Welcome to This Week in Benefits, a new biweekly podcast from Mployer Advisor, the company that is changing the way employers search, evaluate, and select insurance advisors online.  

In each episode, our team will bring you the latest news and industry updates in the world of employee benefits. We will break down top headlines, bring you interviews with top industry insiders, and highlight market trends and stories we’re following.

In case you missed Episode 5, click here to listen and here for the show notes.  

Show Notes    

Date: June 15, 2022  

Episode Season and Number: Season 1, Episode 6  

Episode Title: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Mployer Advisor's Second Annual 'Top Employee Benefits Consultant Awards'

In this week's episode, we discuss the launch of Mployer Advisor's second annual "Top Employee Benefits Consultant Awards” with our Chief Marketing Officer Aaron Clifford and Senior Vice President of Customer Success Ben Nye. Clifford and Nye discuss the history of the award, underscore the need for more transparency in the industry, and detail how we chose our 2022 award winners.  

To listen to the sixth episode of This Week in Benefits, click here.  

Additional Recommended Reading  

Mployer Advisor

About the M Score  

PR Newswire

The 2022 winners of the second annual “Top Employee Benefits Consultant Awards”  

Episode Transcript

Abbey Dean: Hi everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of This Week in Benefits, a new podcast from the team at Mployer Advisor where we discuss all things employee benefits. I'm your host, Abbey Dean, Mployer Advisor's Head of Content, and thanks for being here. Now, today is a very, very big day for the team at Mployer Advisor, and it is a day many, many months in the making. Today is the launch of our second annual Top Employee Benefits Consultant Awards.

This is our Oscars, our Grammys. It is everything to us, and we are so excited to honor this year's winners who are selected, not just based on their years of experience, but also their commitment to transparency and customer service. So for all of the winners, we are just thrilled and we are excited to talk a little bit more today about the history of this awards, why we feel it's important to do, and of course about our scoring methodology, which I'm sure many of you are interested in. So to help me out, I have Aaron Clifford, our Chief Marketing Officer, and also Ben Nye, who is our Senior Vice President of Customer Success. So I'm joined today by two fairly exceptional coworkers, Aaron Clifford and Ben Nye. They're going to introduce themselves, but today we're going to be talking about our Top Employee Benefit Consultant Awards. And I thought, who better than Aaron and Ben to join me and discuss? So guys, will you introduce yourself?

Aaron Clifford: Sure. My name is Aaron Clifford and I'm the Chief Marketing Officer for Mployer Advisor. Hi, my name is Ben Nye and I'm the Senior Vice President of Customer Success for Mployer Advisor.

Abbey Dean: Excellent. Is this the first podcast you guys have been on before?

Aaron Clifford: No, I've not My first, my first our own podcast. I've been on others, don't Google my name. Brag. Yeah, <laugh> brag. No, first Mployer Advisor one for me. Thanks for asking.

Abbey Dean: Of course. Okay. So as of today, when this episode is live, our 2022 Top Employee Benefit Consultants Awards campaign is live and in the world, and this is our second annual year. And this program actually started because of Aaron. So Aaron, tell us about the sort of inception of this awards program, and why you thought it would be a great match with Mployer Advisor.

Aaron Clifford: Sure, absolutely. So when we are looking at the amount of data that Mployer had from various data sources on brokers, we had scored over 15,000 brokers on various components related to their service and customer reviews and plans offered and industry experience. We were looking around what we have this great data, and there are other industries and other awards that are given, but we couldn't find one that was given to health benefit consultants. And so we thought, yes, it would be cool to recognize some of the folks that are doing great work day in day out to help employers get the best coverage for their employees. And so we kind of noodled on it, and let's create an award. Other people created an award and this would be good recognition. We can put some press out on these individuals that are doing great work. And ultimately that's kind of how it came. We looked at US News and World Report, Healthgrades had their awards, and just various industries. Realtors have awards, they have a bunch of awards given <laugh> at all kinds of levels. So we really couldn't find one for the employee benefit consultants. So that's kind of the genesis of it.

Abbey Dean: And we should note that Ben used to work at Healthgrades, so he knows all about awards campaigns and so on. Ben, why do you think it's important to have awards programs that recognize the achievements and transparency of brokers in our industry?

Ben Nye: I think it's important because it's a third party that reviews and validates brokerages or individual brokers for their work and recognizes their depth and knowledge in the field. So it validates when someone is looking or searching for employee benefits for the first time or for the next time either an HR leader or a C-suite individual to see that this group or this individual has the knowledge that is necessary to give them the best advice, the best consulting. And I think that's the purpose of it. We used to say that anybody could say I'm the best, and most companies do. I think we were joking the other day about no one wants to go to the second-best sushi restaurant in Nashville, right? So it's one of those things where you wanna make sure that when you're traveling, when you're researching, when you're buying anything, consumer reports, et cetera. You want to look and be able to rank and sort and say, this is the best for my needs and services. And I think that's why that for Mployer Advisor the second year, this is something that we can push out to the market and say that we stand behind it.

Abbey Dean: We've named more than 600 broker winners as part of the awards this year, which sounds like we've been maybe too generous, but actually this number just represents less than 5% of all brokerages nationwide. Is that right?

Aaron Clifford: That's right. So nearly there were 15,000 brokerages on our platform, and there's even more, we captured most of them, but there's a number probably that we didn't capture. But in terms of 600, just if you look at the about 50 markets that we identified winners in, it's really a very exclusive group. So we're excited to recognize those individuals or those brokerages and the individual brokers that work there.

Abbey Dean: And so let's talk about methodology for a second. How did we select this year's winners, this prestigious group from those 15,000 on our website?

Aaron Clifford: That's a great question. So we have our own proprietary algorithm of scoring these brokers, we call the M score. And then there's other various components that go into it year over year. One of those we get from our own proprietary algorithm, but then we bring in customer reviews and then government surveys, claims information, a number of different data sources that we go to see who is really acting on behalf of the consumer, which in this case would be the employer and offering the best possible solutions for that employer. And so those are some of the components that we go in. You could read more about it on mployeradvisor.com, but it is not just drawing names out of a hat. There is a rigorous process that we go through. It takes us about two to three months just in terms of our data analysis and going through and combing through the various components and the data components of what we measure to choose the winners.

Abbey Dean: And I believe, oh, sorry, go ahead.

Ben Nye: Sorry. I was just going to say one thing there too. I think what's important is that there is a methodology, right? In a selection criteria. It's from a transparency standpoint, it's important to say that it's not a pay for play. So no brokerage is paying us to be ranked or mentioned as one of the top-rated consultants year over year, those things. So it is a process, it's the algorithm the methodology that's important. And we do publicly post that, as Aaron said on the website too.

Abbey Dean: I think it's also important to mention as well, and thank you for mentioning that last point, Ben, is that we're looking at data over the past three years too as a measure for some of this which is significant too, because I think it is a truer picture of a brokerage's breadth and depth of their experiences and the services they offer. Does that sound right, Aaron?

Aaron Clifford: Yeah, absolutely. The amount of, there are some specialized brokers and they may have one in industry that they serve and that is completely fine and good because they're serving that industry. But then how much are they offering to that particular industry in terms of plans? There's various nuances of demographics. There's companies that have an older demographic and a younger demographic. How are they working with those employers to give them the best possible solution for their benefit package, and how are they serving them? And so those are the components that we dig into and look at.

Abbey Dean: So Ben, thinking about our broker winners and how to help them sort of market their achievement, are there best practices that you think they could do or any ways that they should or to clients or prospects where they could say "Hey, I'm a top-rated broker, this means this." Do you have any suggestions?

Ben Nye: Yeah, I mean there's a number of different ways for marketing in general to use this. When you talk about the brokerages can be as easy as your email signature, a LinkedIn post, a social media post with the methodology, and with the press releases we mentioned doing things in local markets. We provide our clients with some press releases to assist them with the announcement to get the word out, as well as just notifying their current clients, or to your point prospects that they have been they've been a winner recipient from Mployer Advisor of this award as well. And just describing that a little bit to them. So we assist with that. We provide some examples. We've seen clients take it as far as on their own web pages, listing all of their awards that they might have received, be it local awards, national awards, et cetera. So we assist with that. The best practices, again, are going to be some of those things. From a marketing standpoint, we would say all of their marketing channels we would suggest, because again it, this is our second year, so there is going to be some press behind this too. And then we, as an Mployer Advisor company as well, are going to be assisting with some local press releases and national press releases to assist with communication.

Abbey Dean: Aaron, do you have anything to add to that?

Aaron Clifford: No, I think Ben covered it.

Abbey Dean: And this is a question to you both again. Context. Ben helped oversee a very rigorous awards program at Healthgrades too. And Aaron, you helped bring this one to life. What do you see this awards, how do you see it evolving in the future?

Aaron Clifford: So for my perspective, the amount of reviews that we're harvesting and receiving on our platform, there's nuance in those reviews as far as the text portion when customers are leading reviews for their brokers. And so there's an opportunity to rate and maybe have various categories within the awards be it service and value or strategy. So I think we'll be evolving the awards to have various subcategories based on customer reviews. And then as our data matures and we see various insights from either, whether it's by region or at a national level, I think we'll be bringing out new categories probably.

Abbey Dean: Ben, same question.

Ben Nye: Yeah, I'd say as the industry itself, like all public industries, consumer industries, it's going to, in my opinion, have more oversight as we move forward, right? Because there's a financial aspect to it where you have a payment. And I think that with that, there's going to be things that we can look at too to make our methodology stronger. One thing I think that we discussed is maybe adding Moody's ratings in the future, looking at insurance companies from another third party, but as a known third party, making that part of the methodology or something similar, just to again, have some names and some information, some regulation, those things to look at too. To give an example of this in the healthcare space, things like malpractice sanctions and those things are populated and are public, and you can use those to review and look at physicians as a consumer. So I think that adds transparency in the insurance world grows, there might be other things that we bring and pull in and make that public which will just strengthen the message and the rating and those things as well.

Aaron Clifford: Our main goal is to empower employers to find the right consultant and broker for their particular company. So all those things that Ben had mentioned, and then the other categories I said we are looking at our end goal is to ultimately empower the employer to get the greatest value for their employees.

Abbey Dean: Absolutely. Is there anything else about the awards that we have not talked about yet that either of you think is important to mention?

Aaron Clifford: From my perspective, if you are a broker listening to this and you are an award winner, I would encourage you to promote it and to encourage your customers to leave a review for you on mployeradvisor.com. If you are an employer and your broker won the award, I encourage you to go to their profile and leave them a review and help others find the right broker for them.

Abbey Dean: Ben?

Ben Nye: I don't think so. I think from our team, we're just very excited for the second annual release and for the press release going out today and for the information to be live. So I think for us, it's exciting. I think that our broker partners that we've spoken to previously are as excited as well, so we're just looking forward to the next couple weeks and the promotion.

Abbey Dean: Awesome. Well, thank you guys both for joining us today. First podcast episode for this podcast, but more to come. So thank you guys so much, and we look forward to having you back soon.

Ben Nye: Thank you, Abbey.

Aaron Clifford: Thank you, Abbey.

Abbey Dean: Well, that wraps up today's episode. Thanks for tuning in. Now, if you have not yet, please subscribe and leave us a review. It really helps. Also, if you have questions about this episode or past episodes, you can also leave us a voicemail message. Feel free to suggest ideas or anything else. We would love to hear from you. Thanks for listening, and we will see you next time.

Thank you for listening to this week's episode of This Week in Benefits, brought to you by Mployer Advisor. Mployer Advisor is changing the way employers search, evaluate, and select insurance brokers. Our intuitive platform connects employers and employees to get great benefits and insurance plans by providing employers with actionable data to easily evaluate and select the best advisor for your company's specific needs. To learn more about Mployer Advisor and our suite of products, please visit our website at mployeradvisor.com and tune in next time. Thanks.

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