How brokers handle client turnover

To achieve success and  to expand their business in the insurance broker market, advisors rely on the referrals of their clients. If the broker can save the client money and offer the employer a quality service, having a long and prosperous business relationship is expected.

However, not every relationship is perfect, and turnover is an inevitable situation that every broker must deal with. How are advisors able to wrangle those employers back into their base?

For Jonathan Mentor, benefits account executive at Foa & Son Corporation in New York, he says it all depends on the client and his relationship with the decision maker. “Usually if there is turnover it’s either office politics or a new decision maker wants to bring in their preferred broker partner from a previous experience.”

Once Mentor catches wind of the potential client loss, he attempts to get in front of the client as soon as possible in order to become familiar with their expectations. “I illustrate the progress we’ve made over a three to five year look back and get a better hold of what their end goal is,” he says. “Is it culture, is it financial, something creative, or are they recruiting? A bottle of wine and a card tends to help too.”

For other brokers such as Marie Goldbeck-Struck, benefits advisor CEO at Group Benefit Solutions in Davenport, Iowa, her turnover is due to state regulation. In 2016 Iowa’s former governor, Terry Branstad, privatized Medicaid without legislative approval and adopted the Kansas model of managed care.

Struck says she had clients that were in the home and health industry who relied on payments from Medicaid. After it was privatized, those clients started to become nervous about not knowing if and when they would be paid, and many sold their business to larger organizations.

“Iowa mandated that my clients move to electronic medical records, which can be very costly,” Struck says. “Since their managed care organizations were denying payments they felt it was better to be bought out by bigger companies that had already updated to new systems.”

Despite the Medicaid difficulties in Iowa’s state government, Struck says she mitigates client turnover by being as transparent with them as she can be, and by taking a 360 approach to their needs.

“I ask questions about their current and future goals, we talk about what’s important to them and how to get there by bringing relevant and creative solutions tailored to each client,” she says. “I also keep open lines of communication with all levels of the company as much as possible from monthly emails, calls and stopping in person.”

Brokers like Stefanie Pigeon, president and founder of Affiliated Associated in Essex Junction, Vermont, are turning to technology to encourage their clients to remain in their care. Pigeon says she has started to use BerniePortal, a benefits enrollment platform, to streamline benefit selection among her clients along with starting her own third party administration service, Healthy Dollars Inc., in order for her business to act as a one stop shop for all her clients’ benefits needs.

“I did have a client, who has been with me for some time, who was having discussions with another broker to bring in an enrollment system to their company,” Pigeon says. “I was able to bring in BerniePortal and build all of their benefits around that platform before their next enrollment period.”

Coupling BerniePortal and her own TPA has allowed Pigeon to expand access to these services to her other broker partners offering her business an even stronger net of support.

Having this strong support network is what Josh Butler, president of Butler Benefits & Consulting in Amarillo, Texas, says will deliver perceived value to clients. “If a client told me they were looking at other consultants, I would simply be direct,” he says. “I would ask where we are lacking and vow to work on a fix.”

In Pigeon’s case, she was tired of the poor service her outsourced TPAs were offering to her clients which sparked her to create Healthy Dollars Inc. “I was very discouraged with some of the administration I was dealing with around reimbursement accounts, Medicare accounts and flex accounts,” she says. “Service-wise, I was running into a real mess and the best way to handle that was to create my own TPA.”

As for Butler, his brokerage has begun to utilize stewardship reviews in order to highlight the value they are bringing to their organization. “This is our way of saying, ‘here’s what we promised and here’s what we’ve done,’” he says. “This is how we keep our relationships strong.”