Imperial Life Financial agents and staff got their introduction to the e-business working environment as the company recently held training sessions for agents and staff to familiarize them with its cutting edge WEBI extranet system.
The $1.4 million mobile virtual office is the company’s newest competitive investment, which is designed to empower its sales representatives to upgrade the speed, efficiency and accuracy of service to their clients.
Three training sessions were conducted at the J. Whitney Pinder Building, for sales representatives and staff from Nassau, and one in Freeport for representatives in Freeport and Abaco.
The sessions were led by Francois Trout, Project Manager, E-Commerce, Desjardins Financial Security, Canada, with assistance from Barry Saunders, Supervisor, Marketing Administration and WEBI Project Manager, Imperial Life Financial, and other members of the in-house WEBI team.
Participants learned how to differentiate among internet, intranet and extranet platforms and how to gain access to the Imperial Life WEBI extranet using their passwords and user IDs.
They were taught to familiarize themselves with the elements of the WEBI extranet site interface which include Clients Portfolio, Products, Marketing, Compliance, Training, Technology, an Infocentre, Financial Planning and a Calendar.
They also learned how to utilize WEBI’s search engine to locate important information. “With WEBI, no matter where you are, you can access just about every facility you would have in the regular office said Barry Saunders. “Sales representatives have access to their client’s portfolio, forms, applications and support from customer service.”
According to Francois Trout, WEBI has revolutionized the insurance business in Canada since it was established three years ago and is now in its third stage of development. “Some things are done differently now. Some reports are now available only on-line so there’s been some cost benefits. One of the most important benefits, however, is having access to information 24 hours a day,” he said.
“Usually sales representative do a lot of calls or sales meetings in the evenings when the office is not open and sometimes they run across missing information they need to know right away.
In the past, they would have had to wait until the next day to get this information. Now a lot of this information is available 24 hours so they can dial up and access information or even download a specific form that they may not have with them,” Mr. Trout said.
Imperial Life’s WEBI was developed over a six month period in consultation with Desjardins Financial Security. Barry Saunders was the project manager for the implementation and leader of the project team.
“Initially the scope of the project was not what we thought,” Saunders said. “It turned out to be a much bigger project than we thought but the good thing is it is allowing us to integrate every department in the company into the e-environment because everyone will be responsible for content.
“What will make this site so unique is that the whole environment will always be evolving. What’s there today would have evolved into something better tomorrow. We might have forms today and tomorrow we might have electronic signatures for those forms, once it’s passed by the government.
“We are going to keep the information on it dynamic. It’s not going to be static so the agents are going to want to go there to business.”
The local WEBI team consists of seven Bahamians: Barry Saunders, project manager; Sophia Sturrup, IT Manager; Tequila Cooper, Individual Policy Service; Cali Sandiford, System Analyst/Programmer; De’Andra Fawkes, Web Editor; Laverne Minnis, Sales Representative; and Alvin Heild, Sales Representative.
