If a large corporation wants to shop among brokers to find the best deal on some type of group coverage, it may take 40 days to receive quotes, because there is no real-time process, he said. Instead, a brokerage agency might send overnight packages to carriers, and each carrier may require a variety of workers to key in the same data with very little project management and barely any audit trails. If an application is incomplete, a carrier might send the proposal back by fax for additional information. Ebix reduces the process for a broker to a single data entry on the Internet, Raina said. Many people in the agency are able to work on it at the same time, and it leaves a trail that can be audited.
Some workers can add data to the project, while others can only look.
Carriers get the proposal next and have the same abilities. Insurers have invested substantially in the technology of customer relationship management. The purchase of insurance is much less frequent, and the product is often a much more complicated instrument. They also improved the educational content in their public Web sites. In January, New York-based eMarketer, a provider of statistics online businesses, rated Allstate's Web site the best in the insurance industry, citing easy claims reporting and payment options online.