Interview: FAQs About Shop & Enroll

Shop & Enroll used to be Medicareful … If you’re brand new to it, what Shop & Enroll is, is a consumer-facing a quote and enrollment platform. It is CMS-compliant. It’s personalized; you get your own unique URL. You can put your contact information on there. Basically, it’s your own website that you can use to collect Scopes [of Appointment], collect applications. It integrates into the Ritter Platform.

I guess there are a couple of different ways to answer this … You can collect applications remotely at the end of an election period. You don’t have to scramble to get that signature before midnight, and you can just use the enrollment platform to get that out to the client really quickly.

Now, if you’re doing a lot of work with carrier portals, probably the biggest benefit to using something like Shop & Enroll is that all of your carriers are going to be on one platform. Each carrier portal that you work with, you have your own process there. You have to remember your own specific username and password, and it can be a little bit of a hassle switching back and forth. But with Shop & Enroll, all of the applications are pretty close to the same [process].

I think the fact that Shop & Enroll integrates into the Ritter Platform really sets it apart, because the Ritter Platform, I think personally, is an industry-leading agent dashboard. If you’re looking for something that has everything all in one, I think Shop & Enroll really works well there.

So, you can certainly use it in a face-to-face setting. You can just bring up your own Shop & Enroll page when you’re sitting down with the client and have them complete the Scope [of Appointment] and the application right there. You can even actually prefill applications prior to sitting down with the client, so we have a lot of agents that go that route.

And finally, you can also use [Shop & Enroll] remotely. You can send out a prefilled Scope of Appointment. All the client needs to do is click a link. In fact … [clients] don’t have to sign their name anymore, they just click the link that will take them to the Scope [of Appointment], click submit, and that’ll be their signature. [A] very similar process [occurs] with an application now. [Clients] click the link, verify their identity, and then just review and sign the application.

So there are really three key compliance rules that I tell all of our agents and we put basically in all of our communication that we send out to any agents.

First, there needs to be a Scope of Appointment for every application that comes through Shop & Enroll and [it] needs to be signed by the client. [It] can be a paper Scope [of Appointment], a Shop & Enroll Scope [of Appointment], whatever it is, there just needs to be a Scope of Appointment for every application that comes through.

Second, the client should always know what they’re signing up for, and that means that the agent needs to do a full plan presentation for the client. Each carrier sort of has their own rules around what that entails, so the agent just needs to make sure that they are following all of the requirements that their carrier sets out … They should not be signing up without talking to you beforehand.

The third … is that you never, ever sign on behalf of the client. If it’s ever the client signature, if they’re ever clicking submit, that needs to be the client [who’s] actually pressing that button, [who’s] actually typing their name.

And I’ll just jump in with one last compliance thing — this is unrelated to enrollment, but I do want to point it out because it is part of our overall compliance requirements. Any marketing that uses the Shop & Enroll brand needs to be run through our Compliance team.

We recommend using the different enrollment methods depending on your client, their level of comfort, how new they are with you, things like that. So, it’s not always going to be the same process for every client that you’re working with.

A lot of times, we recommend for a brand-new client doing everything directly using the Shop & Enroll site, bringing up the Scope of Appointment on your Shop & Enroll page, going through filling that out with the clients. Same with the application, just bringing up the application on Shop & Enroll, going through, answering all of the questions, and then turning the keyboard around to the client, having them sign. We find that works well because it really does sort of mirror the process of going through an application for the first time with a client and just makes it very easy for you to explain.

Now, with an existing client, I would probably try to streamline the process for the next time. I don’t think it’s as important to go through everything step by step. If you’ve already done it once, that’s when I would probably use the in-person prefilled process. We call [prefilled enrollments] FastTrack [enrollments] … You’re going to be able to prefill the whole application for the client and send them an email. We still recommend being on the phone for this just to make sure the process goes smoothly.

Not difficult at all. We have designed this to make it as easy as possible. We try to streamline it as much as possible, so we wouldn’t expect it to be all that difficult. Normally, what we find is the hardest thing is for agents to do is their first application. My team is more than happy to help … We don’t expect any issues to pop up. It is a very easy process, but I think having that sort of backstop makes it a lot more palatable for agents to do their first application.

It really depends on where you are in terms of working with Ritter. Now, if you are a brand-new agent and don’t have any previous contact with Ritter, the first thing you really want to do is go to RitterIM.com and create an account there. Pretty much everything that we do is based on having an account on RitterIM.com, so if you’re not set up, [I] strongly recommend that is the first thing you do.

Now as far as getting set up with Shop & Enroll, this is a free service … but we do have one requirement, and that is that [agents] need to be contracted, appointed and ready-to-sell with one of our qualifying carriers. Our qualifying carriers list is basically any MA or prescription drug plan (PDP) that Ritter [is partnered with]. So, if you just get contracted with an MA or a PDP [through Ritter], we can get you set up with your own Shop & Enroll page.

[After registering with Ritter and contracting with a qualifying carrier,] you’ll just go into the Ritter Platform. Once you’re logged in at the top of the screen, there’s going to be a button that says Shop & Enroll. That’ll take you to what we call the Shop & Enroll tab. Once you’re there, there will be another button that says Add a New Page, click that. That will take you to a little form where you fill out basic contact information.

One thing that trips agents up sometimes is the agent slug. So, the agent slug is basically the part of the URL that makes the site unique to an agent. Most people go first and last name, like my page for example is ShopandEnroll.com/jamesweber. “James Weber” is my slug.

Right now, the way Shop & Enroll works is that it is always tied to your URL. The actual area doesn’t affect anything, so you want to make sure that your clients are going to your specific URL.

We do go through and double-check that clients aren’t being assigned to the wrong agent, but for the most part, the key is that, if clients use a specific URL, it doesn’t matter if there’s another agent working five miles down the road. As long as the client goes to that correct URL, it’s going to be assigned to the correct agent.

We have added a new requirement for all of our existing Shop & Enroll agents to complete a compliance attestation. This is just to make sure all of our agents understand how to use Shop & Enroll compliantly, and it’s a very straightforward process.

It’s just done through the Shop & Enroll tab on the Ritter Platform. Select the Attestation tab, check off a few things, hit Submit. It’s very important for all of our agents to do that, and we recommend doing it sooner rather than later …

I’d like to talk about the marketing side of Shop & Enroll … If you do have a lot of old Medicareful pieces, we are offering a sort of reimbursement process … Old Medicareful pieces will give you some money to buy some new Shop & Enroll pieces, so if that’s the case, definitely let us know.