You may have recently received our email announcing the launch of our Brand New E-Contracting platform. In this week’s Tech Tuesday Blog I wanted to put a spotlight on this new way to get contracted, and share a little bit of what’s improved, and why we decided to improve it.
Let’s Take a Walk Back in Time….
A few years ago we looked to use technology to simplify the contracting process. We all knew that it didn’t matter what company an agent was requesting appointment with, all carriers would ask for the same information. So if an agent wanted to get set up with more than one company at the same time, why should they write out their name, address, phone number etc. over, and over, and over again. This is when our Express Contracting was born!
Senior Benefit Services created a simplified form – four pages of the information every carrier asks for in a clean and organized form. Agents could list multiple carriers on the same Express Contracting form and then our Contracting Department would take care of the individual companies’ paperwork. We would then use a computer program to attach an electronic copy of the agent’s signature to those finalized documents. This greatly sped up the contracting processes for agents, especially when they would want to get appointed with multiple carriers.
Taking Steps Forward
We realized we could improve on this process. We took our same simplified Express Contracting Form and made it fillable. Our newly dubbed “Online Express Contracting” made it so that agents no longer needed to write out their information by hand. They instead could access the Express Contracting file on their computer, type in all their information, then print out a copy, sign it and send it back to us. For a lot of agents, having the ability to type instead of write greatly decreased the time it took them to complete their paperwork. Improvements within our office made it so that we could securely store agents’ information so they didn’t need to constantly complete the same information over and over when new carriers hit the market.
Our Latest Step Forward
The biggest flaw in the Online Express Contracting system was that agents needed to still print out a copy of the document to put a signature on it, and then gather up all the supporting paperwork like licenses, E & O Certificates, etc. and then either scan and email or fax it back to our office. So we decided to take our Online Express Contracting to the next level!
Our brand new E-Contracting platform eliminates that extra step and keeps everything on your computer. As you navigate through the E-Contracting form you’ll be prompted to answer only the questions you need to answer, and then upload any needed documents. At the end of the E-Contracting questionnaire you’ll be prompted to sign in a large box using either your mouse or finger (if using a touch screen device). Then you click submit and we’ll take it from there!
Your appointment requests can all be done online and without wasting a single sheet of paper. All of your information is stored on a website with top notch security. In fact, we only receive a notification that Contracting has been submitted. We’ll still need to use a secure password to log in and access your information. Early testing has already proven to have reduced the amount of time needed to provide us with the necessary information, eliminated several common errors, and increased the percentage of contracts we receive that are 100% complete. During our initial testing I was able to really save a lot of time using my iPad’s auto fill feature. I ended up not even needing to type in half of my basic information.
If you want to take a look feel free to visit our Online Contracting page then click on the E-Contracting button. Once you submit your first contract through our new platform, don’t be afraid to give us some feedback. We’d love to hear what parts you like, and if you hit a snag along the way, we’ll work to fix it. You can always email us at Marketing@SrBenefit.com Our goal is to make the appointment process easier so you’ll spend less time working on paperwork and more time getting in front of your clients.