R-T Specialty / LoVullo Grows Business with Solartis’ Business Process Outsourcing

A common challenge for many businesses is retaining good employees to do detailed repetitive work that is time sensitive.

When a sudden increase in business occurs new workers can be hard to find and their training takes too much time. The work soon suffers and processing backlogs occur. Such was the case in the Customer Care Unit at R-T Specialty / LoVullo Associates.

R-T Specialty / LoVullo Associates is a 65 year old, family-owned Certified Managing General Agency (CMAG). In this role the company underwrites, binds coverage, and issues policies on behalf of their insurers. Today R-T Specialty / LoVullo is in twelve contract markets with multiple carriers covering both commercial and personal insurance.

With so many contract markets and carriers, each with its own processing requirements, it is little wonder that things can get tense when business is growing. Such was the case in 2011, when a growth spurt highlighted a major issue with personnel.

Cristin explains how R-T Specialty / LoVullo evaluated outsourcing companies. “We consulted with a number of organizations and associations. We asked our peers “Are you utilizing this service? What are you using? Has it been successful? What things are you actually using them for? Is there a language barrier? Things like that.”

After receiving a number of recommendations from well-respected contacts in the insurance industry R-T Specialty / LoVullo decided to try outsourcing with Solartis.

Solartis Business Process Outsourcing services benefit areas of a company that generally have a high employee turnover rate. Utilizing Solartis employees, located in India, companies can reallocate their resources to higher value activities or allow for natural attrition.

Carol Mowry, Solartis Vice President of Sales and Marketing said, “Solartis team members work side by side with R-T Specialty / LoVullo’s staff. Using their existing processing systems, we started out slow and assumed additional business processes over time. This allowed R-T Specialty / LoVullo to assess our capabilities, the quality of our team, and the accuracy of our work before making a large commitment. We are now in our third year of processing business for R-T Specialty / LoVullo and have assumed over 12 business processes. We are extremely proud to be part of the R-T Specialty / LoVullo team in helping them achieve their ever improving service and quality standards.

Tricia Solberg, R-T Specialty / LoVullo’s Customer Care Unit Manager, says, “It’s huge to have Solartis take over these processes. Our primary goal in using Solartis has been to make sure that our staff does not suffer from burnout. We continue to grow, and now we are able to keep our good people.”

How is it to work with people who are on the opposite side of the globe?

Tricia says, “We are in constant communication through e-mail and with a weekly status call. On the call Solartis gives us a summary of how things are trending, what the volume looks like, their quality control review, the turnaround times and so forth.”

Cristin says, “I am really pleased with their quality control. The thing that was most noticeable when we started this endeavor was the quality of Solartis’ work. They had the resources in place that we simply did not have from a staffing perspective at the time. ” Tricia adds, “When you have high volume and are doing things in-house, details can get missed. Solartis has their own quality control team that double- checks every transaction.”

Cristin goes on to say, “We are always challenging our service standards. We want to set the service standards bar higher and higher, and partnering with Solartis accomplishes that because we can get our quotes out faster. Our goal is to service our customers faster, better, and with more accuracy … and Solartis allows us to do that.

She concludes, “Our partnership with Solartis has provided R-T Specialty / LoVullo Associates with the flexibility needed to respond to an ever-changing business environment. The synergy we’ve developed allows for greater flexibility specific to implementing changes to our business and staffing models. The operational efficiencies gained are invaluable; Solartis has proven themselves to be an indispensable business partner.”