One reason that negotiating access is sometimes tough to do with employers today is because of agents who worked with their employees in the past. One bad experience with the wrong agent can unfortunately keep the good ones out. Many agents that work with employer groups don't recognize that it's a privilege to work with their employees and great care must be taken to continue to receive that privileged access.
One of the biggest complaints that employees often have is that they feel pressured to buy insurance. But where does that pressure come from? The reason that pressure is there is because of the type of enrollment process they use or it's likely that the person was paid on commission.
Commissioned based sales is an honorable business, but a commissioned based enroller can cause potential problems and one of those problems is that they overly encourage people to buy their offerings just so they can earn a commission.
When that happens employees can sense it and they don't like it.
Therefore, a good policy to follow is to only allow enrollers paid on a per diem basis to work with your employees. Insisting that per diem enrollers are used has the following advantages:
- The enroller is paid the same whether employees sign up or not
- The focus is on the enrollment's educational process and not focused strictly on the number of people signing up
- Employees can feel when enrollers are there to help them and they appreciate the help
So, to ensure the above, what you'll want to do is make sure that enrollers that have access to your employees are paid on a per diem rate and not commission on a per app basis.
The other thing that's an important step to eliminate perceived pressure from an enrollment is to add a step to the enrollment process that allows employees to take the information home before they decide instead of making them decide on the spot.
Sometimes, not devoting time for employees to review a product offering gives the illusion of pressure even when per diem enrollers are used.
On all enrollments I conduct, I only use per diem enrollers and I also build adequate time in my enrollment process to let employees take the information presented to them home before they decide. This eliminates the perception of pressure where it doesn't exist.
The only hint of pressure that should ever exist in an enrollment is in encouraging people to at least hear the offer available so that everyone benefits from the elimination of underwriting and requirements for all.
I talk more about my enrollment process in my post called 3 Steps to More Effective Benefits Communication at Enrollment.
Let me know what you think about paying enrollers commission.
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