Client Background

Our client, a top national insurance brokerage within a diversified banking and financial services company, has been under enormous pressure since the start of the global economic crisis to provide world-class consulting services to their customers regarding their insurance needs. However, in order to deliver this top-notch service, our client had to find solutions to the following business challenges:

• They were unable to reach a vast number of small accounts with insurance and HR needs
• They decided to represent PEOs as the solution, but lacked internal expertise to build the business
• They needed a combination of custom technology and cost-effective sales support to meet higher than normal margins 

The Approach & Business Solution

Cognet HRO evaluated the business challenges and concluded that our client lacked the HR industry knowledge required to expand their business while maintaining a high quality of service. They would need Cognet’s expertise to accelerate the start-up process. Additionally, our client did not have any technology in place to tackle the process at a reasonable cost. Finally, Cognet HRO determined that the client's traditional internal sales support would be overwhelmed by volume.

We proceeded by providing our client with a scope and business requirements document which included the technology essential for service delivery. Our client agreed that having Cognet provide sales support would be significantly more cost effective. Additionally, the client could take advantage of the time difference and technology to solve the volume issues and provide support to the Program Manager to allow our client time for more “high level” tasks and analyses.

The Results & Key Learnings

Through Cognet’s industry expertise, our client was able to accelerate the go-to-market time by a full year. The technology solution was executed in two phases; the first phase included data collection and automated market submissions to deal with volume and the second phase consisted of business intelligence and automation to vendors.  Through the phased approach, we were able to solve the volume issue first. Our client saw a reduction in the traditional cycle time by 24 hours and a reduction in cost of 60 percent. With these great results, the client reached the break-even point with costs within the first six months of operation.

In addition to reducing cycle times and reducing their costs, our client achieved these results from its relationship with Cognet HRO:

• Our client now spends more time developing sales and marketing strategy and vendor relationships, while Cognet ensures the smooth operations of "the machine" with their Program Manager.
• Our client is more effective through the entire process, including the sales operations team, due to innovative thinking and implementation of processes that support their entire process. For example, they now provide sales support direct to the agents to input their applications and perform tasks.