PlanetOne Serves Up Back-Office Programs

Posted: 10/2003

PlanetOne Serves Up Back-Office Programs
By Tara Seals

Master agency PlanetOne Communications Inc. will release two new back-office programs for its subagents this quarter: Agency Logic and Agent Concierge. They represent two distinct options for customer service that will divide the companys subagent base into two, says President and CEO Ted Schuman.

We recently surveyed all our agents and found there are those who wish to have access to all our technology to manage their business, with little intervention from PlanetOne, Schuman explains. And then there are others who need us to administer their clientele through test and turn up.

Agency Logic will cater to the first group, giving users access to all the tools and resources PlanetOne employees have in administering their agency needs. Taking a $2 million Oracle-based platform from LogicWare, PlanetOne customized it for its business: It is a full-blown database, with trouble-ticket reporting, commissions, order entry, the ability to check status online and to communicate with our staff online, says Schuman. It is really an all-inclusive, turnkey solution, where the hub will be here in Scottsdale [Ariz.] and all of our agents will be using it like an extended LAN, all on the same server, communicating back and forth about their customers and new deals, up to and including doing proposals. They have an extended seat on our server and will be extremely selfsufficient and will have leeway to manage their base as if they were right here in the PlanetOne offices.

PlanetOne developed the platform, which also integrates with carrier systems, during the past year and a half. The system will be mandatory for most PlanetOne agents to use beginning Nov. 1. Agency Logic users will pay a nominal monthly fee to have access to the database, but that fee will be waived once users hit a certain revenue threshold.

Users also will receive their own branded frontend Web sites, says Schuman.

These guys now can look professional, like theyre a big company, he explains. The customized e-commerce sites offer all of PlanetOnes services that are available online.

Subagents can put their logo, contact info, a description of their company  and theyll be able to build on this Web site for themselves with a set-up wizard, says Schuman. They then can select the products they want to market through that Web site, so effectively well give them the Web site to generate the sales on the front end.

A second product, Agent Concierge, is a program for agents who prefer to spend their time selling rather than managing the behind-the-scenes paperwork. Agent Concierge allows these subagents to outsource all back-office duties to a special team of PlanetOne employees.

This is a group that will take a little lower commission, but they get an 800 number that rings to us in Scottsdale, to a group of customer service people who are exclusively employed to do nothing but help those agents who are part of the Concierge program. And we literally will be there from soup to nuts  from filling out paperwork, to submitting it to the carrier, to tracking it from test to turn up, to doing customer service, working their rejects, handling billing disputes, whatever it may be. Our guys will do 100 percent of the back office for the agent, allowing them to do one thing  focus on business development.