A large opportunity within health care reform is to be a resource for your team, customers and prospects. As many of you reading this may be aware there is a lot of mis-education on the coming changes. Just last week, I was chatting with a client about health care reform and a local business owner over heard our conversation. He started explaining what he knew about health care reform, which sad to say was completely wrong. This business owner had 200 employees and he promptly called his HR manager who confirmed his incorrect information. Low and behold our client scored a meeting with this company to set the record straight and review the account.
Here is the challenge, not only are your prospects confused but most likely your current customers may also be getting a lot of misinformation from their friends, the news or even your agency! Zywave has designed a three part plan for health agents to capitalize on this change, which includes:
• Effectively and Efficiently Educating your customers and employees
• A strong defense to keep your current book
• A HUGE offense to capitalize on market change
Our first of a three part series is on education and how to effectively and efficiently educate your customers and employees.
Education of Customers
In order to defend your current book of business you need to provide your customer with timely, accurate and easy-to-understand information on how this new law will affect their business. As you have seen rate increases of 20%-30%, there is a lot of fear around the uncertainty of how this will impact business in the future. You need to provide quick, timely and engaging information to customers, this can include:
• Monthly Health Care Reform E-Newsletter
• Content on Your Website
• YouTube Videos
• One-Page Guide Sheets
• Social Media Updates
• Webinars
• EBooks
The beauty of all the items listed above is that they are all scalable. Currently your team is having the same conversations over and over again with your customers. You can’t control what they say, how they say it and, even more importantly, how they update clients when changes happen. You need to have a standardized message that is in your control to effectively and efficiently educate your customers.
Education of Your Staff
In times of change it is mission critical that your team has standardized talk tracks about Health Care reform. This is not only to protect you from an E&O perspective but to equip your team with the most accurate and effective talk tracks. For example does your agency script out how to discuss a 30% rate increase? Do you know what you want them to say about fines from Affordable Care Act? Here are some sample conversations you should script out:
• My rate just increased to what??????
• I’m thinking of cancelling my group benefits and paying the fine
• I have questions on Health Care Reform. Can you give me the rundown of what I need to know?
• My friend told me….
Being able to control the message on this ever changing environment is critical to your agency’s ability to capitalize on the Health Care reform.