The Covid 19 pandemic has turned out to be a blessing in disguise for the insurance industry in some ways. This is because it has compelled insurers to bring numerous operational changes that was long overdue. One such change brought about mostly during the pandemic was digitizing their processes. Digitization helped many insurers survive and adapt to the pandemic-induced changes. For instance, when remote or hybrid work became unavoidable due to the lock down, digitization helped carriers carry out their operation with a remote workforce.
However, not all carriers and agencies were able to make a smooth transition to the digital process. Yet they were able to survive the odds because of Insurance BPO service providers. Third-party partners helped insurance companies to understand, adopt, and implement the right strategy and technology to optimize their process. This enabled insurers to maintain operational continuity amidst the pandemic without disrupting their operational infrastructure.
In this article, we will explore different ways insurance process outsourcing can help insurance carriers make their operations more resilient and ready for any future disruptions.
Looking for Specialized Workforce for Insurance Processes- BPO Providers Can Get them Out of their Hats!
During the height of the pandemic, free flow of specialized workforce in the insurance industry was hampered by factors such as lockdowns and high attrition rates. This led to an unprecedented surge in claims administration backlogs and rise in fraudulent claims. Insurance outsourcing companies helped carriers compensate for this lack of skilled resources. Here’s a look at how insurance back-office support providers can continue to provide support to insurance carriers:
Claim Management
Like in the last two years, a pandemic in any other manifestation will also result in job losses and bankruptcy among masses. In the event of a fourth outbreak of Covid-19 or for that matter any other pandemic insurers must brace for a surge in loss-related claims. In such a situation, insurers will need claim administration domain experts who can be available on a 24/7 basis to deal with the surge in claims. However, factors like remote working and shortage of in-house killed professionals will render this task difficult.
Outsourcing to Insurance BPO providers will open access to claim administration experts. They have the required infrastructure to support their employees work from remote locations and process multiple claims with ease and perfection. Furthermore, global outsourcing companies have resources stationed at different time zones and locations that are less affected by the pandemic. This ensures that there is always an agent present on a 24/7 basis to serve clients placed in containment regions and will continue to reinforce the importance of insurance claims business process outsourcing.
Fraud Detection
Instances of insurance frauds were on the rise and have costed insurers dearly during the ongoing pandemic. Such insurance frauds range from customers staging fake accidents to upcoding. And such trends will rule the roost in the event of a future outbreak. This is why insurers must adopt fraud detection measures to avert possibility of losses to frauds. In this digital era, insurance fraud analytics is one of the go-to tools for efficient fraud detection.
Insurance outsourcing companies provide access to professional claim adjusters and use insurance fraud analytic tools to detect the slightest of anomalies in claim forms. These tools are based on algorithms like tree-based boosting, logistic regression, Naïve Bayes, and others that can differentiate genuine claims from frauds. Experts use these tools to analyse past claims data, customer demographic data, and others to identify fraudulent claims.
Risk Management
A pandemic can result in numerous job losses and pay cuts. Employment status for most of the people are on the line because of the pandemic-induced economic uncertainty. This is why insurers must employ every means to determine risk propensity of every consumer before rolling out policies for them.
Such risks can be best analysed by partnering with Insurance outsourcing companies. A specialized insurance BPO provider banks on predictive models such as insurance risk analytics to predict risk propensity of customers. This analytics tool studies customers’ past and present financial condition that provide insights into their ability to pay premiums on time. It also alerts underwriters in case of any critical elements missing in insurance policies. Additionally, BPO partners help carriers ensure that their risk management model complies with individual insurers’ regulatory requirements.
Insurance Back Office Outsourcing – A Proven Model for Strategic Empowerment of Operations
Insurers must take the right strategies to make their operations more resilient to current and future disruptions. Insurance process outsourcing will play a critical role in helping insurers identify which parts of their operations require a strategic overhaul and devise the roadmap accordingly.
Personalization of Policies
A proven way to improve business prospect during a pandemic is to personalize insurance policies that suit customers’ profiles. However, this does not mean that insurers have to personalize policies on an individual level. They must tailor their policies after grouping their audience based on different characteristics. These characteristics may include people who indulge in rash driving, people who are prone to frequent ailments, persons who have started a family and will look for a bigger house to settle, and so on.
To do this grouping, insurers must parse through numerous unstructured data drawn from various sources such as telematics devices, wearable devices, and others. Insurance outsourcing companies provide powerful data analytics solutions that analyze data drawn from these sources to draw meaningful insights about customer behavior. These insights help to group consumers based on the characteristics stated above and facilitate the process of personalizing policies.
Improve Call Center Experience
Customer retention becomes a big issue for insurers in recent times and more so during crises like the pandemic. The in-house call center team of a carrier always find it difficult to respond to an influx of generic and complex customer queries. This difficulty is because of reliance on legacy systems and lack of KPIs for call center agents. This is a serious implication on insurers’ reputation because call center experience is one of the key determinants of an insurer’s relationship with their customers.
The best strategy, therefore, is to outsource this function to insurance BPO companies. They provide the right mix of technology and resources to resolve customer queries in a fast and efficient fashion. Insurance outsourcing companies leverage multiple communication channels such as phone, email, and chat to address customers. They dedicate customer care representatives who can address and follow up on customer issues on behalf of insurers.
They create the right sales pitch that is perfectly aligned with market trends and consumer sentiments. They have a sound sense of judgement about the right time of pitching a product. This reduces the chances of insurers being judged as pushy.
Embrace Direct to Customer Model
Today customers are more likely to purchase coverage directly from an insurer because of greater awareness about policies and a digitized insurance market. This is termed as a direct to customer model (D2C) which every insurer must consider embracing. By reducing dependency on a middleman, insurers can speed up providing customers policies to their liking.
The right way to go forward is to seek help from expert third-party insurance BPO providers. They will have the right tech stack and marketing strategies to get you started with the D2C model.
They will first overhaul your website with quote engines, messengers, and chatbots who can answer visitors’ queries in an instant. Third-party vendors will dedicate resources with industry acumen who will assist customers throughout the journey of raising a query to purchasing an insurance policy.
Automating High End Operations- How Outsourcing Helps?
The Covid 19 pandemic had accelerated adoption of automation in insurance industry. This has made a visibly positive impact on various insurance processes. It had modernized insurance workflows and revolutionized customer experience. However, certain insurers still do not have the necessary infrastructure or expertise to optimally use automation technologies. Relying on third-party vendors will eliminate the need of procuring technologies. Outsourcing vendors fields these right expertise and solutions that fit insurers’ specific needs. Here’s a look at the top automation use case in insurance industry:
Document Indexing and Filing
Insurance files involve multiple documents that contain images depicting damage, medical reports, police report copies, among others. Going through individual files and indexing it manually severely decelerates workflow while increasing chances of errors such as misinterpretation or missing information.
Technologically advanced insurance BPO providers use automation solutions based on optical character recognition (OCR) and robotic process automation (RPA) algorithms. These solutions perform the following functions:
- Classify documents according to user preference and type and store it in custom folders.
- Index and label documents using naming conventions such as buyers’ name, policy history, address, and others.
- Enable search and edit options. This makes it easy for insurers to locate a specific file in an instant.
- Generate instant insurance histories of policyholders
Policy Management
It is always an uphill task for insurers’ employees to access policies that are spread haphazardly across multiple employees’ computers. Policy revision does not take place on time because of the difficulty of tracking down policy documents. This heightens the risk of policy violations and an overall inaccurate policy management.
Third-party insurance BPO providers use software solutions that create a central repository to store all policy-related documents in digital formats. The software creates automated workflows for document creation, review, and approval. It issues automatic task management reminders to alert employees when a policy nears its time for revision.
Regulatory Compliance
Documenting process details for audit is lengthy and has several layers of complexity. This increases the chances of regulatory violation.
RPA solutions automate processes like validating policyholders’ information, furnishing regulatory reports, and issuing account closure processing notices. It drives regulatory compliance by recording daily logs of automated processes and generate reports that are ready to be reviewed by auditors.
How We Assist You in Improving Your Insurance Operations?
With over 8 years of experience in delivering efficient back-office support services to insurance agents and carriers, we have helped our clients achieve new levels of business efficiency. Our professionals are experts in specific domains such as claims management, policy issuance, loss run processing, renewals processing, and policy administration. We undertake end-to-end responsibility for executing all back-office operations while maintaining cost-efficiency.
Our specialists are equipped to handle all the complexities that the pandemic brings about, to ensure continuity of your core business operations. For instance, for one of our clients, a Florida based Casualty Insurance Agency, facing severe resource shortage during the pandemic, we provided continuous service level support to keep their business running as usual. They banked on us to avert a backlog and meet customer expectations.
As a global outsourcing company, we operate from different remote locations and time zones. This is especially beneficial during pandemic-induced lockdowns.
Who Are We and Why Are We Considered as An Industry Authority?
This article is authored by experts at InsuranceBackOfficePro, a leading insurance BPO service provider. We have extensive experience in provide back-office and other operation support to retail agencies, wholesales and carriers, and independent brokers and MGAs. We bank on our in-house industry-experts and cutting digital tools to help clients to overcome process-related challenges and overhaul their operations.
