Whether agents and brokers need to present Medicare Advantage (MA) insurance options to beneficiaries over the phone or online, health plans must now accommodate telephonic or telehealth videoconference presentations.
While in-home presentations are not possible for everyone right now, MA beneficiaries still need to understand their options and trust that they are making the right decisions regarding their health care needs.
Based on our experience, we understand that health plans need to quickly execute on the following:
- Combat a confusing agent onboarding process
- Turn difficult online MA beneficiary enrollment processes into a simple and easy solution, by providing the proper tools necessary for remote capabilities
- Provide transparency of your commission payment system, which empowers your sales staff with detailed visibility of beneficiary enrollment status, avoiding surprise commission adjustments.
To successfully follow up on business practice execution, here are the key features that your virtual tools should provide regardless of which 
vendor or in-house solution you choose:
- Single sign-on capability: Users should be able to manage all sales and marketing functions and support from a software as a service (SaaS) platform, which provides support for all revenue generation activities.
- Member acquisition and efforts: Your sales backend should help to streamline the sales process for onboarding internal and external sales agents
- Integrated oversight: A health plan’s customer relations management (CRM) and commission payment must allow for an integrated overview.
When you give your agents these tools, you provide your decision-makers with interactive reports, such as clickable values, sorting, and searching capabilities. An agent’s ability to generate reports that display enrollment by timeline, status, and product is invaluable.
We can’t stress enough how health plans must make reports available with drill down features to view enrollment by status for agencies and agents. By doing so, agents can quickly identify persistency and production performance issues.
About the author
As a founding managing partner of Engagent Health, Derrick Taveras is responsible for the agent sales software platform, bringing more than 20 years of experience developing risk adjustment, quality programs and eligibility solutions on a national scale. Taveras is charged with ensuring that Engagent Health allows users to manage all sales and marketing functions and support from a single sign-on SaaS platform, to support all revenue generation activities. Previously Taveras served as the senior vice president of business development for Centauri Health Solutions, Inc., and played a pivotal role in the organization’s ability to bridge opportunities that came from the acquisition of Tactical Management. Inc. (TMI), the company Taveras founded. Part of Centauri’s acquisition of TMI included its flagship SaaS platform now labeled, Centauri Advance.