A Fortune 500 insurance company needed to increase renewal and re-enrollment in its medium and large account segments. 

A Fortune 500 insurance company identified inconsistent renewal and re-enrollment for the 5,000-plus accounts in its medium and large account segments. Sales reps’ focus on driving new sales coupled with a mid-year reorganization of the account servicing model led to uncertainty about the organization’s ability to create positive plan sponsor experiences as accounts entered the first and second re-enrollment phases.

ZS conducted a combination of quantitative and qualitative investigations to understand the impact of delivering better experiences for plan sponsors and their employees—and found the opportunity exceeded $50 million in premiums per year.

ZS interviewed stakeholders from the sales, client servicing, underwriting, product, tech and enrollment solutions departments and found that a majority of premium risk was due to poor rep/client manager coordination, last-minute planning, complacency with maintaining the status quo for a given account or low utilization of value-added services and capabilities.

To prioritize accounts for immediate attention, ZS created a predictive model to identify accounts with the greatest experience and revenue lift/preservation opportunity. To aid in opportunity discovery and issue diagnosis, ZS created a planning tool that centralized intelligence from several data sources to create a total account view.

ZS facilitated a “rapid improvement” workshop with a cross-functional group of individuals to discuss the gaps and co-create a path towards improved account planning and creating the desired experience for plan sponsors.

ZS designed a disciplined account planning process to connect key internal partners for collaborative and proactive planning discussions. The goal was to create a better renewal experience for the plan sponsor by bringing the best of the company to them.

ZS launched the program in year one to support about 300 accounts from the “high priority” opportunity segment and facilitated joint planning calls with 30 sales reps and 40 account managers. In the calls, ZS identified activation opportunities such as migrating to a new enrollment platform, proactively engaging underwriting to improve pricing or redesigning benefits communications material.

ZS received positive feedback from sales reps, account managers and internal stakeholders. The value of the program has been attributed to the intelligence report, the high-touch support and coordinating the sales and service teams earlier in the process to yield a more proactive approach to suggesting benefit/price, technology or communication changes to the plan sponsor. Using a test and control experiment completed by the analytics team, we measured a $3 million revenue lift within the test group of accounts, plus additional spillover value. Due to the initial success, the client sponsor hired 15 people to run the program on an expanded basis moving forward.