“We’ve found that, because SmartOffice is a pure web solution, there are very few technology challenges. The solution supports multiple usage models, enabling us to use the solution for our own needs in dealing with the carriers, while giving our member agencies proven marketing and contact management tools to help them build better relationships with their customers.”

- Chris Soniat, Director of Marketing, BRAMCO

CUSTOMER PROFILE
BRAMCO (Brokerage Resources of America, LLC) is the premier association of independent life brokerage agencies in the United States. BRAMCO represents the industry’s leading life annuity and long-term care companies to individual producers, registered representatives, banks and broker/dealers nationally.

THE CHALLENGE
BRAMCO (Brokerage Resources of America, LLC) is the nation’s largest association of independent life brokerage agencies. A cooperative organization of wholesale brokerage general agencies, BRAMCO serves as an independent marketing organization that brings value to its members by providing strategic marketing support and the collective bargaining power of a large group membership when negotiating with carriers.

In 2002, in an effort to offer its member agencies the added benefits of a full-service central processing unit, BRAMCO made the decision to implement a new agency management solution. This approach would offer all of BRAMCO’s member BGAs the much needed efficiency of scale to get a rich, full-featured agency management solution, as well as providing smaller agencies the benefits of such a solution without the need for in house IT support or technology infrastructure.

When selecting the best solution to meet their needs, the team at BRAMCO considered a number of factors, not the least of which was the financial stability of the vendor. “There are basically three vendors out there today who offer the BGA functionality we needed. One was questionable from the perspective of long-term stability, one was owned by one of our largest competitors, and the third was Ebx CRM – a company that had a proven history, was financially stable, and whose client list was growing fast,” says Christopher Soniat, Director of Marketing for BRAMCO. The vendor’s commitment to the BGA market was also important, and Ebx CRM had demonstrated this assurance with its purchase of LifeMarkets, makers of the highly used Commerce Agency™ solution, in 2002.

Ebx CRM’s SmartOffice® for Agency Management quickly became the frontrunner. “One of our managers and I had both come from firms that were using Ebx CRM’s Commerce Agency,” says Soniat, “and the new web solution offered similar functionality, but in a much more flexible environment.” With nearly 30 agencies to support nationwide, the SmartOffice solution not only offered BRAMCO the ability to support its members online, but it also offered the ability to view real-time case information online – from anywhere.

THE SOLUTION
As one of the first organizations to implement SmartOffice for Agency Management, BRAMCO served as a beta site for the software — a situation that can sometimes be precarious for the initial users. But, according to Soniat, Ebx CRM did everything possible to make the beta process go smoothly and deliver the expected results. “The Ebx CRM team was very committed and kept us from getting frustrated throughout the beta testing process. We implemented soon after Ebx CRM acquired LifeMarkets, so they were still learning the ins and outs of the BGA market. The support team really went above and beyond to be certain that they truly understood and met our needs. We always felt that our needs were heard, and Ebx CRM responded extremely fast to deliver a polished solution that works for us.”

Also, unlike other agency management solutions that have been migrated to the web from a Windows® platform, SmartOffice is built from the ground up on a web platform. This has resulted in a very stable solution that comes fully integrated right out of the box. “We’ve found that, because SmartOffice is a pure web solution, there are very few technology challenges,” says Soniat. “The solution supports multiple usage models, enabling us to use the solution for our own needs in dealing with the carriers, while giving our member agencies proven marketing and contact management tools to help them build better relationships with their customers.”

As a distributor, BRAMCO is primarily using the solution to deliver a high level of service to its member agencies, but they have also made the solution available to the agencies. While a number of the agencies are already beginning to use the system for contact management and marketing, many agency users are looking forward to delivery of the pending case download module scheduled for release in the next version. While BRAMCO can now provide hard-copy downloads of the information, the online capability will have major impact on accelerating new business processing, and Soniat expects that it will result in agency movement toward SmartOffice. “Based on the success of our implementation, I wouldn’t be surprised if we have 10 to 20 agencies live on SmartOffice within the next few years.”

THE RESULT
After just over one year in use, SmartOffice has proven to be a wise choice for BRAMCO.
The web platform has shown to be ideal for serving the dispersed organization. By making it possible to process business quickly and deliver added services to the agencies, SmartOffice helps BRAMCO deliver better service and, ultimately, grow its ability to meet the needs of the agencies.

SmartOffice provides BRAMCO and its member agencies with the following benefits:

• The ability for all users to work remotely and maintain real-time access to the information they need to be effective
• An intuitive user interface that makes it easy to bring people over to the system
• Full web-based functionality that supports BRAMCO’s dispersed organization
• Industry-specific functionality, terminology, and process support
• A high level of support from the Ebx CRM team

As the BRAMCO implementation grows, Soniat anticipates using the solution on many more levels. “SmartOffice has a ton of features that we haven’t even explored yet. As our agencies begin to take advantage of all SmartOffice has to offer, we expect to see even greater results across our entire business.”