Health Plan Improves Broker Effectiveness and Shortens Sales Cycle with Pivotal CRM

Situation

Sentara Health Plans, Inc., located in Virginia Beach, Virginia, uses an internal sales force and maintains an outside network of 200 brokers to provide health insurance coverage to a range of subscribers. The organization’s Small Group Business divisionprovides healthcare coverage for businesses with 2 to 50 employees. The branch, which has 450 employees, relies on its brokers to distribute and sell its healthcare plans to customers throughout the region. Against the current backdrop of competition for health insurance customers, Sentara wanted to grow its business by increasing membership and improving customer retention. As part of this strategy, it also wanted to increase broker effectiveness, better manage costs, and significantly improve internal workflows.

Those goals posed a significant challenge for Sentara: it wanted the ability to grow without adding to the headcount. “We used a very manual paper-based process, so we wanted to streamline that,” says Rachel Thomas, Director of Small Group Sales for Sentara. “We wanted to produce more sales more efficiently and with less labor.” Sentara had been using an internal sales database system from Firstwave Technologies, from which quotes were printed out and manually reentered into a core database. “We had lots of information coming in that was on paper and not well-organized,” says Scott Johnson, IT Director at Sentara. “It was stapled, rerouted, and touched too many times. We wanted to move away from that.”

Time was also an issue. “From the member, to the broker, to the sales executive, to the administrator, to the underwriter—department to department, paper handoffs took too long,” says Johnson. “We needed to change this process to reduce the number of paper touches and the time and effort to enroll new members. Also, our brokers were limited to working directly with us for all of their quote needs, so that meant they were limited to working 8–5. We wanted to provide them with full-time access to quoting, which lends them additional selling hours.”

Solution

To solve these issues, Sentara turned to Pivotal Corporation, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner that specializes in the deployment of customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. In 2002, Sentara deployed the Pivotal CRM for Healthcare Payers suite of products, which includes Pivotal Healthcare Front Office, Pivotal Healthcare eBroker, and Pivotal SyncStream. This product suite uses the Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 database running on the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system, both part of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software. It is also XML-based, which ensures optimal performance, flexibility, and scalability.

The solution lets healthcare payer organizations such as Sentara minimize paper-based processes and streamline operations. There are two components to the Sentara solution: Pivotal Healthcare Front Office, designed for internal sales, marketing, and underwriting; and Pivotal Healthcare eBroker, designed for external brokers.

Front Office allows for front-end data consolidation. It also fully integrates with a healthcare organization’s rating system to help automate rates, quotes, and proposals.

The eBroker application extends automation capabilities to brokers, allowing them to generate their own proposals, insert approved rates, deliver requests for proposals to prospects, and oversee the contract process. “It gives brokers the opportunity to have a browser-based tool on their own computers,” says Bruce Cameron, Senior Vice President, North American Sales for Pivotal Corporation. “With a secure login, a broker is able to open up their own home page and, for example, check on the status of pending proposals and download important sales and application information.It is designed to give them more self-management tools.”

After spending time reviewing solutions from several CRM vendors, Sentara chose to deploy the full Pivotal CRM for Healthcare Payers suite. “The technology is solid and very flexible, because it allows us to get the right information to our brokers while also managing data internally,” says Johnson. “But more than anything else, Pivotal understood our business and what we needed.”

Benefits

Pivotal CRM has allowed Sentara to automate processes, improve sales efficiencies, achieve new business growth, save time in the membership-enrollment process, and increase adoption rates without adding to administrative overhead.

Improved Efficiency

Pivotal CRM brings both cost and process efficiencies to Sentara. “The Pivotal solution has allowed us to streamline our sales and service processes and speed up our information-sharing ability with brokers,” says Thomas. For example, because Pivotal CRM users can only enter validated information through the system, the potential for duplicate data entry is eliminated.

Rapid information-sharing is important for Sentara, because the company needs to communicate with brokers quickly and move information as effectively as possible. “For example, if a new product rollout is on the way, a company can send out that information to all its preferred brokers immediately for download,” says Cameron. “That’s an important competitive advantage in the healthcare industry, where speed counts. Pivotal CRM makes it possible to get accurate information out quickly to the brokers, and then into the hands of decisionmakers.”

Sentara is also able to better track quotes through Pivotal CRM. “Prior to deploying the Pivotal solution, it was difficult to track and generate quotes with speed and efficiency using a spreadsheet,” says Thomas. Because Pivotal CRM moves the Sentara quoting system online to a secure Web site, quotes created by brokers in this system are immediately fed into the SQL Server database. “By automating new-business quoting, we’ve decreased processing time by 50 percent. We’ve also seen a 30 percent increase in quotes over last year.”

With Pivotal CRM, Sentara has also been able to keep its overhead down. “Pivotal’s automation capabilities have allowed us to increase the volume of quoting and enrollments while reducing headcount,” says Thomas. “Our accountservices department, which is responsible for enrollment, has been able to downsize one-and-a-half full-time employees. That’s because they no longer need to manually input group setup and rate setup information from hundreds of pieces of paper.”

In addition, because the solution is so user-friendly, users do not require much training. The company’s brokers can easily do their own quotes, and they are not as reliant on the internal office. “There is no hesitation to use the product, and they’re more productive as a result,” says Thomas.

Increased Business

Pivotal CRM also leads to direct increases in revenue and new business for healthcare payer organizations. For example, the automated solution allows Sentara brokers to spend less time on manual administrative tasks such as printing and mailing reports and more time in front of new prospects. Because this new system uses a centralized SQL Server database, data is immediately available to both brokers and internal Sentara staff.

Pivotal CRM also gives brokers the ability to precisely track sales prospects as well as analyze performance and market trends. Consequently, brokers can target potential customers more effectively.

“We’re definitely generating more revenue, while at the same time reducing administrative expenses,” says Thomas. “In short order, we have moved back into a membership-growth mode. We have increased business by hundreds of members in that time. And in terms of retention, we’re running at a 93 percent rate, which is 5 percent higher than before the solution was deployed.”

Since deploying Pivotal CRM, Sentara has added an average of 46 new customers per month, reflecting an 18 percent increase in their quote-to-member conversion rate—a substantial increase over the previous rate.

Time Savings

Pivotal CRM also reduces the time spent on the quoting process, both for brokers and the internal sales-support staff at healthcare payer organizations. A process that formerly took up to an hour now takes minutes, according to Cameron. “At Sentara, the quote process has gone down to one minute,” he says. “As for their sales cycle, the brokers have gone from a 10-day quote-to-enrollment process to a 5-day one.” Part of the reason for this is that they can now produce a complete customer proposal package with the click of a button, thanks to Pivotal CRM.

The reduction of paperwork resulting from Pivotal CRM’s efficiency also allows sales representatives and brokers to spend more time in front of customers and less time behind their desks. For Sentara, that means sales staff and brokers are on the road about 10 percent more of the time. “That’s a huge advantage of this solution,” says Thomas. “More time out of the office means more customer face-time, and that means more business for the company. That was simply not an option before this solution was in place.”

Strong Microsoft Relationship

As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Pivotal also enjoys a close relationship with Microsoft. “We’re a Microsoft shop; that’s what we sell,” says Cameron. “We have worked very closely with Microsoft to develop this product suite, and we will continue to work together to build other products using SQL Server and other Microsoft tools.”

The success that Sentara has had with the Pivotal CRM solution has also led to collaboration between the two companies on additional projects. “Sentara wants to grow without adding more steps and more time to its processes,” says Cameron. “That’s what we are helping Sentara achieve, and it’s how we will continue to help other healthcare companies. We help companies become lighter and more agile, with the ability to move information through the organization faster and better.”

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