Company Background:
The Benefit Doctor is an insurance brokerage specializing in comprehensive employee benefit packages that provide end-to-end coverage, from short-term disability and accident protection to health insurance and supportive benefits like vision and dental. With client experience at the core of their mission, the agency operates on three foundational pillars: education, transparency, and support well beyond a client’s initial enrollment.
Whether a client is enrolling for the first time or returning for their fifth year, The Benefit Doctor is committed to delivering personalized benefit solutions that work for each business’s unique needs – even if those needs change from year to year. With continued education and support, clients can feel confident that their employees are cared for without the extra stress of trying to navigate confusing policy agreements.
Like many insurance brokerages, commissions – though complex – were still easy enough to manage in spreadsheets in the beginning. However, as they continued to grow and expand operations, commission complexity increased and the challenges that were present early on only became more amplified.
That’s when they decided to implement Core Commissions to automate their incentive compensation processes.
Greta Dean, VP of Operations at The Benefit Doctor, oversees commissions and led efforts to implement Core Commissions for their team.
“I can trust the data.”
“It works well, and it has supported us as we’ve grown,” said Greta when asked about Core. “It’s scalable with our business, and it’s evolved with our business.”
The Benefit Doctor’s Commission Pain Points:
- Agent Tier Structures: Producers have different commission tiers that are based on experience. Newer agents may work with a single carrier which places them at a lower tier, while more seasoned producers are contracted with multiple carriers allowing them to unlock higher commission rates.
- Massive Spreadsheets: When the team first began looking for a commission solution, their primary spreadsheet contained roughly 1,000 lines – daunting enough – and today that spreadsheet exceeds 25,000 lines.
- Multiple Carriers: Carrier compensation statements come from numerous different carriers and arrive in a variety of formats, making reconciliation time-consuming and difficult to audit.
- “War Coach” Overrides: Earlier this year, The Benefit Doctor introduced overrides to their commission formulas. This allows their more experienced sales team members, referred to as “war coaches”, to earn an additional commission on sales where they helped coach their more entry-level counterparts.
Core’s Solutions:
Customizable Rules: Core’s robust rules engine made it easy to implement conditional logic for agent tiers and overrides, automatically applying the right rules during commission calculations to ensure accurate payments every time.
Automated Auditing: Core’s automated auditing tools help Greta and her team verify imported data by immediately flagging discrepancies, making it easy to pinpoint the exact source of potential errors. These auditing tools help ensure that there are no missing gaps in their carrier reporting or producer commission payouts.
Streamlined Workflow: Even with Greta’s 25,000-line spreadsheet, Core’s automation capabilities ensure that commission data flows exactly where it needs to go. This allows Greta to complete her entire commission process in as little as an hour – or sometimes two during especially busy cycles.
Emailing Reports: Greta substantially decreased her commission reporting time by utilizing Core’s bulk-email features. In one-click, Greta can automatically send personalized pay detail reports to all of her agents.
Customized Dashboards: As their agency grew, it made more sense to enable Core’s Online Portal to allow their agents access to login to view their pay statements and Core gave Greta complete control over how agent’s pay dashboards were designed. She was able to create dashboards that showed:
- Payments received
- Commissions broken down by group and policy
- First-year commissions versus renewal commissions
- Earning trends
Support Beyond the Subscription
Like The Benefit Doctor, Core doesn’t disappear after onboarding. Ongoing support and responsiveness have made Core a trusted partner rather than just a software provider.
“If I ever run into an issue, I know I’ll get a fast response — usually within the same day,” said Greta. “That’s huge when you’re responsible for paying producers accurately and on time.”
When their agency management software (AMS) introduced commission management capabilities, she was asked by her leadership team to do due diligence to see if consolidating commission processes to a single platform would be better for their company. Knowing exactly what Core is capable of and being equipped and knowledgeable about what to look for in a commission management solution, she very quickly realized that what this other company was offering was not anything near what Core has been able to consistently deliver on.
After evaluating their AMS’s commission capabilities, it became clear that the functionality and flexibility did not compare to what Core already provided. Greta felt more confident than ever that other software providers could not match Core’s depth of features or customization options. Additionally, Core’s consistently responsive support over the past several years only further solidified her commitment.
“With Core, if I wanted to change the whole thing tomorrow, I know that I could ask my implementer to help me rebuild and restructure it however we needed.” Greta said.