How SureCo Streamlined ICHRA Onboarding (and Wins Broker Deals Because of It)

Why brokers now refer customers to SureCo specifically because of how they onboard with Aligned.

Faster Onboarding Prep

~80%
Template Per New Hire
1
Steps Missed
0

About Company

Headquarters

Santa Ana, CA

Founded

2016

Employees

51-200

Industry

Insurance

About SureCo

SureCo helps employers move away from one-size-fits-all group health insurance by giving employees an individual health insurance allowance, an ICHRA (Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangement). Every migration is a coordinated effort across SureCo, the employer’s HR team, a broker partner, and often a third-party administrator.

Jennifer Ross leads the team that guides customers through that migration. Christy Bell manages day-to-day onboarding and trains new account managers.

The Challenge: A High-Stakes Process Held Together by Email

Onboarding an ICHRA customer is not a single handoff. It’s weeks of coordinated work across multiple companies, dozens of tasks, and several people inside each customer organization. All of whom need to do their part on time for the migration to land cleanly.

Before Aligned, Jennifer’s team ran the entire process out of inboxes, Excel lists, and Word documents.

“It was a series of emails. We would schedule a meeting, show presentations, send them lists of items, send them emails afterwards asking them to follow up. Going back to our emails, looking to see if they completed it. On and on and on.”

Jennifer Ross
Vice President of Customer Management, SureCo

That created three compounding problems:

• People fell off the trail. With tasks spread across email threads, customer contacts could go quiet and the team wouldn’t catch it for weeks.
• Nothing was repeatable. When Jennifer trained new team members, there was no single source of truth for “this is how we onboard a customer.” The process lived in her head.
• Things got missed. In a regulated benefits migration, a single overlooked document can come back months later as “we never knew about this.”

SureCo used SharePoint internally, but it was closed to external parties. So every document a customer or broker needed had to be re-sent by email, recreated, or chased down.

Why Aligned Won

SureCo’s sales team surfaced Aligned first, evaluating it for their own process. When they showed it to Jennifer, she saw it fit something else entirely: onboarding.

The team had considered managing the process in project management tools, but those came with a dealbreaker: external users would have to create accounts and log in. For a customer already overwhelmed by a benefits migration, adding another password was a non-starter. Aligned let brokers and HR teams collaborate in a shared workspace without any of that friction.

Three things sealed it:

• A shared workspace customers, brokers, and SureCo could all work in with no separate logins
• Task-level structure with owners, timelines, and attachments in one place
• Templates that let SureCo codify their process once and reuse it for every new customer

“The fact that it’s called Aligned is exactly what we do with our customers. We’re trying to align on the process with our broker partners and HR teams so we can walk them through the migration. It was a no-brainer.”

Jennifer Ross
Vice President of Customer Management, SureCo

The Solution: One Room, One Process, One Source of Truth

Every new SureCo customer now gets their own Aligned room, built from one of two master templates: a net-new template for first-time ICHRA migrations, and an annual benefits planning template for returning customers. Each room is organized into clear sections:

• Introduction and discovery
• Customer action items for the HR team, with attached templates and links
• A separate track for broker partner tasks
• Visible tasks on SureCo’s side, so customers see the work happening behind the scenes
• A document workspace with training materials and employee education resources

Christy’s team doesn’t walk through every task in a meeting. They introduce the room, show how to navigate it, and let customers explore. Questions happen in Aligned’s chat. Documents get uploaded back through the room. Everything stays in one place.

“Customers will ask, ‘Can you send me this document?’ And I’ll say, ‘It’s in Aligned, here’s the page.’ Once they see how helpful it is, they’re hooked. Most of our customers are eager to get started. They like having a list and having everything in one place.”

Christy Bell
Lead Technical Implementation Specialist, SureCo

The Results

~80% Faster from Lead to First Meeting

Before Aligned, Jennifer needed about three days of prep between getting a new customer lead and running the first onboarding meeting.

Now she spins up a new room in minutes. “We change five words on the page for the new customer, and it’s there,” Jennifer said. “I push a button, change five words, and send the intro email. I can literally have a meeting the next day.”

Nothing gets missed

For Jennifer, speed is nice. Accuracy is the real win.

“I’m super type A. I don’t want to forget anything. Making sure nothing gets missed is so much more important than speed. We don’t run the risk that we missed a step. We’ve eliminated that risk completely.”

Jennifer Ross
Vice President of Customer Management, SureCo

A repeatable process new hires ramp on in days

When Jennifer handed day-to-day onboarding to Christy, the template did most of the training. When Christy began training the next group of account managers, it did it again.

Every room also becomes an institutional memory. When a referral came in recently from a competing ICHRA vendor, Christy pulled up an archived room from a similar migration, reviewed what worked, and handed the archive to a new account manager as a ramp-up tool. “If she had to go back through emails and piecemeal that together, it would take weeks and she very likely would have missed things.”

Brokers now refer customers specifically because of the onboarding experience

This is the result SureCo didn’t expect. Broker partners, who have multiple ICHRA vendors to choose from, now send customers to SureCo specifically because of how the onboarding runs.

“Several brokers have come back to us and said this tool is what’s making the implementation process smoother. It gives them extra confidence in us.”

Jennifer Ross
Head of Customer Success, SureCo

It closes deals in the room

Aligned also shows up in late-stage sales conversations. “From the end of the sales process, I’ve seen salespeople pull up the Aligned page and show it to the customer,” Christy said. “Customers say, ‘We just need to see there’s a plan.’ Once they see there’s a plan in place, they’re confident to sign the contract.”

Results a prospect can take to their team

• Cut new-customer kickoff prep from 3 days to next-day
• Eliminated “we never knew about this” risk across a regulated migration process
• Built reusable templates that train new hires and double as institutional memory
• Turned onboarding into a reason brokers refer deals to SureCo
• Gave sellers a late-stage asset that helps prospects sign with confidence

“We just need to see there’s a plan. Once customers understand the process, they’re confident signing the contract.”

Christy Bell
Lead Technical Implementation Specialist, SureCo