BrokerageBuilder Reviews

The organization is insane, it is the best to keep our affairs in order.

Sometimes the system feels outdated and old, it is not syncing with Ease or anything elese

We use it to ensure renewals and individuals are properly taken care of.

We’ve used brokerage builder for as long as I’ve Been with my company. We use it for everything from to do task management, record keeping, voicemail records, and every email we send to the client.

Brokerage Builder does not have a lot of features that make it compatible with excel (such as to export the names of files submitted)

A huge benefit is keeping everything in one place on a cloud based software. We don’t have to worry about access because we can access it anywhere at anytime.

Helps me with everything I need to get done

I haven't had any issues so far. I think they could put themselves out there more so more people know about their business.

When I come across some I will contact someone about it.

New to the industry, introduced to this software and was very impressed with the ease of use and intuitiveness of the program. I like the integration with Outlook.

It has experienced some technical issues with Internet Explorer

Tracking client interactions for future reference.

.Ability to search clients and save required documents and information on clients

I do not have any dislikes for this product at this time

Ways to share information - brokerage builder solves

Easy to plug and play. Makes it simple to figure out where to input things and navigate the tool.

Sometimes it will require you to put in a number or address when there isn't one for the org. But that could just be our admin settings. Also, I think it could look prettier. It looks a bit outdated, a bit 2000s-ish.

Gives us a CRM specifically for organizing our clients, their invoices, addresses, etc. Makes the process of handing off accounts to our service team much easier.

Tracks clients and carriers well. We can add notes on the various plans to help our eligibility team manage benefits for our clients. Plus, we benefit from plan information and adding custom fields.

Once an employee or team is added in BKB they can not be removed easily. Anyone attached to an old plan is not able to be removed until they are found on the old plans. I recommend setting up BKb clearly when starting.

We can manage all our clients on one system with plan information, eligibility, the account team, and client contact information. BKB also feeds account information to our company accounting software to help manage commissions.

The dashboard is helpful. I like how the emails are in the activity and you just click a tab to see them all. It's easy to search for documents. I also like how flexible the system is--you can add custom fields on the client level, and it's very easy to add activities and workflows.

I wish you could drag/drop emails and documents to attach to clients/activities. Biggest con for us was that we had two different agency management systems: on CL/PL and one for Benefits. Reporting can be a pain. We had to have multiple custom reports created, and some took months of back-and-forth and levels of expert help. We could never truly trust the book of business report because of some oddities with BORs. I had to run 4 different book of business reports (one for monthly premium/commissions, one for annual, one for quarterly and one for semi-monthly) and then merge them together and subtotal for all producers. It was a huge pain and never 100% accurate.

We used BrokerageBuilder for 6 years. The team really liked the look/layout and ease of use. We didn't have any major issues with it. Our agency ultimately made a change 6 months ago so that we have one agency management system for all lines.

The system is well-organized, easy to navigate and pretty flexible. You can create custom fields and workflows very easily.

From an efficiency standpoint, it’s a pain to attach every email you send or receive. There is an Outlook plugin that helps, but other systems allow you to drag and drop emails, which is MUCH faster. Same with attaching files—I wish you could drag and drop, but you cannot. When you set-up a plan, you have to put the expected premium and commissions. Once commissions have been posted, you cannot go back and change this without un-posting and re-posting commission statements, which is tedious. This comes up in you make a mistake when you set-up the plan, so you have to be careful projecting premium/commissions (especially when you get a BOR mid-year or have a multi-year rate guarantee). Our biggest pain-point is the reporting. Our old system would capture expected AND actual premium and revenue for each plan, which gave us a very accurate book of business (BOB) report. BrokerageBuilder only pulls *expected* premium/commissions, so when your premium/commissions change (acquisition, new hires, layoffs), it’s not reflected. When you get a BOR mid-year, the premium/ commissions is always off. For example, when we get a BOR for an account that renews in 4 months, the reports will show the 4 months of premium/commissions as an annual amount, so producers think we are under-reporting premium/commissions, but it’s just the system not being sophisticated enough to calculate this properly. I have to run 4 separate BOB reports (plans with monthly, annual, quarterly and semi-annual premium/commission), then clean the reports up, then merge them together, then sub-total each producer (and we have 35-40 producers). It’s a huge pain and never truly accurate. It causes a lot of grief for our accounting department, the producers, and me. We were told, after the fact, that many P&C agencies post commissions in their P&C system and not BrokerageBuilder because of the reporting limitations. Overall, the reporting has not worked well for us.

It’s a good system for many brokers, but I think it’s getting outpaced by other systems. Zywave needs to make some changes quickly or they will lose a lot of business from brokers that have P&C and Benefits departments. More and more firms are combining systems and moving their Benefits department away from a Benefits only system like BrokerageBuilder. Having two systems just doesn’t make sense anymore if you are a large firm with P&C and Benefits departments. The reporting is cumbersome and we never fully-trust it. A lot of the reports we asked for did not exist and had to be created. We felt these were standard reports: book of business reports, new business reports, etc.

We made the change to BrokerageBuilder six years ago, and it was a step-up from our prior system. We’re housing our client info electronically and can access it from anywhere. We like the system, except for the reporting and attaching emails.

Brokerage builder is a fantastic way to organize your groups and keep track of renewal information.

It's a bit clunky and takes some time to get used to. It also takes a long time to set things up since everything is manual.

Keep everything up to date. The tool is only as good as your own data so make sure to input as much information as you have.

It's a great way for us to keep track of our customer base.