Once upon a time, insurance companies processed insurance claims by pen, paper, and a seemingly infinite array of filing cabinets.
This might seem archaic to most modern insurance providers, but those same companies might be viewed similarly in the near future if they neglect to embrace current advances in technology.
A report by PwC noted three core similarities of insurance industry leaders:
- A corporate culture that emphasizes operational excellence, productivity, and cost-effectiveness.
- The ability to innovate at scale
- The ability to execute as a competitive advantage
The following article is dedicated to enterprise organizations either currently utilizing business process outsourcing (BPO) or are exploring insurance BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) services for outsourcing a single business function such as outsourcing insurance claims.
Why Outsource Insurance Claims?
Insurance claims processing companies can significantly benefit from a more streamlined process, from claim to resolution.
Whether you're a medical, home, or automotive insurance company looking for a competitive advantage, the core idea is the same: more qualified talent means a higher volume of incoming insurance claims can be processed.
Effective outsourcing can keep your internal team focused on providing the best possible value to the end customer.
In fact, 70% of insurance CEOs identified the top opportunity for corporate reinvention is to prioritize the customer experience in the next twelve months. Coming in second place is, you guessed it, a transformation of their core supporting technology.
2020 forced the entire world into new challenges. Insurance companies are tasked with the responsibility to maintain business as usual despite the evolving adverse circumstances.
Is Outsourcing Insurance Claims Right for Us?
Without proper management or scaling processes, an insurance contact center could quickly devolve into a pandemonium that churns out unhappy customers taking their incensed experiences to Internet review sites. It’s natural for any business to grow too big for its britches, but it’s particularly catastrophic for an insurance claims business to lag behind its duties to its customers.
The perennial task of corporate reinvention is to balance day-to-day operations with methodical strides for improvement; in the case of insurance companies, the focus on the customer experience is one of the primary industry differentiators that simply cannot be neglected.
The solution is to find a reliable and trustworthy BPO solution that helps scale operations like insurance claims. It might seem unnatural or unnerving to outsource a physical tangible call room, but the reality is some outsourced call centers may do the job better while adding a key new ingredient: the ability to scale.
Insurance BPOs provide the skills for “in the trenches” tactical work of handling insurance claims, and they can also bring the expertise that comes with having helped other large organizations scale their businesses.
Having “free” time may feel weird for a manager, but you’ll get the hang of it.
What to Look Out For When Outsourcing Insurance Claims
You may be able to find some turn-key insurance BPO services, but if only it were that easy. We don’t advise any business owner to blindly trust outsourcing key processes of their business.
The proper software stack allows proper integration between your business and your BPO, and it can provide several concrete advantages no BPO can offer by itself.
For example, Insightful helps insurance companies and insurance BPOs gain insight into employee performance while creating a reward system that recognizes consistent top performers. This not only helps keep insurance virtual assistants accountable to their company whether hired directly or through an insurance BPO services company, but it helps you stay on top of your priorities without the cognitive overload of manually checking each employee.
In an industry such as insurance, the speed of processing and resolution are the core of the customer experience. It’s much easier to snipe out insurance virtual assistant inefficiencies and magnify what’s working well with the proper productivity monitoring tools.
Data Privacy and Security
Insurance claims tend to involve highly sensitive data, so make sure that your BPO has strict compliance measures in place. Medical insurance companies should take additional proactive measures to ensure HIPAA compliance at every step of the way– medical insurance claims software exists for a reason! Ultimately, the liability of protecting your customers’ data is still your responsibility– so do your due diligence.
Insightful, for example, has the option to either store data in the cloud in just a few minutes, or to store data locally on an organization’s private servers. Depending on your data's sensitivity, storing outsourcing claims and BPO processes on your own servers is worth considering.
Final Thoughts: Outsourcing Insurance Claims
By harnessing the potential of business process outsourcing (BPO), insurance companies can streamline back-office operations and minimize operational expenses while reducing the time it takes to settle claims.
Effective BPO translates directly into the bottom line: lower costs mean higher profits.
Services and processes that were once time-consuming and exhaustive can be streamlined by outsourcing or totally automated using cutting-edge technology. This, in turn, helps insurance companies increase their profits, giving them the option to re-invest further into growth and the customer experience.
When outsourcing anything from customer onboarding to claims processing, you can harness your team’s focus on strengthening your core areas and increasing customer satisfaction.
Ultimately, better and faster ROI claims processing depends on your systems and software stack.