Black belts are great when it comes to martial arts, or you just need to keep your pants from falling off…but I’m not talking about judo or fashion choices here. I’m talking about ‘Six Sigma Black Belts’ and why I don’t like them.
The recent destruction caused by epic hurricanes in the last few weeks has brought to light how important business continuity planning is to insurance organizations – especially for those insurance agencies that were hit by the same disaster as their insureds.
As in all industries, technology continues to disrupt the way we do just about everything. We recently asked some of our own experts to give us their take on how technology trends are impacting the insurance industry and outsourcing.
How your insurance organization services its clients and accounts is largely dependent on the quality of output from your administrative processes. If you’ve got slow turn-around times, mistakes and requests for more information and other inefficiencies, your organization is bound for poor service – no matter how pleasant your staff may be.
When analyzing the renewal processing costs for one of our clients, ReSource Pro found that more than 50% of all accounts had revenues that were below the average renewal processing cost.
We often hear from customers that the hardest part of starting to use an insurance outsourcing service, is starting to use an insurance outsourcing service. This is especially true for businesses that have never used outsourcing, also referred to as BPO (business process outsourcing) or BPM (business process management), before.
For years now, the insurance industry has struggled to attract and retain people. Now, with so many in the industry set to retire, addressing the industry’s talent crisis has become a top priority for many insurance executives.
Over the last decade, insurance outsourcing has evolved to meet market needs. Like in many developing industries, outsourcing providers have taken different approaches to serve insurance clients. Today, providers mostly fall into three categories: Traditional, Transactional and Strategic
As previously discussed in this series, business process outsourcing (BPO) or ‘outsourcing’ in the insurance industry has been around for quite some time. Initially, outsourcing was leveraged almost exclusively by large insurance organizations. But what about the rest of the industry?
Are you getting the most out of the creativity and ingenuity of your people? Most insurance organizations don’t realize how much expertise and insight their people can bring to a product, process or service where they have experience. In fact, they are often not even asked their opinion.
According to Prudential’s Ninth Study of Employee Benefits, 81% of benefits brokers said their role has changed a great deal in the last five years. The employee benefits landscape has changed significantly, with the role of the benefits broker having shifted from being sales-focused to service-oriented.
Do you remember the scene from the 1996 movie Jerry McGuire, where Tom Cruise as Jerry is begging Cuba Gooding’s character to step into line and exasperatingly says “Help me, help you.” Tom Cruise’s character then storms off, and Cuba Gooding says, “See Jerry, that’s the difference between you and me…”
Technology has had a transformative impact on the way almost every industry does business over the past 20 years. It has made some businesses obsolete – Blockbuster and Kodak are two of the big ones that come to mind – but it has also enabled so many more, including outsourcing / business process outsourcing (BPO).
You can have great assets, great people, great resources, great intellectual capital and great opportunities in your insurance organization, and still be expending excess energy, spinning your wheels and suffering considerable loss in output.
This is the first in a series of posts, wherein we’ll be discussing the origins and evolution of insurance industry outsourcing. In this post, we discuss the early economic principles that laid the foundation for modern outsourcing.
