Zywave Inc.
Wauwatosa
Innovation: Broker Briefcase product upgrades
www.zywave.com
Broker Briefcase is not a new product for Wauwatosa-based Zywave Inc., which has offered it since its early days as a company, but throughout the year the product will be receiving a series of upgrades aimed at allowing the company’s customers to rethink what is possible for their businesses.
Making a series of significant upgrades to the company’s flagship product, intended to function as a marketing library for insurance brokers, required multimillion dollar investments in product development, coordination across large portions of the company and a strategic approach to launching each upgrade.
“We wanted them to stand on their own,” Dave O’Brien, Zywave chief executive officer, said of the product upgrades. He pointed out it would have taken less development time to do one big release in the fall, but a staggered approach allows brokers to absorb each of the changes as they come out.
The first round of upgrades, released in April, includes new notifications alerting users to relevant content curated by Zywave market analysts. Broker Briefcase provides access to information on best practices, proven strategies and other materials.
Zywave also has released its 2016 health plan design benchmark report and added to its suite of health care consumer-related materials, a response to the election of President Donald Trump and policies expected to be pushed by his administration.
In June, the company plans to roll out an upgrade aimed at offering customers their own automated marketing agency. O’Brien noted most insurance brokers generate the majority of their business through referrals, but many don’t have a formal program for handling them. The June update will feature social media strategies and tools for putting together branded proposals and presentations.
An upgrade in mid-July will include a package of videos and other materials aimed at helping companies bring on and train new brokers. O’Brien said the industry’s average age is in the mid-50s and smaller firms struggle to have the scale or time to bring on new brokers, even if they are coming from similar roles in other industries.
“It’s not an industry that’s gone out of its way to attract millennials in any way, shape or form,” O’Brien said.
The final upgrade, planned for the fall, is the most complex. While brokers currently can access the product to get a general proposal, the updated version will create a customized version focused on specific issues customers or prospects might be concerned about.
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- Screen grabs from the Broker Briefcase product.
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- Screen grabs from the Broker Briefcase product.
“It’s that innovation, making it think like a broker, that we get excited about,” O’Brien said.
Pulling off several significant upgrades to a major product required plenty of time and investment, but O’Brien said there also should be a payoff for the business. The product management teams at Zywave have a challenging task because the company has plenty of other products to which it could devote resources. Making the decision about where to invest involves an approach similar to the TV show “Shark Tank,” as product managers are asked to make the business case for pushing ahead with projects.
In the case of Broker Briefcase, the company was planning to migrate away from Microsoft Silverlight, which no longer is supported. While that investment was necessary and would make it easier to write new code, customers wouldn’t necessarily see the benefit, so O’Brien said it made sense to also push ahead with upgrades that customers would actually see. But coordinating the moving pieces, including technology, content, market data and user experience, certainly is challenging.
“A lot of it is very good project management, just to make sure the communication lines are open,” he said.
O’Brien emphasized the importance of building the new products in-house, where developers can look the CEO in the eye and hear about why a project is moving in a certain direction.
“It’s very easy and the numbers can be very compelling to offshore,” he said. “One of the secret ingredients we have is our people, and we’re not that secret about it.”
But he added that being innovative requires asking people to stretch outside of their comfort zones, which can be a challenge for younger generations who have grown up under the spotlight of social media and pressures to perform in school.
“We challenge people to challenge themselves,” O’Brien said, arguing it is okay to make mistakes and they should be expected. “If we’re not (making mistakes), then we’re not innovating enough.”
He said the goal shouldn’t be just small, incremental tweaks, but innovations that make it easier for customers to do their work.
“That takes somebody willing to fall flat on their face and know that they’re safe doing do,” he said.
