6 Reasons to Consider Insurance BPOs
Brooke Whitney, Patra sales solution consultant for employee benefits, and Jessica Caudle, Patra director of employee benefits, give their take.
There is a great deal of attention focused on efficiencies in 2020.
For benefits brokers, it’s critical in today’s market to laser-focus their services and become more efficient for their business to survive within the increasingly unpredictable industry. Only those who are willing to adopt innovation will come out ahead.
Brokerages of all sizes face challenges when it comes to operating their organizations efficiently and affordably. Striving to remain competitive, brokers often take on additional servicing for clients beyond the necessary basics, which leaves them exhausted and pulled in many directions and prevents the business from growing as it otherwise could. This added servicing also impedes the development of new skills among employees and deters them from being creative.
When confronted with making changes to become more efficient and reduce costs, many brokerages face the following concerns:
How will the customer experience change?
We want the business to be more efficient, but how may the customer be affected? If we change our workflows, processes or services, how will our customers react? Will we keep their business? How can we become more efficient and keep the customer happy without interrupting service?
Will ROI match the effort?
If we make changes to our processes and workflows, how will we know if we’re saving money? How will we know if employees have more time to spend with clients?
What about all the processes already in place?
We want to be more efficient, but this is how we’ve always done it. And we’ve always made it work.
How do I find the right employees to implement change?
We keep hiring and training entry-level employees, but eventually they quit or want a higher-level position. There is constant turnover in these roles, which is expensive. How can we put a stop to this turnover cycle?
In response to these concerns, and in order to stay competitive in today’s insurance business environment, more and more brokers are turning to business process outsourcing (BPO) as a solution. By leveraging benefits BPO, brokerages are refocusing internal resources on their core functions while outsourcing some of their back-office business processes. When experienced employees are hard to find, partnering with a BPO provider is an effective solution that enables cost-effective growth and increased output and provides top-notch customer service to free up time for your sales and service employees.
Knowing the benefits of BPO will help a brokerage decide if this is a solution that could work for its business.
Outsourcing will enable you to:
- Reduce employee turnover, reduce hiring, and lower your labor costs. When you choose to outsource tasks, whether it be data entry, eligibility management, billing audits, renewal assistance or small-account management, you pay your outsourcing partner as a contractor. This approach reduces the costs of hiring, including those for training, benefits and equipment. By outsourcing these processes, the work will be completed in a timely, efficient and cost-effective way and puts a stop to the turnover cycle.
- Focus on your core competencies. Your key employees, whom you hired for their expertise in insurance, sales, relationship management and consulting, end up spending a large portion of their day on transactional tasks. Your BPO partner can take on these tasks, allowing your experienced employees to focus on their core competencies.
- Promote growth. Giving your account managers time to focus on client relationships and account rounding will lead to growth and higher retention. Relieving your management staff from overseeing workflows allows them to focus on training, which will result in elevating your employees to focus on growth.
- Provide quicker and more consistent turnaround times. Many BPO companies use a globally dispersed staff to complete work. This means your business will run 24/7, resulting in quicker turnaround times for you and your clients.
- Provide business continuity. A BPO can streamline and execute upon critical insurance processes, enabling brokers to be responsive to their clients, providing focused, uninterrupted attention and service.
- Reduce your liability. You may be one of the many companies that recently moved your operations to a work-from-home environment. With this comes an increased E&O exposure. If you’re partnered with a BPO company that takes responsibility for the work that its employees do, it will offer liability coverage through its own E&O policy, reducing your liability exposure.
Patra is a diamond-level sponsor of The Council.
