If you are an organization that provides employee benefits to your workforce, then you are likely already working with an Employee Benefits Broker/Consultant.

We typically find that organizations aren’t proactively considering a change in brokers unless there are obvious service issues or overall dissatisfaction.

Some common broker issues may include:

• Lack of support from current broker to resolve service and/or claims issues with insurance provider.
• Receiving a skyrocketing annual renewal with no or minimal advance warning (high rate increases should never be a surprise!) – likely because they aren’t regularly provided with their claims experience (aka usage) reports.
• Current broker rarely contacts client to provide ongoing education and information on industry trends. They are kept in the dark.
• Current broker doesn’t readily provide cost-savings ideas/strategies.

If you are pleased with current broker services – that’s great! However, maintaining status quo may not be the right thing to do either.

 Not all brokers are created equal!!!

Evaluate Current Broker Services

Firstly, you need to assess if you are being well serviced by your Employee Benefits Broker/Consultant. To help you with this assessment, please download a Benefits Broker Checklist.

Decision to Change Broker

If you have determined that you aren’t satisfied with the services of your current Employee Benefits Broker/Consultant, you may decide to terminate the existing broker relationship and establish a new agent partnership.

The option to change your broker/consultant is always available to you by simply signing an industry-wide used document called an Agent of Record (AOR) and following the industry-wide process (your new broker should inform you of the detailed process).

Highlights of the AOR process includes:

• Completing the AOR letter and forwarding to current carrier.
• Your current broker is then given 10 business days for them to retain you as a client (so expect a call!). Ideally, we recommend is better to have a conversation with your current broker explaining your decision to change prior the AOR being sent to the insurance carrier – it’s a good professional gesture.
• To bypass the 10-days, ask your current broker to approve immediate release of your account vs. waiting for the 10 business day waiting period to pass.

Changing brokers does not impact your Benefits Plan

You can continue coverage with your carrier without any disruption. However, you benefit immediately from the support of your new broker services.

In the unfortunate event you are unhappy with the services of your newly appointed broker/agent, you just complete a new AOR and designate another new agent.  The same process would begin again allowing the current broker 10 business days to try and retain your business.

For further information about this process, please contact ENCOMPASS.

What Our Clients Say

Okanagan Regional Library says:

“Prior to appointing ENCOMPASS as our advisor, we were dealing directly with multiple insurance carriers/providers and believed we were getting the needed support. In hindsight, we were actually not. When ENCOMPASS Benefits came in, they conducted a thorough analysis of our plan, marketed our multiple policies to the entire Canadian field of carriers, merged the plan into one preferred provider and set us up on a much better system.”