Outsourcing Services for Insurance Companies

Introduction

The concept around outsourcing back-office, claims, customer service and business process functions has long been a hot topic with insurers across the United States. Do you trust an outside organization to successfully adopt your internal philosophies and methodologies or does the company continue to build from within? Are there ways to leverage outside vendors to draw upon their varied capabilities to successfully augment internal capabilities and thus create a better service methodology? Do you look at companies focused solely on your industry or one with experience across a wide range of industries?

Indeed, challenges are increasingly mounting for insurers and their claims desks to differentiate and set themselves apart from their competitors. Increased pressure for profitability translates into a hard look at cost reduction and top-line revenue growth. Profitability is linked to the ability to accurately staff agents and customer relationships with high quality customer service staff over time to achieve financial success. In addition, success will be often be determined by the insurers best able to leverage numerous outside channels / vendors in order to achieve higher levels of quality, better process flows, and thus lower costs / higher margins.

Challenges

Insurers recognize and have begun to internalize that in order to respond to these external pressures, they need to re-evaluate inefficient back-office as well as service oriented functions inside the organization. Another priority is improving the quality of service to the distribution channel. As agents have more choice in choosing carriers, they are looking to align with an organization that makes it easy to conduct business, pays commission on a timely basis and reduces the time to process business while giving each customer the highest levels of service experience.

With insurers struggling to achieve these goals, many will look to external partners for quality, cost effective process and service oriented solutions tailored to fit their specific requirements. Their end game as always is cost reduction, profit margin increase and quality differentiation.

Solution

First Call Resolution is the first US-based contact center outsourcing company to actively focus on the actual call center or customer service needs of the insurance provider at their basest level. We ask the tough questions that most vendors will not ask, thus creating unique outsourcing solutions that might not have been due to the inherent complexity involved with the solution and required by the outsourcer.

Questions such as, “If you had a perfect outsourcing relationship, what would it look like and how would it work?” We believe that the job of the outsourcer is to act like a true partner, not a vendor, helping where the pain actually is and not creating more challenges in the process.

Claims and Customer Service Outsourcing Solutions

Increased challenges around handling front line claims and first notice calls continually forces insurers to think outside the proverbial box and look at new alternatives to the traditional models of handling all contacts inside their internal call centers. Does one continue to add internal agents, build additional sites, and add more and more infrastructure within the organization?

FCR believes the best ideas around servicing customers and agents are the ideas that fit each company’s specific wants and goals. Many will be quite different from their competitors and rightfully so. Each insurer is unique and all claims and customer service should be customized accordingly.

FCR recommends looking at the front line claims / customer service experience in holistic form. Too often, companies feel compelled to view their customer service desk in a “silo” or product-specific manner rather than as an integrated overall customer experience, primarily due to constraints placed on them by legacy systems and processes. Our belief is that the future will be dependent on the ability of the company to provide better levels of customer service by viewing the entire experience in singular form.

Why First Call Resolution

Now, more than ever, insurers need to get back to building value at the customer level. They need to ensure the effective management of client relationships by creating exceptional customer retention. To build a positive customer experience, not only does a provider need to offer a diverse portfolio of highly competitive products to the market, but the service experience presented to the end customer must be better than their competitors’. All of this requires improved access to information. With more choices than ever before, you must develop strategies that build stronger, more effective relationships with customers by using companies such as FCR.

Our focus is on providing the best and brightest phone, email, web chat, and business process agents from our 3 domestic call center locations to fill in claims and service gaps wherever needed by insurers across the customer service, FNOL and claims contact handling spectrum.

Whether the need is after hours claims handling, email, site redundancy, front line customer service help during outages such as hurricanes or winter storms, or even just acting as an overflow call handling valve alongside our clients’ internal claims desks, we believe that the best value an outsourcing partner can bring to the table is to look at every challenge from the clients’ actual perspective, then build the outsourcing solution starting from there, tailoring it to fit exactly what their greatest needs are.

Some contact center outsourcing needs will be small, some will be large; all will be unique to each specific insurer. FCR believes that if you cannot see things from the clients’ perspective, targeting that specific pain point of the customer service process, you will be unable to deduce and solve the clients’ true challenges both initially and going forward.

By leveraging our highest quality, domestic based call center agents alongside an insurers’ existing customer service and claims desk, they will realize cost savings, increased quality and staffing flexibility, better service metrics and better customer retention at the end of day.