Sam Melamed’s Journey Through Insurance Innovation

In this episode of the Insurtech Building Blocs podcast, host Cory Schmidt speaks with Sam Melamed about the evolution of Insurance-Forums.com, the importance of community in the insurance industry, and Sam's journey from agent to CEO. They discuss the significance of building a caring company culture, market trends in ancillary products, and the necessity of continuous learning in the ever-evolving insurance landscape. The conversation also touches on the role of AI in customer service and the balance between technology and human connection.

Takeaways
- Insurance-Forums.com was crucial for Sam learning and sharing in the industry.
- Community and cooperation are vital for growth in the insurance market.
- Building a caring company culture can lead to better customer retention.
- Continuous learning is essential for success in the insurance industry.
- AI can enhance productivity but should not replace human connection.
- The insurance industry has low barriers to entry, making it accessible.
- Ancillary products are becoming increasingly important for customer retention.
- Understanding market trends is crucial for brokers and agents.
- Customer care should be prioritized to build goodwill and trust.
- Mistakes can lead to growth if handled well.

Chapters
00:00 The Evolution of Insurance Forums
05:54 Sam's Journey in the Insurance Industry
11:54 Building a Caring Company Culture
18:00 Market Trends in Ancillary Products
25:03 The Importance of Continuous Learning
33:46 The Role of AI in Customer Service

Stay Connected:
Learn more about AgencyBloc: https://www.agencybloc.com
Connect with Sam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sammelamed
Learn more about NCD: https://www.ncd.com
Learn more about Insurance Forums: https://www.insurance-forums.com/

Insurtech Building Blocs is presented by AgencyBloc, the #1 Recommended Insurance Industry Growth Platform serving the benefits and senior market space with 6,500+ customers across multiple solutions within the platform. With a range of insurance-specific solutions for sales enablement, client and policy management, compliance management, quoting and proposals, and commissions management — all with highly recommended customer support — we've got you covered.

Learn more at https://www.agencybloc.com

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X: https://twitter.com/agencybloc

Chapters

• 0:00 The Evolution of Insurance Forums
• 5:54 Sam's Journey in the Insurance Industry
• 11:54 Building a Caring Company Culture
• 18:00 Market Trends in Ancillary Products
• 25:03 The Importance of Continuous Learning
• 33:46 The Role of AI in Customer Service

Transcript

Cory Schmidt (00:02)
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Insurtech Building Blocs podcast. I'm your host, Cory Schmidt. Excited to be back with you all and ⁓ really excited about our guest today. ⁓ With me today is Sam Melamed. Thanks for joining me, Sam.

Sam (00:58)
My pleasure, and I'm really excited.

Cory Schmidt (01:01)
Awesome. we were just ⁓ talking about ⁓ Sam and I kind of had a connection via our lurking and involvement in Insurance Forums early on. And Sam was also a customer of AgencyBloc back in his ABC Insurance Trust days. I've always been, ⁓ customers have always asked Sam about us creating like a community or a place for people to ⁓ come together and participate online.

I've always been deathly afraid of the moderation of that and how things might go off the rails. So the burning question I want to ask you is like, ⁓ what was the most ⁓ interesting or ⁓ crazy thing that happened in the days when you were moderating Insurance Forums?

Sam (01:46)
Well, you're not wrong to be nervous about it. Agents can be a rough and tumble bunch and they really like to speak their mind and there's definitely trade-offs for sure. You know, in the early days of Insurance Forums, I was just a struggling agent trying to learn like how do I actually make a living doing this thing called insurance. And so Insurance Forums wasn't really a business, but it was my education tool.

And very quickly, immediately there would just be flame wars. People would be fighting. And I mean, we had legendary fights and I'm a Sabbath observant Jew. so from Friday night till Saturday night, I would go offline. And by Saturday afternoon, I'd start getting nervous. Like, what am I going to walk into? There's going to be these crazy fights. And some of it was political. Some of it was ideological. Some of it was, you know, back in the day, agents used to go to,

a lot of association meetings or have other places where they could gather and talk to each other. And the internet started to replace that except without the filter of someone's gonna punch you in the face if you're gonna say that to them. And so we had some scary times for sure.

Cory Schmidt (02:58)
That's awesome. Yes. It's sort of even probably before the days of, know, LinkedIn and all the things we can do to share content. You know, I know you're a big contributor there. It seems like this was, was far before any of that.

Sam (03:10)
Yeah, this was, really the internet when it got started had a lot of these listservs that were mostly email based. then for a while discussion forums became a very popular way of organizing people along certain topics. And when I was a struggling agent, you know, I was young, newly married, we got pregnant right away, trying to figure out how to make a living. It was very hard to find quality information. People weren't really posting their playbooks out there and

forums were the one area where professionals did tend to have a willingness to help out and share some ideas and marketing strategies. And I can't count the number of people who've come over to me over the years to say, you know, I learned how to take care of my family by reading what was happening on Insurance Forums. And in some ways that was more gratifying than any economic benefit out of it.

Cory Schmidt (04:03)
Yeah, that's very cool. I know Adam, my business partner and I, we used to spend a fair amount of time just keeping an eye on it. You know, even things like, you know, how we stood up competitively to other solutions in the market. Like people would chime in about that. They're like, what are you using for your CRM? And you know, how does it work for you and how do you accomplish these things? So I, yeah, totally agree with that.

Sam (04:25)
Yeah, this is really an industry built on sharing. You know, there's a lot of "coopetition." There's a lot of friendship where people compete, but they're also friends and they trade notes. And if you can't find peers to share the mistakes that they've made or the things they've learned or the service providers and tools that are excellent, then you're going to have to make every mistake on your own. And that's a very tough road to go.

Cory Schmidt (04:48)
"Co-op-etition," I love that. Is that in the dictionary?

Sam (04:52)
It probably, I heard it a few years ago and it's, you know, I think it does accurately describe, especially the Medicare and ACA distribution ecosystem where there's a lot of consolidation, there's a lot of competition, but you also really do need to cooperate if you want to get top contracts or if you want to secure some deals.

Cory Schmidt (05:03)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I, ⁓ it's funny, we, just had our BlocBuilder conference here a couple of weeks ago. ⁓ and I was, ⁓ had the opportunity to, to play some golf with a couple of long time customers who are like, view them as like competitors, right? Because they're, they're both in the distribution space. And I think what you're saying completely resonates. Like they were sharing ideas. They were talking about the challenges that, that, that they're facing. In fact, I think.

They're even working together in some capacity as well. So I see that play out a lot, which you're right. Like you don't see that a lot in other industries, which is, it's pretty neat.

Sam (05:54)
Yeah, and it's really critical to growing the market. You know, we talk about, you want to take market share from someone you're always fighting to be the best, the strongest, or do you want to grow the market that creates opportunity for everyone? And I've seen that play out just many, many times in the insurance ecosystem where the cooperation ends up lifting all boats.

Cory Schmidt (06:17)
Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, let's, I know I jumped right into it because I really wanted to ask that burning question about moderating a forum in a community, which my approach would probably just be to turn off any posting between Friday night and Saturday night, you know, in that case, but maybe that's not a way to grow a community. So let's take a step back. Let's talk about your background, Sam. I think it's really fascinating your path from, you know, become

becoming an agent or deciding to become an agent all the way to ⁓ becoming the CEO of NCD. So maybe let's talk about that a little bit.

Sam (06:53)
Sure. Well, I spent many years studying to be a rabbi and eventually figured out close to the end that that was just not my dream and I needed to go a different route. And so I didn't have a college degree and didn't really know like how I was going to make a living. Got married very young and someone in my neighborhood said, let me teach you how to sell insurance so you can pay your way through grad school. At the time, I thought maybe I would be a psychologist.

And I started selling insurance and right away I fell in love with the numbers and the angles and the regulatory side, but I just couldn't figure out how to sell. You know, I had started with a friend of mine who was really gregarious guy and did not have call reluctance and was able to succeed very quickly. And I was just shy and introverted and really struggled with prospecting and with closing.

and was just really somewhat lost, like not able to figure out. I know there's people making a living in this market. I'm a smart guy. There's got to be a way to do this. And that's really why I started Insurance Forums was to learn why am I so bad at this? And like, how are people actually working here? But it got to the point where I had to also like, you know, find, find a real job.

And so I ended up being lucky enough to find the ABC Insurance Trust, which was, you back in the day, there used to be a lot of association health plans that trade association sponsored. The small group reform laws made those difficult to continue to have one plan that complied with all the state regulations across the states. But this association had an insurance trust that had a unique story, actually.

Many decades ago, there were a large policyholder of John Hancock, right? When they demutualized and so they got a large stock grant that basically formed a trust. And so I came there to work and I started as Director of Sales overseeing the sales team and the account management team. And I was there for almost 15 years. And over the years I took on progressive responsibility for compliance and marketing, and then eventually took over as the CEO.

And so I ran that business for a number of years. I reported to board of trustees who are all company owners whose companies participated in some of our benefits. And we had a subsidiary agency that sold employee benefits across the country. And so we were one of the few very small-ish insurance agencies, not of true national scale, that was selling business in almost every state because wherever we had members, we were selling business.

And at the same time, Insurance Forums was my side hustle where it was growing as a community and we started getting some advertisers and hired a few people to run that and to keep growing that alongside. And so I really grew up in the healthcare ecosystem on the employee benefit side. The ACA was very impactful because it was really the first large scale regulations that were being developed and passed.

when I was in the market, I got to see being in DC, a lot of how the sausage was made. We were part of lot of coalitions of trade groups that were seeking to influence the bill and then seeking to influence the implementation and the execution and the tweaks and got to see how a lot of times well-meaning legislation or regulation doesn't play out in the market the way that legislators might think it would for any

a variety of factors. And you see a lot of that happening over the last five years or so in both the ACA and the Medicare markets. And you see some of the new regulations that have been released by the new administration really trying to deal with some of those market realities in a very different way than the previous administration had. And so I had a nice career there until about four years ago when I took over as CEO of NCD.

So NCD is a product development and distribution business in the supplemental health space. So our current product suite is dental and vision for the individual markets. And we're working on cancer, heart stroke, critical illness, hospital indemnity, and a broader suite of products. And so I've been running that business for just under four years now and trying to build a world-class team and figure out how to get good at it.

Every day is ⁓ exciting, terrifying, thrilling, all the inns, and it's been quite the journey.

Cory Schmidt (11:42)
Yeah, very interesting. And so when you, when you made the plunge into NCD, did you acquire the business Sam or, or just become the CEO and report into a board? What's the, if you don't mind me asking, what's the structure?

Sam (11:54)
Yeah, I acquired a majority of the business together with some financial partners and took over as the CEO. And really I was part of a holding company that split out and we had the opportunity to take some employees from the holding company and then really build out a world-class team.

Cory Schmidt (12:13)
Very cool. ⁓ One of the things I admire is it seems like the, I think you guys call it "NCD Cares" and I see all of the, you know, best workplace badges on the site. You guys care a lot about, ⁓ you know, how customers feel about your company and that's not super common. I feel like we've tried to build something like that at AgencyBloc and we,

We strive for it every day. I'm kind of curious like how culture has played out. You mentioned the holding company. Was there already a culture in line with that? Did you really have to try to persist that culture from an existing team or was it something that you tried to introduce?

Sam (12:54)
The existing business had a very caring culture, a very generous spirit, but did not have technical execution around exactly how to do that. In an individual billed business, for example, you have a lot of load balancing issues where you might bill 20,000 customers on one day and 4,000 customers on another day. And so you have these

big spikes in member care calls based on what's happening on different times. And so if you try and say, well, if we hire enough people to really hit an amazing SLA, we're going to answer every call in 30 seconds or less. You've got to really overstaff so that you can hit that mark on the much heavier service days when something else is going on or the day after a holiday. And so.

So we have to really over invest to say, this is the race we want to win. Right? We think about our business as what are the races we should run where we can be the best in the world. And then what are the other races where there's a technology provider, there's a carrier partner, or there's someone else who's actually really, really great at this and they figured it out and we should partner with them. And so treating our customers differently was something that it was like, this has to be a race we win every day.

And actually when I was starting out and I said, all right, we have to hire a bunch more people. We have to be answering these calls much quicker. We have to offer text support. We have to offer a website chat. Some people in the industry told me, you know, you're making a mistake, Sam. This is not going to show up in retention or it's not going to justify an ROI. You're going to spend a lot of money over staffing this so that you can hit the mark on your busiest days. And it's, it's not going to make economic sense.

And in some ways, four years later, they were right. Like, you know, if someone gets a new Medicare Advantage plan that happens to have a strong dental benefit, they may leave a standalone dental plan, even if they were very happy with it. If someone is a gig economy worker and they buy your dental or your vision plan and then they get a job and now they have benefits through their job, they're going to go there. So there is an upper bound.

Cory Schmidt (15:12)
Mm-hmm.

Sam (15:14)
limit of where things could be and I do believe we have the best retention of any individual dental or vision distributor in the country and I've seen enough data to know that that's probably true but there's still an upper bound and the cost and the expense to really take care of your customers this way is significant. But where it does show up is in the much softer side of like who can you hire?

You know, if someone Googles "NCD Dental Reviews" and they see our Glassdoor reviews and they see our Google reviews and they see the way our customers are talking about loving our team and how gracious and kind and patient we are with them, then when we go to hire a next member care class and we're looking for the best of the best.

We can find people who say, yeah, you know, I don't want to work for Comcast or I don't want to work for a company that doesn't have a reputation of being able to treat their customers and their employees this way. And so when you think about how to produce alpha in a business, how to create value, it always starts with people and the kinds of people you can bring on to your team. Figuring out how to differentiate your digital footprint of what does it feel like? If you look at that, it's really important.

I remember early on a mentor of mine, Sean Fenlin asked me, "Sam, how much do you think a negative review, a one-star review costs your company?" I said, "I don't know, $1,000?" He said, "I bet it's $100,000." I was like, "what do you mean?" He's like, "well, you know, you're out there trying to convince distributors who have choice in the market why they should work with your company. You better believe they're going to want to look at what it feels like to do business with you and what it looks like.

And so if you don't do a much better job of managing those, ⁓ it can have a real cost." And that really catalyzed our obsession with, okay, we want to be the highest rated insurance plan administrator in the country. I think we are. not saying I've done the verification to prove that we are. It's been brick by slow brick and really it starts with the team. Suzanne Young, who runs our member care team is amazing and has really just built out.

a leadership structure under her and a methodology of hiring and training that I think is differentiated. We found some interesting pockets like our favorite secret, I'll reveal it here than the other insurance companies that want. The best member care employees we find come from emergency services. 911 operators. When you think about who can... ⁓

who can have calm and presence of mind if someone is frustrated or annoyed or challenged or confused, they are just absolutely amazing. But aside from hiring the best people, the other piece of it is how do you pull out the best from the people that you have on your team? And I remember years ago, I met a friend of mine, Toby Bezudo, who's a big developer in the DC area. I was asking him, what's your secret sauce?

You know, there's so many developers, you guys are just next level. He said, you know, we hire the best designers in the business for our projects. You know who else hires the best designers? Everyone, all of our competitors. But the difference is we get them so excited and so aligned with the right project that it pulls out the best of them. And it turns out the difference between the best from the best and the okayest from the best is huge.

And we all know that in our own lives, you know, when we produce our very best output, it's materially differentiated from when it's just okay. And so having people feel really proud of the company they work for and really proud of the way they treat their customers also gets them really excited. It becomes this recursive loop. And so we have like our, our mission is spreading the smile.

And partly it's an ode to dental insurance, but also partly it's our ethos of just be good people in the world. And Jackie Pounds, who's now our VP of operations ⁓ a few years ago when we were doing our ⁓ development of our mission, she said, you know, my team stares at spreadsheets all day. I get it and it's nice, but like, how do we really live and feel this? And so we created the "smile feed"

in our Teams, Microsoft Teams, which is a Teams channel where throughout the day, it's kind of like the heartbeat of our company where we will post reviews that come in about review worthy service and how we've touched someone's life and how we've impacted them. And, you know, really use that to infuse everyone in the company that ⁓ every leadership meeting we have, our head of member care will tell a story.

of one member whose life we positively impacted in a significant way that week. Again, to just bring those in every single meeting, every single day, continue that recursive loop that like, feels good to help people. And then there's the reality of the investment. You every year we manage our average handle time to move up, to be higher. I think that's unique in the industry. I've never heard any...

Insurance executives say, I'm looking to spend more money on this. But what we find is we're sometimes the only adult that our customer talks to all day. We have over a thousand customers over the age of 90. When you think about how you provide caring customer support for people who are not internet savvy and who really need that extra mile, it goes a long way.

Cory Schmidt (21:13)
Yeah. I mean, I think it's, really admirable and it's interesting how many parallels I see between NCD and AgencyBloc in terms of how we've tried to build that same culture and value system. Sam, in talking with some customers recently at our conference, you know, I had multiple people comment on like, I don't know how you guys built this company. Like with, where did you find these people? Like it's, it's what you said. And it's, it requires like just a

constant dedication to that and bringing in a team that's dedicated and, you know, people who are smart, but also like humble and kind and willing to do the extra, go the extra mile for their customers. it occurred to me, and I don't know if you've ever had this realization, like I started to wonder if they, if they work with us because they think our product's amazing or if they think our team's amazing, maybe it's both and I hope it's both, but like, I think they're also willing to, ⁓

you know, to accept, you know, rough edges in areas where, you know, where you have them when they know that like you're very dedicated to delivering value and being a good partner.

Sam (22:19)
I'm a huge believer in that, you know, in the technology field, more so than in the insurance field, there has been the concept that the best product will win, right? That if you just out execute and build the best product, you will win. And I do think a big part of your success is that you did build the best product. You built a better mousetrap and have continued to extend that mousetrap and to innovate there. But in terms of getting grace from your customers or from your agents to say,

This is a company that cares. You know, that shows up in all the little ways that your team responds when someone's frustrated or someone's upset or a feature's not working the way they want it to. All those little things can be paper cuts or they can be band-aids. you know, through the cracks, when you have a culture of kindness and a helpful spirit, absolutely that shows up a lot. On the insurance product front, you know, the...

The reality is like we're thinking about new products and I love the idea of building something that doesn't exist creation, figuring out where the market might be going. But it's also true that there's a lot of carcasses of insurtech startups that thought let's just build a better product and then we'll win. And this really is a relationship game. mean, distribution is everything and you see this, you know,

a number of carriers in the Medicare market really burnt distribution over the last year as they encountered some MLR headwinds. those are, you know, sometimes short-term decisions that get driven by market factors, especially for publicly traded companies. But you can set your company back 10 years if you burn your distribution. And for what we do, which is develop exceptional products and pay distributors very well to help put customers in the right products, everything.

rolls back to distribution. And that more than anything is a relationship game. People want to work with company where they know there's real people there, where they can build real rapport, establish a real relationship and be treated kindly. And I think also anticipating and understanding what it's like to be in their world.

Cory Schmidt (24:35)
Yeah. Well said. ⁓ So on the topic of you, kind of started to go into the, you know, some of the, the, the trends or things that are playing out in this space. I'm really interested in like what your, what your thoughts are around market trends specifically in the ancillary space. I mean, you mentioned NCD is in the process of developing other benefit offerings, you know, other products. ⁓ What are the trends that you're seeing play out in the ancillary space?

Sam (25:03)
So there's a lot of different market dynamics, some driven by the market, some driven by government regulations that all have different impacts on the ancillary space. Broadly speaking, I am very bullish about standalone ancillary supplemental health products. Really for that market to succeed, the first thing you need is a robust ACA and Medicare distribution ecosystem. So 10 years ago, you really couldn't make a living selling ACA policies.

That was your business. just, the commission wasn't there. The carrier choice wasn't there. And so that was a large addressable market that didn't have an agent having a credible conversation with someone about their health and financial exposure around their health. In the Medicare markets too, over the last 10 years or so, there's been a huge run-up in the number of agents that have been in the market.

given the silver tsunami of how many people are aging into Medicare every day. And that also lifted the total number of people who are having these conversations. So there's very few people in the country whose job is to just sell dental insurance or just sell cancer plans. There's a few small agencies that do, but for the most part, these aren't ancillary. are add-on to a core medical sale.

And so the larger the population that is being addressed in the core medical sale, the larger the broader opportunity. And so I think with ICRA moving possibly some employee benefits members covered into the individual markets, plus the continuation of the aging of the Medicare and the robustness of the ACA markets mean that there really is a growing market in that respect.

From a regulatory standpoint, there's a lot of different machinations that impact things. For five years, we saw a big run up in the value of embedded dental and vision benefits in Medicare Advantage. And this past year was really the first AEP where we saw a pretty stark pullback that was being driven by the higher than expected MLR ratios that the Medicare carriers were seeing. I think there's...

some push in Washington right now to really rethink the supplemental benefits that are embedded in Medicare and how viable is that market to continue in the way it's going. The GAO put out a report a few years ago expressing frustration that the supplemental benefits are often the leading marketing piece, but then we don't actually know, people really using them? Are they getting benefits?

There's a new regulation that just went into effect that mandates that Medicare Advantage plans have to notify members mid-year when they have unused benefits. So I think for a long time, for about five years, it was seen as like, we could just add these benefits that will help us with marketing, but no one will use them. And so they won't hurt our profitability. And now you have this perfect storm where a lot more utilization is happening. There's a lot more.

focused by agents and brokers around benefit activation being important for retention. And so I do expect that even with the recent bump in M.A. reimbursement that CMS pushed through in their last letter, there's still continued MLR headwinds. And we saw this ⁓ elements just reported earnings and obviously UnitedHealthcare reported very challenging MLR.

environment for them with their MA plans. And so I think we're going to continue to see pullback from some of those embedded benefits and that's going to help grow the market. The second thing is just load balancing from a time standpoint. You know, for most agents who sell Medicare or ACA, it's very hard to keep yourself busy all year. And so you have scaled distributors who are playing in the DSNP or the CSNP space and those spaces are not quite as robust as they were.

and there's just less carrier thirst for the off-cycle sales. So you have people with expertise in helping people navigate healthcare systems. And you have people who maybe during AEP didn't have time to present ancillary options, but now have a book of business that they can go back to and say, this will help me with retention, it'll help round out.

Cory Schmidt (29:26)
.

Sam (29:34)
put our customers in strong benefits. And so I think you have a lot of those movements that are going to continue to be a force to help grow the market. And then you have just the economic reality. The cost of buying leads or generating customers continues to climb. And so the ability to create more value by putting them in other high value products that they will use makes a lot of sense.

know, dental and vision are much easier ancillary benefits to sell because everyone knows they're going to use them, right? You don't buy vision insurance if you don't have glasses or contacts. But if you do, you know, I'm going to be able to use this benefit. If you buy dental insurance, you know, like this is not a pray to God, I don't use kind of coverage the way cancer or life insurance or even long-term care would be. At the same time, you also have the reality that

we all acknowledge that if someone gets a devastating medical issue, then often they can declare bankruptcy or have a lot of financial stress, not even around paying the actual cost of care, but just the incidentals of how disruptive it is to your life. If you have a devastating cancer diagnosis and you need more babysitters and Ubers to the hospital and you know, all miss work. And so,

there are some of these large risks that more and more people are interested in insurance.

Cory Schmidt (30:59)
Yeah, you mentioned the ability to better retain, you know, customers through the ancillary products. I think that one resonates with me. We've looked at our ⁓ customer base, you know, the, the, obviously we can understand their book of business, right? So in-force policies by, by coverage type, which is what we refer to them as, but you know, there's not, it's a very small percentage of like ACA in-force policies or Medicare advantage in-force policies that have like any kind of attached.

you know, dental or vision, you you mentioned critical illness, like you just don't see it. And it seems like brokers are really missing an opportunity to use it, not just as a way to generate more commission, but like you said, like create a relationship, become the trusted source for those products.

Sam (31:43)
Yeah, we see it all the time. mean, the biggest barrier to people getting dental care is fear of the dentist, right? I haven't gone in a couple of years. I'm afraid they're going to shame me for not brushing or whatever. When people buy a dental insurance policy, they essentially say, I am now invested in this. I have to go do this. And so it's actually an access to care issue where the more people who buy the policy. But when we talk to our customers,

who are new to a dental policy, who might have been retired for five years or be in the gig economy. The most common response when we asked why did you not have a policy before is no one asked, no one brought it to me, I didn't know it existed, I got it through my work and I didn't know you could get this outside of work.

Cory Schmidt (32:33)
Yeah. And part of our, one of the new products that we just announced at BlocBuilder is, you know, a digital marketing content offering. And part of that's like around ⁓ education. So we've always been big believers in just educating the market, even about our own products. Like we just educate customers on the market and the options that are out there. We're not like selling a product or positioning the product in our first interactions. And I think that's, you know, it's a pretty.

common way of getting introduced to customers, but we're hoping to help brokers to communicate and educate their beneficiaries so that then they understand the value of some of these ancillary products.

Sam (33:10)
Yeah, I think you're in a unique position because you have access to scaled customer base that often has not been presented with other things. And I think the entities that have researched it have seen it very clearly that when you have multiple products attached to one customer, your retention on all the products is lifted materially. They don't need to be with the same carrier. They don't need to be on the same bill, but they do need to be with the same agent.

And so not only do you create a new revenue opportunity by selling something new that you hadn't sold before, but you really protect your core revenue of the core medical sale.

Cory Schmidt (33:46)
Yeah, absolutely. ⁓ One of the things I've really appreciated about you, Sam, is the plethora of knowledge that you share on LinkedIn. just, I think, I've heard you reference how you spend a lot of time reading and learning, even like the regulations and the articles. And you mentioned even just current news, obviously the UnitedHealth with the earnings coming out yesterday. ⁓

reinforced, I think, the importance of becoming ⁓ a student of the industry. And I'm curious, why do you think that's important for brokers to be a student of the industry and to understand all these things that are interplaying?

Sam (34:31)
You know, Insurance is one of the most fascinating career possibilities in the United States today. You don't need a high school diploma to get an insurance license and build a very nice living for you and your family. You don't, there's very, very low barrier of entry. You need to take a pre-licensing course. You need a pass and you don't need to pass it on your first time. And then You just need hard work, dedication and figure it out. And there's

100 different paths to making a very nice livelihood in the insurance industry all of them ultimately require that you know what you're doing and that you can support your customers, whether your customers are agents, or whether your customers are actual consumers, that you can support them, but, the way that the regulatory world works is things

always, always, always get more complicated and not less. When you think about what did you need to know five years ago to be a successful Medicare agent versus what do you need to know today? You know, the new Medicare Part D smoothing, how does that work when you're moving from one carrier to another and that didn't exist two years ago. That wasn't on anyone's field of vision.

There's new birthday rules in some states coming out around MedSupp. And If you're not staying up to date on the latest rules and regulations, then you're really just not able to, you know, to take care of customers well But there's also never been a better time to become an industry expert. All the information is out there. You know, there's hundreds and hundreds of different sources of information on LinkedIn and Facebook groups and forums and newsletters and articles,

And so I believe in  high agency. I believe that anyone who wants to, maybe not anyone, most people who want to can seize the opportunity and it starts with education. So there's never been an easier time to just say, "I'm going to become a student of the game and really learn everything there has to be here." When I started writing on LinkedIn, it just forced me to be a deeper learner, to really go that one layer deeper. And, you know, I would.

skim 500 articles a day and double click on 10 or 30 or 50, but am I really going beneath the surface? Am I really figuring out, there's an update to star ratings and there's the lawsuit and like, what's really happening here? And forcing yourself to go that layer deeper just creates a lot of opportunity to make uncommon connections or start to see trends emerge. And so...

To me, I am a lifelong learner. Being growth obsessed is one of our core values at our company. And that's not really, we want to grow our company, but it's really being around people who are growing and learning. It's just exciting and it's infectious and we love sharing it with each other. But really there's just never been an easier time to develop true expertise by being a student of the game.

Cory Schmidt (37:43)
Yeah. Well, I've appreciated your contributions and being able to learn from you. Do you have a couple of favorite sources, Sam, that you would recommend brokers pay attention to if they're obviously beyond the Sam Melamed LinkedIn feed?

Sam (37:58)
Yeah, I would say Insurance Forums is certainly still a very active place where I get a lot of information. You see what people are talking about, what they're bringing up. There's a lot of Facebook groups out there that are very strong. There's some in basically every niche of insurance. I love those. And I've posted a few times on LinkedIn a list of some of the publications I read, you know, every day for yourself, care and modern healthcare and healthcare dive and Kaiser family foundation.

But I've also built using AI some tools that will spider the internet and pull every news release from every state department of insurance. I get a little obsessive about it. I don't know that everyone needs to go too crazy, but there's tons of great resources. And then there's a lot of really smart people, Jared Strock and Sachin Jain are two great people to follow on LinkedIn.

for Medicare information, Art Gottlieb for ACA, and there's just all out there for the taking.

Cory Schmidt (39:01)
I was going to ask you if you're using AI in any capacity and you jumped right into that, Sam. So I love that concept. Obviously it makes these things a little bit easier to ⁓ absorb and digest and understand the themes, but ⁓ it also can glaze over maybe important details. So that's my guess as to why you're wanting to really read the source material.

Sam (39:20)
Yeah, you know, I'm bipolar about AI. I became obsessed with AI when the tools really first hit and was really intrigued with productivity gains. But then I started to see like, is AI going to fix healthcare? Is it going to break it? The answer is both. And it's really like, there are some applications where you can get scale around things that we've never been able to. But there's other things where I just, ⁓

I've dialed back a little bit. Like we've talked about some AI tools for our call center that, you know, can analyze sentiment, sentiment analysis of like in real time and can tell us when someone is frustrated or their tone of voice and can suggest problem solving. And I really pushed back against that and said, like, I don't want to lose the core ability for our team to actually be the best, most empathetic problem solvers.

And, ⁓ like I have ADHD. There was a time when I took medication, a short period of time where I was like, I gotta be able to focus. And then what I realized over time is that I need to actually learn how to use my brain and I need to learn how to direct it and train it. And this is not serving me.

It's a tool that will make me in fact more effective at this one thing, but what am I giving up? I'm losing something actually pretty important. So I love AI, I use AI every day. I mandate that all of our executive team has paid accounts and is really using it for a number of important things, but I'm also much more skeptical of some of the productivity gains.

Cory Schmidt (41:04)
Yeah, makes sense. think, you your customers have found value in being able to talk to a real person when they call, you know, call into the NCD team. And I think that the value of that cannot be overstated. Like I think there's just so much ⁓ good that comes from those personal connections. So ⁓ I can understand the desire to not use AI, maybe especially on customer facing.

Sam (41:26)
Absolutely. For us, we treasure the moments when we can talk to customers, establish a real human connection, ask about their grandkids, talk about the dog. And those are opportunities to do more than just solve a problem. Like we, our tech team came to us and said, you know, 30 % of our member care calls could be solved by a machine, right? You need to order a new card and it's easy. And we said, no.

You know, first of all, why would we want to take wins away from our team? Right? Like there's some number of calls where you're going to deal with a frustrating, complicated claim and you can't solve it easily. If we start cutting off all the things that you could solve easily, then the ratio of how it feels to actually be helping people in real time could tip in a unique way. So we treasure those minutes and look to grow them.

Cory Schmidt (42:21)
Yeah, I refer to it as you're making a small deposit into a bank of goodwill, you know, over and over again. And that's important when things don't go well, which is inevitably going to happen. So, yeah.

Sam (42:32)
Absolutely. One of my favorite quotes is, the road to success is paved with mistakes well-handled. And having the grace that you earn over time, brick by brick, is a big part of that.

Cory Schmidt (42:48)
I like that a lot. Awesome. Well, admire what you're doing at NCD, Sam, and always appreciate your contributions to the LinkedIn community and educating myself and others in this space. So thanks so much for taking the time to chat with us and look forward to catching up with you again in near future.

Sam (43:09)
My pleasure. That was great. Thank you, Cory.

Cory Schmidt (43:11)
Thanks, Sam.