7 Client-Specific Strategies for Brokers

Today's healthcare insurance space offers opportunities for producers that stand out from the crowd. However, differentiating yourself in this competitive landscape requires crafting client-centric insurance models with a personalized customer experience. Employers want bespoke solutions to suit their needs and priorities, and their expected standards for customer service are rising.

To attract and retain high-value clients, try leveraging these seven client-specific strategies for healthcare producers.

1. Conduct Client Assessments

Tailoring insurance solutions to your clients starts with understanding them and their needs. Use this four-part process to get to know a new client:

1. Initial survey: Interview the client and give them a survey to distribute among their employees. Aim to establish their budget, goals, past healthcare experiences and what people at each level of the company want and expect from their health coverage.
2. Industry research: Look at similar companies and industry publications to identify healthcare trends and sector-specific health risks. This will help ensure your client can offer their employees competitive benefits that meet or exceed industry standards.
3. Regulation check: Check what federal, state, local and industry regulations apply to this client so you can focus on compliant healthcare solutions. For example, businesses with at least 50 full-time employees must provide healthcare that meets Affordable Care Act (ACA) standards.
4. Analyzing demographics and claims history: Review the client's claims history for quantitative insights into the benefits they rely on most. Demographic data, like the workforce's age range, family status and income levels, can help contextualize the claims history and identify potential gaps in current benefits packages.

2. Create Custom Solutions

Once you've gauged your client's needs and preferences, you can assemble custom packages aligned with their priorities. Considerations here include:

• Benefits: Beyond the basics, evaluate whether to offer coverage like vision, dental, disability insurance, mental health care and telehealth services. Focus on the benefits most relevant to this client, and consider proposing personalized benefits for employees depending on their demographics, roles and preferences.
• Price structure: Consider how the company's financial picture, employee incomes and claims history could impact the right balance of premiums, deductibles and copayments. For example, a manufacturing company with a moderate risk of work-related illnesses may prefer a solution with low deductibles or a reimbursement plan to offset deductibles. This ensures workers have peace of mind about seeking the care they need.
• Coverage components: The winning insurance recipe for your client may have multiple ingredients. For example, you could combine a High-Deductible Health Plan (HDHP) with a Medical Expense Reimbursement Plan (MERP), Health Savings Account (HSA) or Flexible Spending Account (FSA) to save the client money while offering flexible benefits.
• Preventive care and wellness: Wellness and preventive care are becoming well-established parts of comprehensive healthcare plans. These programs help employees to live healthier lives, which in turn makes them more productive and can lead to lower healthcare costs in the long term. Preventive care and wellness benefits could include fitness incentives, nutrition counseling and addiction therapies.

3. Drive Cost-Efficiency

When deciding whether to work with you, most prospective clients want to know if you can save them money. To remain competitive, look to provide superior cost-efficiency and transparent price comparisons when discussing options with your clients.

One effective cost-saving strategy is to combine an HDHP with a MERP. On the one hand, this secures lower premiums for your client. On the other, it allows them to offset employee out-of-pocket costs with pre-tax funds, saving money for workers and reducing taxable earnings. This makes the combination a financial win-win that also allows employers to offer customized benefits their employees will value.

4. Personalize Resources

Your clients and their employees need resources to help them understand and use their coverage. These could include:

• Videos, pamphlets and infographics.
• Live webinars and workshops.
• Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots to answer common questions.
• A direct line to human healthcare representatives.

Work with your client to understand how resources could better suit them. For example, a tech startup with a young workforce may appreciate AI chatbots and vertical videos. Other companies may have employees who prefer to read a physical pamphlet or phone up a human rep. Ensure resources align with the company culture, speak at an appropriate level and clearly lay out the benefits this client has chosen.

5. Prioritize the Experience

Customer experience is a major factor in client retention. To build a loyal, satisfied clientele, prioritize finding a balance between:

• Personalization: Provide your clients as much flexibility as possible to create their ideal bespoke solution. Build individual relationships and offer attentive support while using analytics to spot client-specific coverage needs.
• Simplicity: Create user-friendly resources and guide them through the process of choosing and using their coverage. Equip clients with technological tools like quick online claim submissions for convenience while ensuring human support is always available when needed.

6. Stay In Touch

A client-centric approach to insurance involves an ongoing relationship between producer and client. As the producer, maintain regular communication with your client and review how the tailored solution you provided is working for them. Even if you succeeded in addressing their initial needs, their goals, finances or employee demographics could change and affect what they need from a healthcare plan. Recognizing and meeting these new needs could be the difference between retaining the client or not.

7. Request Reviews

Ask each of your customers to fill out a brief annual review of your services, describing how well you:

• Offered a flexible range of benefits.
• Made the process easy to understand.
• Responded to needs and queries.
• Delivered value for money.

These evaluations can help you improve your client-centric insurance services. With your client's consent, you can also turn positive reviews into testimonials to promote your services to new clients.

Contact The Difference Card for Client-Centric Healthcare Solutions

As a producer committed to client-specific solutions, you have the potential to stand out even in a competitive group healthcare landscape. You just need the right customizable coverage solutions to offer. With The Difference Card, you can unlock innovative insurance customization for your clients.

The Difference Card is a MERP solution you can pair with an HDHP to save your clients money. This flexible healthcare tool allows you to offer clients multiple personalized benefits packages for their employees, all built on a single underlying plan for the company. Our industry-leading customer service means your clients can get hold of a supportive human rep in under a minute, and we process claims within just two working days. Plus, we offer HSA, FSA and Health Reimbursement Arrangement (HRA) solutions for your client-centric insurance toolkit.

Request a proposal to learn more about creating bespoke client services with The Difference Card.