Revolutionizing the quoting process and benefits administration experience: Explore Beam's technology-focused approach

Featured in Voluntary Benefits Voice Magazine

By Elek Pew, Head of Digital Partnerships

In today’s digital world, technology plays a pivotal role in transforming various industries, and employee benefits are no exception. For brokers and group administrators, embracing technology is paramount to staying ahead of the curve.

Beam Benefits, a digitally-led employee benefits company, stands at the forefront of modernizing the industry. With a laser focus on technology and strategic partnerships, Beam is revolutionizing the quoting process and streamlining benefits administration.

Customized quotes with the Beam Quoting Tool

At the heart of Beam's technology-driven approach is the Beam Quoting Tool, or BQT. This powerful tool allows brokers to obtain quotes that are instant, accurate, and most importantly, customized to the specific needs of a group. With its user-friendly interface, brokers can easily navigate the tool's features, leveraging advanced functionalities to their advantage.

Shelf rates are often the default among quoting platforms; not the case with the BQT. One notable feature is the census uploading capability, ensuring rates are tailored to each client's needs. This level of customization sets Beam apart, as brokers can provide their clients with quotes that accurately reflect their workforce demographics and benefit preferences that otherwise would take days of back-and-forth conversations.

Streamlining the benefits experience with advanced integrations

At Beam, our vision is to showcase our technological prowess while modernizing the landscape of employee benefits. To achieve this objective, we’ve established partnerships that integrate our product offerings directly into the technology platforms that brokers and group admins utilize today. By collaborating with three types of partners – direct digital agencies, quoting platforms, and benefits administration platforms – we solidify our competitive advantage and deliver a seamless experience to our clients.

Direct digital agencies: Enhancing sales and service

We partner with direct digital agencies, enabling them to self-service promote, market, and sell Beam plans directly on their platforms. This streamlined approach allows digital agencies to focus on providing exceptional service to their clients. With the assistance of a dedicated Beam support team, direct digital agencies can coordinate real-time quoting, client enrollment, renewals, and ongoing service and benefits administration for their Beam plans. This partnership ensures that mutual clients receive the highest level of support while benefiting from Beam’s cutting-edge technology capabilities.

Quoting platforms: Accuracy and collaboration

Beam understands that many brokers use quoting aggregator platforms to quote and compare several benefits providers’ products simultaneously. Our philosophy is to meet brokers where they are by partnering with these quoting platforms to make accessing real-time, competitive Beam quotes possible in the quoting tools they use most. We deliver significant advantages to the quoting experience with these platforms by integrating them directly with Beam’s industry-leading rating API. 

It’s important to note that when platforms integrate with Beam’s API, Beam rates displayed on these platforms are not shelf rates, which are static and may not accurately reflect individual circumstances. Instead, our rates are fully underwritten, using census data when available, and bindable utilizing Beam’s AI-driven pricing methodology. This level of customization ensures that the Beam quotes brokers provide their clients through these platforms are accurate and tailored to their unique requests. It also ensures that risk is calculated appropriately and the group and broker aren’t surprised with hefty rate increases at renewal.

Benefits administration platforms: Simplifying enrollment

Our direct integrations and custom API connection with benefits administration platforms bring significant advantages to open enrollment and ongoing employee eligibility maintenance. These platforms offer robust technological solutions that facilitate enrollment processes and provide mechanisms to transmit benefits election data seamlessly to us.

Beam integrates with the industry’s leading BenAdmin platforms and offers easy connection methods for ensuring a simple and reliable data transfer. Brokers and group admins can count on our ability to receive and process valuable enrollment data from these platforms accurately and quickly, saving time and minimizing the risk of errors.

Our tech-focused approach is reshaping the employee benefits landscape. Through strategic partnerships and industry-leading integrations, we empower brokers and administrators with real-time solutions, delivering accurate, personalized rates and streamlining benefits administration. As Beam continues to lead the charge in modernizing employee benefits, our commitment to innovation and platform integrations remains unwavering, paving the way for a brighter future in the industry.

Check out the full July issue of Voluntary Benefits Voice magazine here.