(Image credit: Dollar Photo Club.)

No one wants to wait for a slow website.  According to several studies, most users will abandon any site that takes more than 10 seconds to load. Whether the 10-second wait is caused by an Internet problem or a design flaw doesn’t matter because the user has clicked off and gone to another page—one that loads in less than a second. The organization with the slow site has lost them, maybe forever.

Brokers and benefits managers 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.

Don’t Sacrifice Accuracy, Security for Speed

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. 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.

(Related: New Global IQX Group Insurance Offering Integrates Quoting and CRM)

Getting fast quotes is challenging enough even when you’re talking about straightforward health insurance. It becomes even more challenging when other benefit products are added, such as ancillary benefits. Employers increasingly 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’ll want to use census data to get a more accurate rate and to aid in straight-through processing to a proposal and enrollment.

Rules-Based Underwriting

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 applied to quoting.   Many carriers are worried about their senior underwriters retiring within the next five years. Now is the time to have the rules and workarounds in their heads put down into rules-based underwriting system. It’s a matter of having a capable, secure system and then using it to capture how underwriters at a particular insurer create quotes.

This is the best method to providing comprehensive, quality quotes, fast, without sacrificing accuracy or security.   Fortunately, the technology is readily available.

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 attracts more usage, which ultimately leads to writing more business in less time.

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