Everything Insurers Need to Know About Business Process Outsourcing

What Is Insurance Business Process Outsourcing?

Insurance business process outsourcing (BPO) refers to insurance agencies subcontracting a third party to perform back-office tasks on behalf of the insurer. Insurance BPO services cover a range of tasks like:

data entry
claims processing
customer service
accounting
policy administration
and much more

Insurance BPO is an established service in many other sectors, so it’s a reliable way for insurers to offload work that isn’t mission critical and allow their skilled employees to focus on high-impact projects.

1. What is insurance business process outsourcing?

2. Why do insurance companies outsource?

3. Why insurers are combing services with BPO technology

4. How BPO Cuts Processing Time by 75%

5. How to choose the right BPO solution

Why Do Insurance Companies Outsource?

Market forces are putting pressure on insurers to cut costs and improve process efficiency.

By streamlining operations and adding new resources to the team, business process outsourcing addresses numerous problems facing insurers today.

Problem #1: Slow Turnaround Times

There are only so many tasks any one employee can get through. Unfortunately, internal inefficiencies or lack of resources lead to an ever-growing backlog. Slow turnaround times not only decrease your business agility but also negatively impact your customer experience.

Solution: On-demand Talent Resources

The fastest way to improve your turnaround time is to outsource the tasks that are slowing you down. Rather than experiment with different internal workflows to fix turnaround time, you can utilize insurance BPO services to add experienced professionals as an extension of your time.

More hands make light work, and your turnaround time can dramatically improve when you’re delegating tasks to professionals who have perfected the process.

Problem #2: Data Entry Inaccuracy and Errors

Claims processing is particularly prone to human error. In many cases, errors happen because overburdened employees are in a rush to complete the task at hand and move on to the next item in the backlog.

It’s difficult to address this issue without adding more employees and fundamentally changing our process.

Solution: More Resources and a Proven QA Process

By outsourcing data entry, you’ll be able to more evenly spread the work out and take advantage of the QA processes your BPO company uses to ensure accuracy. At Solartis, we employ a proprietary maker/checker model that’s helped insurers dramatically reduce data entry errors.

Problem #3: Rising Operating and FTE Costs

Inflation has hit Insurers hard in recent years, which increases costs across the board and shrinks profit margins. Even though premiums have risen in recent years, inflation and other factors continue to mitigate profitability gains.

Solution: Resource Flexibility

Rather than reduce staff or entertain other traditional cost-cutting strategies, you might be served thinking about how to fundamentally change how you do business.

Insurance BPO services all you to only pay for the resources you need when you need them. During peak season, you can scale up your support from your BPO provider and then scale back when you don’t need those resources on hand.

This type of flexible service is being adopted across industries because it gives businesses more control over their spending without missing out on revenue opportunities.

Problem #4: Talent Shortage

In-house talent isn’t only getting more expensive to employ; it’s also getting more difficult to find. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 50% of today’s insurance workers will retire in the next 15 years.¹

If that prediction is true, there will be around 400,000 unfilled positions in the insurance sector. It’s alright challenging to find insurance talent, and that probably will only grow in the coming years.

¹The US Chamber of Commerce, The America Works Reports: Industry Perspectives

Solution: Contracting Experienced Talent

Good BPO companies are staffed with insurance professionals who have years of experience in policy administration, accounting, and other back-end services. Rather than compete for a shrinking pool of talent, it’s often wiser to hire agencies with the same set of skills you’re looking for.

Combining Services with BPO Insurance Technology

Partnering with a BPO company can offer more than just additional talent resources. You can also benefit from the technology these companies use to deliver and manage their services.

For example, when you partner with Solartis, you’ll get access to OptimX, our workflow engine. Using OptimX, you’ll have total transparency into the tasks and deliverables we’re working on.

Here are a few more ways businesses benefit from our BPO technology:

Speed and Performance

Increase your business agility with on-demand resources. Your requests are handled in real-time, 24 hours a day, driving significant efficiency improvements.

Data-Driven Insights

Get a clear view of the return on your BPO investment. Utilize real-time reporting and detailed analytics to task completion time, review work quality, and make data-driven decisions.

Immediate Workflow Adjustments

Clear out your administrative backlog within 4 weeks with automatic task assignment and reassignment, rule-based turnaround times, and priority adjustments for easy adjustments.

How Solartis Administer Solves Common Insurance BPO Challenges

With Solartis Administer, our BPO solution, your company will realize immediate benefits in lower costs, reduced turnaround time, and eliminating the administrative backlog. The addition of OptimX allows total transparency and real-time reporting, for analytics, insight, and improved data-driven decision-making.

In this video, Solartis CEO, Nick Richardson, details how Solartis Administer works side by side with operational and underwriting staff to free them from time-consuming administrative activities.

USE CASE

How CHIC Cut Processing Time by 75% With BPO Services

As an automotive insurer, CHIC saw an opportunity to expand into the ride-sharing market and start offering policies for limousines and vehicles used by Lyft and Uber.

CHIC needed to move fast, but they didn’t have a technology solution in place to support this project and still heavily relied on manual, paper-based processes.

By partnering with Solartis’s BPO services, CHIC was able to outsource its policy administration processes and start rapidly issuing policies for this new market. What’s more, they were able to cut processing time by 75%.

Read the whole case study to learn how Solartis helped CHIC build a footprint in this new market and transform its legacy system.

Read the full case study

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