they are and why they are special.”
Haack entered the agency technology business in 1992 with a claims data analysis reporting system designed for health plans. In 1995, he founded Zywave, marketing the system to other agencies as Decision Master® Warehouse.
Today, the company offers a wide range of property/casualty and employee benefits-related communication and automation products to agents and brokers, delivered exclusively with customizable Web-based technology.
MyWave Elements is the latest and most flexible edition of its broker-to-client Web portal service. The new edition, built on a Microsoft.Net and SQL Server platform, took about a year to design and integrates most of the Zywave information products into a single Web delivery. Other Zywave products include Broker Briefcase®, a sales and marketing communications tools for agents and brokers; Brokerage Builder, an account management system; HRconnection®, a human resources information portal, and several property/casualty and employee benefits claims analysis tools.
Zywave has about 800 agent/ broker clients and nearly half—about 387—are beginning to use the new Elements modular technology, Haack says. More than 100 users have already developed customized portals for their clients.
Dave O’Brien, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Zywave, says the new product is the result of a survey of Zywave’s user base. “Brokers continue to seek ways to differentiate themselves from other producers calling on their client base,” he says. “They seek ways to demonstrate how they are different, more informed and better able to provide the level of service their clients expect.
“People have always been the broker’s way of differentiating themselves with more qualified, personal service,” he says, “but the demand for online, 24/7 information and services requires another differentiator.”
MyWave Elements, he says, provides a platform on which agents and brokers can deliver a branded and unique service to the most important clients. “It’s very easy for a smaller broker to use the Web to deliver an information product that is comparable to the expensive services provided by larger competitors without exhausting a lot of resources on acquiring and maintaining technology,” he says.
Rebecca Running, MyWave Elements operations manager, heads a team of Web designers that works with agents and brokers to design single or multiple customized portals for their clients. The implementation process takes from four to six weeks, and users are allocated five hours of consulting time to collaborate with Zywave.
She says designers and broker partners share two or three consulting calls in which they explore the client needs and services they plan to include. “Broker partners lead the construction process with their insight into their clients and their own distinctive personalities that they wish to communicate with the portals,” she says.
The result, she says, is a user-friendly and intuitive interface that identifies that client by name and provides the level of service and resources that the broker chooses to be available to its customers. *
For more information:
Zywave, Inc.
Web site: www.zywave.com |
