How to make big data more manageable

“I don’t know how consultants are handling their businesses without [big data],” says Jeff Oldham, vice president of the Benefitstore at Benefitfocus. “Without it they are just shooting blindly in the dark.”

John Modica, assistant vice president of regional and small business solutions strategy at MetLife, says advisers should be looking at big data to best serve their clients.

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“If I’m a new agent coming out and I do not have a very diverse block of business, [MetLife] has tools by industry,” Oldham says. “The nice thing about Met is that they can give an agent that’s brand new coming into the field data which can empower them to have sensitive conversations with new prospective clients that they wouldn’t have been able to have with their current clients because they did not have access to their own data.”

Andrew Kimmel, president of bnchmrk, says there are three key sections of big data that advisers, consultants and brokers should pay attention to when managing big data and advising their clients.

1) Benchmarking. All brokers and consultants help their clients make renewal decisions around plan design or cost changes and benchmarking is a very useful tool to show their clients how they compare to the competition. Ultimately, it highlights the areas where they are weak or strong and those become the target areas for changes to be made.