"Everything that a customer could ask is answered up front with the system," Vazoulas says. "The printed quote gives a summary of the entire contract with benefits and riders and details that wouldn’t otherwise be available unless we had a brochure on hand, and those are never up-to-date. The fact that they can see it up front and go over their plan line by line makes it much easier for them." Because he’s already sent clients custom proposals created with the proposal configurator, when Vazoulas visits them face-to-face, about half have already made up their minds to buy Empire’s services. As a result, he sells on average twice as many Empire policies now than he did before. From a broker’s standpoint, it’s an easier sale with the new technology, he says. Empire measures customer satisfaction through mail surveys, but Bell says it’s too early to gauge whether the company’s Web strategy has had a quantifiable impact on customer relations. Although assessing a client’s level of satisfaction can be difficult, Vazoulas says brokers are not hearing many complaints about the speed of enrollment.

"I can usually tell how happy the customer is based on how much negative feedback I get," Vazoulas says. "If there’s something they don’t like, I’ll hear about it up front. But with this system, I get no negative feedback."

In the first six months of 2001, Empire’s small-group sales increased 274 percent compared with the same time period the year before, although the company isn’t sure how much of that increase can be attributed to the new enrollment process. Plans to run an analysis have been shelved, Bell says, in favor of going forward with updates to the site.

In fact, just two months after rolling out Broker Services, the company launched a website that lets individual members access and update their personal data, check claim status and payments, and request ID cards. Last summer, it launched a beta version of a portal for physicians. A similar site for employer groups was slated for completion by the end of 2001. These portals proved invaluable when Empire lost its headquarters at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. The company used the sites to reassure brokers, members and physicians that Empire was up and running and to post contact information for its other offices.

In 2002, the company plans to create a broker services application to handle customers with more than 50 employees. Empire will also allow brokers to renew contracts online. This time, the IT department is doing the development in-house.