Think about the applications your employee benefits team opens first every morning.
For most agencies, Outlook is near the top of the list. Producers and account managers use it to communicate with clients, carriers and prospects throughout the day. Add Excel, Word and Teams, and much of the agency is already operating inside the Microsoft environment.
So why should your CRM feel like a completely separate system?
That question is worth asking when evaluating technology for an employee benefits agency. Instead of choosing a CRM and then figuring out how to connect it to the applications your employees already use, there is an advantage to starting with a CRM built on the same platform.
That’s one of the reasons we built BenefitsBridge on Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Outlook Isn’t Just Email for a Benefits Agency
For an employee benefits professional, an inbox contains much more than messages. It contains a large part of the history of your client relationships.
A client asks about coverage. An account manager follows up with a carrier. A producer discusses a new opportunity. An HR contact sends information about an upcoming renewal. Questions, decisions and follow-ups move back and forth all day.
When Outlook and your CRM operate as separate worlds, important information can remain in individual inboxes instead of becoming part of the agency’s shared client history.
That creates another problem: employees have to connect the dots themselves. They work with the client in Outlook and then have to remember to go into another system to update the CRM.
What Changes When Your CRM Is Built on Microsoft?
BenefitsBridge is built on Microsoft Dynamics 365, so it works within the same Microsoft ecosystem your team already uses.
The Outlook integration makes it easier to connect email communications with the appropriate records in BenefitsBridge. Instead of treating the inbox and CRM as two unrelated places, client communications can become part of the information available around that relationship.
That matters when someone other than the usual account manager needs to understand what’s happening with a client. It also matters when a producer is preparing for a meeting, a manager wants visibility into an account or the team needs to look back at previous communications.
The information becomes more useful when it isn’t isolated in one person’s inbox.
Familiar Tools Can Mean Fewer Extra Steps
There is another practical benefit to building an employee benefits CRM around technology people already use every day: you aren’t asking employees to completely change the way they work.
Your team is still going to use Outlook. They’re still going to use Excel, Word and other Microsoft applications. The question is whether your CRM works with that environment or adds another disconnected layer on top of it.
BenefitsBridge isn’t designed to replace the Microsoft tools your team likes using. It is designed to connect the agency-specific information you need with the Microsoft platform already supporting your business.
That can mean fewer extra steps for employees and less dependence on people remembering to update a separate system after the work is already done.
The Benefit Goes Beyond Outlook
The Microsoft foundation is also important because Outlook isn’t the only application involved.
Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365 and the Power Platform provide a broader foundation for connecting information and business processes. BenefitsBridge adds the functionality employee benefits brokers need on top of that platform, including client and prospect management, renewals, service activities, commissions and other agency-specific processes.
That combination is important. A generic CRM may provide a strong technology platform but require extensive work to make it useful for an employee benefits agency. A benefits-specific system may understand the industry but exist largely outside the technology environment your employees use every day.
BenefitsBridge is designed to bring those two sides together: an employee benefits solution built on Microsoft’s business technology platform.
Why Connect the Dots Yourself?
When agencies evaluate a new CRM or agency management system, feature lists naturally get a lot of attention. Can it manage renewals? Can it handle service requests? Can it track commissions? Can it manage the sales pipeline?
Those questions matter. But there is another one worth adding to the list:
How well does this system fit with the technology our employees already use?
If your agency already runs on Microsoft, choosing a CRM built on Microsoft can remove some of the connections you would otherwise have to create and maintain yourself.
Your team is already working in Outlook.
Your CRM should be able to work there too.
