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A conversation with Meredith Jacobsen, SVP Client Services for the Mid-Atlantic Region, and Hannah Craven, Senior Director of Operational Solutions, Employee Health & Benefits at MMA
MMA’s Mid-Atlantic executives are laser-focused on finding efficiencies. And they rely on their leaders to identify new opportunities to get brokers out of the mundane and into client relationship-building activities.For Meredith Jacobsen, SVP Client Services, and Hannah Craven, Senior Director of Operational Solutions, ThreeFlow was anew, innovative way to help staff work smarter. It could automate data entry, eliminate carrier back and forth, and create standardized outputs that would eventually uncover deeper insights across the business.We recently sat down with them at our sales kickoff to hear:
We wanted our brokers to be spending time consulting our clients and proactively thinking through the next issue to solve for them—not typing rates and words on a page. We saw an opportunity with ThreeFlow to:
We had to get our important client-facing team members away from data entry and from playing traffic cop between the carriers. It was always a back-and-forth of, ‘Oh, which carrier did I send this to?’ and ‘Oh, there was an update on our census, which rep do I send this to again?’
These extra steps—in addition to the dreaded spreadsheeting—were happening at the most crucial time of the client lifecycle: renewal. It’s when they were supposed to be the most “on,” if you will, the most accurate, the most perceptive, so they could make good recommendations to their clients.
The way I was trying to solve for this was through outsourcing. But the truth was that it cost a lot of money. And it took so many hours because we didn’t have a standardized template—the outsourcing vendor had to train their resources on each team’s spreadsheeting setup. A platform that could automate data entry and track the sending and receiving of carrier information would significantly reduce that time and expense.
Several things set ThreeFlow apart. One was the carrier-paid model, and the fact that a good number of carriers were already participating on the platform. That made it super simple to gather, store, and review data—we could see, in real time, how data from carriers was coming in.
Another was ThreeFlow’s use of AI. We’d explored other vendors who said they could normalize carrier data, but they still required our brokers to get the information from carriers themselves and upload it manually.
ThreeFlow did this automatically. Seeing that visual of clicking on different dropdowns for different lines of coverage and seeing the plans with the carrier logos made us go, ‘Oh, wow, that’s amazing.’
The custom presentation assistant was a serious differentiator as well. With other vendors, we just couldn’t get the quotes to look the way we wanted. With ThreeFlow, we could finally create a solid client-facing template that everyone could use. That standardization has laid the foundation for so many more things we can do now in terms of analytics.
Besides everything Hannah said, ThreeFlow’s flexibility and willingness to accommodate us were second to none. During the evaluation, it was easy to point to things and say, ‘This will be a barrier to adoption without x’ or ‘You’ll have to do y and z to make this work.’
Other vendors weren’t willing to budge, but the ThreeFlow team was willing to hear us out, think creatively, and work hard to fix it. That problem-solving spirit meant a lot to us in a potential partner.
We started by painting the picture. At the time, every piece of data had to be transitioned by an individual, whether it was going to outsourcing or a specialty group, it had to be touched over and over and over.
We made it clear that all the time spent in emails and systems left brokers in a panic during renewal time. But more broadly, and perhaps more importantly, they didn’t have time to:
All things that are required to deepen client relationships and position brokers as true consultants. In our leadership’s minds, a tool designed to reclaim that time, like ThreeFlow, could ultimately contribute to greater client satisfaction and retention.
We had been talking a lot about how our brokers have to take what sells, and then put it in communication materials, an agency management system, an app, a portal—and then implement it in a benefits admin system. There were so many touches, as Meredith mentioned, but also so many opportunities to introduce discrepancies.
Showcasing ThreeFlow as the way to (1) standardize the output and (2) automatically feed it to the right places would make it not only a major timesaver but also a must-have during our switch to a new AMS (Applied Epic) this year. Plus, it would be an enormous cost-savings on the outsourcing side.
We now have 30 offices across 10 major hubs rolling into 5 different ThreeFlow instances, which translates to hundreds of users, ranging from producers to client services folks to marketing analysts.
And the data that’s being captured in ThreeFlow now, the normalization as we talked about earlier, it’s working really well. So well that we are referring to ThreeFlow as one of our systems of truth in terms of what coverages are in place today for our clients.
That’s a big accomplishment ahead of a very important initiative: the integration with our new AMS, Applied Epic. Eventually, ThreeFlow data will feed seamlessly—and correctly—into our AMS, and in a world not so far away, even serve up data to our clients automatically.
We did a lot of time studies because I’d been tracking time down to the minute with our outsourcing vendor, so that was our easiest place to compare.
It’s interesting because we’ve seen so much success with one of our role types and servicing models. So we’re closely analyzing what they’re doing differently so we can incorporate it into future training and rollouts.
We wanted to make the pilot as easy on our teams as possible. That way, it was easy for them to see the reward of moving to ThreeFlow.
Addie and Toan at ThreeFlow were so helpful from an operational standpoint. They laid everything out with a roadmap to build out the initial clients, which was key to getting the client services team’s buy-in.
We sing praises of the ThreeFlow team. It’s a lot of work to get a pilot over the finish line, and you guys delivered. I don’t say this lightly—it has truly been a beneficial partnership.
Talk to your users and potential champions.
For example, I went to a producer leadership group and spoke with them about showing up on the 5500, hearing how they would respond to that objection, and getting their real thoughts on the technology. That got us some brownie points, as did a conversation with the account management leadership group. They were a good sounding board as well.
Getting our carriers on board was a big deal, too. They are very important partners of ours, and we had to make sure it would be a positive experience for them.
You need the right mix of people and process to make it happen.
When you get agreement to do a pilot, really think about which group you want to pick. Where are you going to get the most ROI and buy-in? Make sure there’s a service leader—like I had with Meredith—in your corner, too.
Email jefflee@threeflow.com for a ThreeFlow overview.
Align on next steps with curated implementation strategy conversations.
Kickoff the partnership with ThreeFlow.
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