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.
Recent publicized ransomware attacks (“WannaCry”) have reminded many about the importance of cybersecurity vigilance. Proving this, any insurance organization that followed the most basic cybersecurity best practices would have been safe from WannaCry.
In the insurance industry, most people think of ‘outsourcing’ as delegating low value tasks at the lowest cost possible. In reality, we outsource mission-critical work all the time – legal, accounting, tax filing, marketing, IT and more – without any hesitation and with a clear understanding of the benefits. So, for lack of a better…
Have you ever been promised that if you just had [fill in the blank] data, you could generate game-changing insights that would transform your insurance operations? If only it were that simple. Unfortunately, insights don’t come from simple osmosis by staring at your new reports and dashboards. That is a recipe for analysis paralysis, and…
As we all now know, in the end the Best Picture Oscar did not go to the movie “La La Land”. In case you missed it, during this years’ Oscar Awards, Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty mistakenly announced La La Land as the winner for Best Picture. The actual winner – Moonlight – was announce a…
Sometimes, the best business lessons come from unexpected places. For example, one might assume there are few similarities between insurance business processes and the world of logistics and package delivery. Yet, taking a closer look, we find an interesting and helpful correlation. In the 1970’s UPS, the world’s largest package delivery company, started experimenting with…
