This Web Pioneer Survived By Supporting Brokers

Digital serves many big benefits brokers, but Sullivan says working with Digital Insurance could make sense for a broker that generates as little as $30,000 in annual gross benefits commission revenue and has as few as 30 small group customers.

Originally, Digital billed itself as a “provider of Internet solutions.” Small employers and their employees are starting to conduct more benefits business over the Web, but Digital Insurance decided early on that it had to add traditional call center services.

These days, “most of our customer experience happens over the telephone,” Sullivan says. “You cant tell the customer what to do. Youre dealing with decades of tradition of people talking to each other.”

Thesco Benefits L.L.C., New York, is one of the brokers that has been using Digital Insurance to handle small groups.

The arrangement “is certainly not saving us any money, but it was not intended to save us money,” says Richard Fleder, Thescos chief executive.

Thesco hired Digital Insurance to improve service for the smaller groups and give them access to specialized services, such as customized benefits Web sites, that Thesco could not have supplied on its own, Fleder says.

Thesco handles the most complicated service problems, such as tricky claims disputes, in-house, but Digital Insurance can handle the complicated problems as well as routine customer service issues, Fleder says.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Edition, August 5, 2004. Copyright 2004 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.