A leading online healthcare marketplace + AgentSync Manage

A tech-forward healthcare marketplace that helps older Americans enroll in Medicare and Medicare Advantage plans, and works with thousands of licensed agents across 51 states and territories, struggled with tedious and repetitive tasks, both for the agents it hoped to recruit and for its own internal staff.

When the company recognized that its current producer onboarding and ongoing producer license management processes were hindering its ability to recruit more agents and grow quickly, it turned to AgentSync for a solution. 

Since partnering with AgentSync and developing custom Salesforce workflows, this customer: 

• Reduced agent ready-to-sell timeline to sell by 50 percent.
• No longer encounters delays from agents refusing to come in-person to complete certifications.
• Has been able to grow its producer force without adding more compliance staff, lowering its producer-to-admin ratio.
• Can operate its internal onboarding function at a ratio of 30 producers to one licensing team member and, even more impressively, can manage renewals at a ratio of 180 producers to one team member. 
• Handles producer compliance effortlessly thanks to daily NIPR syncs and automated tasks that get agents updating their own information without manual reminders.

“Everything about AgentSync Manage is wonderful. Agents go in, they complete all the questions for every single state we want to license them in, and we can even spot potential conflicts and resolve them before we start the onboarding process.” 

Head of Producer Licensing

A tradition of doing things better

The insurance industry has a reputation for being slow to adopt technology, but one AgentSync customer is an exception to that rule. This digital-native agency has made its name providing a user-friendly online marketplace for people to shop for (originally) healthcare, and (more recently) Medicare and Medicare Advantage plans. 

The company’s 20-plus year history spans back to the early 2000s, when its founders decided there had to be a better way for people to shop for and compare health plans. With the introduction of the Affordable Care Act in 2013, it became a leading provider of marketplace plans and helped millions of Americans secure coverage. Today, the company provides that “better way” experience to seniors who need help understanding their options for Medicare and Medicare Advantage plans. 

The company’s mission to make insurance easier and more accessible doesn’t end with plan members: It wants to do things better than others for its internal staff and the thousands of agents who sell policies on its behalf. That’s why, when given the chance to modernize agent onboarding and ongoing compliance management, the company chose to partner with AgentSync. 

An ambitious technological vision

“We have some really big, audacious goals, and AgentSync partnered really well with us to use our existing Salesforce instance along with AgentSync to build and customize an enormous workflow that had all sorts of different triggers and automations for agents through the entire onboarding process.”

Head of Producer Licensing

Onboarding insurance agents, many of whom hold licenses in multiple states, hasn’t historically been an easy task. Insurance regulations and licensing requirements vary across state and territory lines, and differences can include background check requirements, fingerprinting procedures, continuing education, renewal dates, and many other details, both large and small. 

Traditionally, one person (or a team of people) has been tasked with keeping track of these details for insurance agencies, often using spreadsheets and paper. As this particular company realized, it becomes impossible to grow a business effectively when each new agent adds more work to the licensing and compliance management team’s workload. 

This is where the customer’s ambitious technological goals came into play. “Our vision is to create a one-stop shop for our agents for everything related to licensing and appointments,” said their director of licensing. Instead of asking agents to jump through hoops across different websites and systems, he said, “We’re trying to give them that visibility in one location.” 

Big wins out of the box

“Our previous system was that we were managing who should get licensed in what state with a spreadsheet. It’s painful to think about that.” 

Head of Producer Licensing

The company decided to go big with AgentSync’s customization capabilities and create integrations and automations that would truly be life-changing for staff and agents alike. But even just “out of the box,” they saw some immediate wins with their new agent onboarding and compliance management solution. 

One such win was their newfound reporting capabilities. A licensing manager said, “Out of the box, the reporting features made us more efficient and saved costs because we could quickly see which producers were actively working in which states and no longer renew unnecessary states.” It may not seem like much, but when you tally up the cost of paying for thousands of agents’ license renewals across multiple states where they aren’t even writing business, the savings are substantial. 

Another one of their favorite AgentSync features is the Compliance Library. This online resource keeps track of state-by-state license compliance facts and makes it unbelievably simple to get real answers to compliance questions from a single source of truth. 

Spoiler Alert! You don’t have to be an AgentSync customer to access the Compliance Library. It’s a free online resource available to anyone.

Customizations, workflows, automations – Oh my!

One of the main reasons this customer selected AgentSync as its new compliance partner was the nearly endless opportunities for integration and customization they envisioned. Adopting AgentSync, along with their existing Salesforce instance, allowed them to go all in on their “really big, audacious goals.” 

All of these goals were intended to reduce friction for new and existing agents, and allow them to start selling more quickly. A huge bonus was that the company’s own internal staff realized cost savings and efficiency gains in the process. “If we were to do this via the original method of spreadsheets and sticky notes,” one licensing manager said, “to do the same work at the scale we’re at now, we’d need double or triple the size of that team.” 

“With AgentSync’s producer portal, along with some customizations we’ve built out, our agents have one place they can look to see the status of their appointments, any actions they need to take, their current certifications and licenses, any documents they need to upload, fingerprint requirements – all those little nuances that we have to keep track of because we deal with 51 states and territories that all act independently of each other.” 

Head of Producer Licensing

The result: Real-time, integrated, automated compliance

Producer licensing compliance isn’t optional for agencies that sell health insurance and Medicare plans. But, as this AgentSync customer now knows, the heavy lift of manual, tedious compliance management is. Using AgentSync, they’ve taken much of the effort out of the agent onboarding and renewal processes, creating an exceptional experience for agents and their own staff at the same time. 

At the core of the company’s success is real-time and always up-to-date information. Whether it’s information the agent enters themselves, or information pulled from an industry source of truth like NIPR, their internal compliance team knows they can trust what’s in their system. And the best part is the compliance managers and their teams don’t have to spend time asking, reminding, convincing, bribing, or begging agents to provide the information and documents they need.

“We created a task that gets assigned to each agent on the anniversary of their hire date and prompts them to update all their information and background questions, if needed,” a senior compliance manager said. Not only do automated tasks like these relieve administrative work from the company’s compliance team but, “this is a huge benefit because we avoid getting emails from state DOIs asking why they found something in someone’s background check that we didn’t report.”

Simply put, “We’ve found having updated information has a trickle-down effect on compliance and makes everyone’s job easier.” 

How AgentSync helps this major Medicare agency: 

• The team that onboards new agents can do so at a ratio of 30 new agents to one staff member.
• The license renewal management team is running at a ratio of 180 agents at a time per one staff member.
• The team can reliably vet agents’ information ahead of time and catch (and correct) issues before they cause a hitch in the onboarding or renewal process. 
• Agents can now start selling 50 percent faster, down from an average of 45 to 50 days to half that time. 
• Using AgentSync has removed friction from the agent onboarding and renewal process by giving agents a single place to complete and update all their information and taking constant reminders and paper chasing off the team’s to-do list. 
• The company has been able to grow its producer force more quickly than the licensing team: the true definition of scaling.