{"id":240206,"date":"2003-01-10T12:11:47","date_gmt":"2003-01-10T17:11:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/?p=240206"},"modified":"2021-02-14T08:57:53","modified_gmt":"2021-02-14T13:57:53","slug":"imperial-life-employees-enter-the-virtual-office","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/2003\/01\/imperial-life-employees-enter-the-virtual-office","title":{"rendered":"Imperial Life Employees Enter The Virtual Office"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Imperial Life Financial agents and staff got their introduction to the e-business working environment as the company recently held training sessions for agents and staff to familiarize them with its cutting edge WEBI extranet system. <\/P><\/p>\n<p><P>The $1.4 million mobile virtual office is the company&#8217;s newest competitive investment, which is designed to empower its sales representatives to upgrade the speed, efficiency and accuracy of service to their clients. <\/P><\/p>\n<p><P>Three training sessions were conducted at the J. Whitney Pinder Building, for sales representatives and staff from Nassau, and one in Freeport for representatives in Freeport and Abaco. <\/P><\/p>\n<p><P>The sessions were led by Francois Trout, Project Manager, E-Commerce, Desjardins Financial Security, Canada, with assistance from Barry Saunders, Supervisor, Marketing Administration and WEBI Project Manager, Imperial Life Financial, and other members of the in-house WEBI team. <\/P><\/p>\n<p><P>Participants learned how to differentiate among internet, intranet and extranet platforms and how to gain access to the Imperial Life WEBI extranet using their passwords and user IDs. <\/P><\/p>\n<p><P>They were taught to familiarize themselves with the elements of the WEBI extranet site interface which include Clients Portfolio, Products, Marketing, Compliance, Training, Technology, an Infocentre, Financial Planning and a Calendar. <\/P><\/p>\n<p><P>They also learned how to utilize WEBI&#8217;s search engine to locate important information. &#8220;With WEBI, no matter where you are, you can access just about every facility you would have in the regular office said Barry Saunders. &#8220;Sales representatives have access to their client&#8217;s portfolio, forms, applications and support from customer service.&#8221; <\/P><\/p>\n<p><P>According to Francois Trout, WEBI has revolutionized the insurance business in Canada since it was established three years ago and is now in its third stage of development. &#8220;Some things are done differently now. Some reports are now available only on-line so there&#8217;s been some cost benefits. One of the most important benefits, however, is having access to information 24 hours a day,&#8221; he said. <\/P><\/p>\n<p><P>&#8220;Usually sales representative do a lot of calls or sales meetings in the evenings when the office is not open and sometimes they run across missing information they need to know right away. <\/P><\/p>\n<p><P>In the past, they would have had to wait until the next day to get this information. Now a lot of this information is available 24 hours so they can dial up and access information or even download a specific form that they may not have with them,&#8221; Mr. Trout said. <\/P><\/p>\n<p><P>Imperial Life&#8217;s WEBI was developed over a six month period in consultation with Desjardins Financial Security. Barry Saunders was the project manager for the implementation and leader of the project team. <\/P><\/p>\n<p><P>&#8220;Initially the scope of the project was not what we thought,&#8221; Saunders said. &#8220;It turned out to be a much bigger project than we thought but the good thing is it is allowing us to integrate every department in the company into the e-environment because everyone will be responsible for content. <\/P><\/p>\n<p><P>&#8220;What will make this site so unique is that the whole environment will always be evolving. What&#8217;s there today would have evolved into something better tomorrow. We might have forms today and tomorrow we might have electronic signatures for those forms, once it&#8217;s passed by the government. <\/P><\/p>\n<p><P>&#8220;We are going to keep the information on it dynamic. It&#8217;s not going to be static so the agents are going to want to go there to business.&#8221; <\/P><\/p>\n<p><P>The local WEBI team consists of seven Bahamians: Barry Saunders, project manager; Sophia Sturrup, IT Manager; Tequila Cooper, Individual Policy Service; Cali Sandiford, System Analyst\/Programmer; De&#8217;Andra Fawkes, Web Editor; Laverne Minnis, Sales Representative; and Alvin Heild, Sales Representative. <\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The $1.4 million mobile virtual office is the company&#8217;s newest competitive investment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_10223285771444175_51037792744":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-240206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-headlines"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240206"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":240878,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240206\/revisions\/240878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}