Key Takeaways:

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•  Outsourcing insurance claims is an effective way to reclaim time for your business.
•  70% of CEOs believe you should prioritize customer experience.
•  The right software monitoring employee time can help you maintain high standards while outsourcing.

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Read time: 6 minutes

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Once upon a time, insurance companies processed insurance claims by pen, paper, and filing cabinets.
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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.
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A report by PwC noted three core similarities of leaders in the insurance industry: 

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1. A corporate culture that emphasizes operational excellence, productivity, and cost-effectiveness.
   
   
2. The ability to innovate at scale.
   
   
3. The ability to execute as a competitive advantage.
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The following article is dedicated to enterprise organizations either currently using business process outsourcing (BPO) or exploring insurance BPO services for outsourcing a single business function such as insurance claims.

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We’ll also explore what to look out for when outsourcing insurance claims and how tracking work time can help you create accountability.

Why Outsource Insurance Claims?

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Insurance claims processing companies can significantly benefit from a more streamlined process, from claim to resolution. 

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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. 

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Effective outsourcing can keep your internal team focused on providing the best possible value to the end customer. 

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In fact, 70% of insurance CEOs identified the top opportunity for corporate reinvention is to prioritize the customer experience. Coming in second place is, you guessed it, a transformation of their core supporting technology. 

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Insurance claims can take up a significant amount of company time, and much like other core business functions like data entry, could distract employees from focusing their energy on needle-moving activities.

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With that in mind, here are some of the reasons you should consider outsourcing insurance claims:

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Cost Efficiency

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It may be obvious, but it’s true - outsourcing your insurance claims could help you lighten your budget.

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2024 looks set to bring economic challenges and many businesses are preparing for that with heavy rounds of lay-offs and efforts to cut costs where possible. As such, it could be a wise strategic decision to start to think about core business functions - like insurance claims - and how you can continue to do them at a fraction of the current cost.

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Access to Expertise

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When you outsource any core business function, you relinquish control over it, which can seem like a risk if you have high standards. As a business owner, it’s hard to make the decision to look outside of your workforce for solutions to core business functions, but sometimes it’s the right one.

‍Outsourcing your insurance claims could turn out to be one of the best decisions you can make.

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Why?

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Outsourcing insurance claims to a specialist insurance firm that can draw on the years and years of experience of its employees, and apply best practices at every step of the way, can ensure efficient and mistake-free processing.

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That’s one of the primary benefits of the virtual workforce in 2024: there’s a global talent pool you can dip into which means you have unprecedented levels of access to specialized talent.

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Scalability

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As you grow your company, outsourcing becomes a very useful tool you can leverage to scale sustainably yet quickly.

As you scale, you can simply adjust the level of outsourced services to suit your current size. That way, you don’t have to hire your way to growth, and risk spending more than you can afford and simultaneously taking employee time away from the most meaningful growth activities.

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AI is another tool at your disposal for accelerating growth and scaling sustainably, since you can leverage it to automate simple business functions and even support the processing of insurance claims to streamline operations.

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Focus on Core Competencies

On that last point, one of the best reasons to outsource your insurance claims (and other business functions for that matter) is so you can direct your resources on what matters most to the business.

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By freeing up employee time, you can encourage them to focus on core competencies such as:

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• Ideating and innovating for new products
  
  
• Improving the customer experience
  
  
• Brainstorming strategic expansion 

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There’s only so much time and attention we all have access to during the day, so why not use the 80/20 principle and encourage your employees to focus on the few activities with the highest ROI for your business?

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You’ve likely been aware of the studies that have shown attention spans suffer drastically with context shifting, tab hopping, and general distractions. So with that being the case, doesn’t it make the most sense to direct your employees’ energy toward the areas they can make the most meaningful progress in?

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Is Outsourcing Insurance Claims Right for You? 

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Without proper management or scaling processes, an insurance contact center could quickly devolve into a revolving door of unhappy customers taking their negative experiences to Internet review sites.

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It’s natural for any business to lose sight of what matters most early on - delighting customers and ensuring they receive personalized attention - but it’s particularly catastrophic for an insurance claims business to lag behind in its duties to customers. 

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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.   

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The moment you accept lower standards is the moment your customers will start to think twice about filing insurance claims through you.

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The solution?

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Find a reliable and trustworthy BPO solution that helps scale operations like insurance claims. It might seem unnatural or unnerving to outsource a physical 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. 

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Insurance BPOs provide the skills for the tactical work of handling insurance claims, and they can also bring the expertise that comes with having helped other large organizations scale their businesses. 

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Having “free” time may feel strange for a manager, but you’ll get the hang of it. 

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What to Look Out For When Outsourcing Insurance Claims

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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. 

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Choosing the Right Software to Monitor Performance

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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. 

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For example, a remote screen control tool like Insightful helps insurance companies and insurance BPOs gain insight into employee performance while creating a reward system that recognizes consistent top performers. 

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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. 

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Leveraging remote screen control allows you to make sure the work is being done correctly and to the agreed-upon timelines.

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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. 

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How AI Fits into the Equation

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The mantra ‘work smarter, not harder’ has never been more relevant than it is today.

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With language-based models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT dominating discussions in every industry, there are limitless use cases where it can assist you in streamlining operations and helping you scale sustainably.

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For example, AI-powered chatbots can help you provide immediate assistance to your customers, and even walk them through the insurance filing process. Alternatively, should you choose to outsource the claims process, you can have AI scan the claims for inaccuracies and act as a last quality assurance measure to hold your outsourced partner accountable.

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Automated fraud detection using AI and machine learning can be a valuable last defense against illegitimate claims, and so it’s worth considering even if you outsource your insurance claim processing.

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Data Privacy and Security 

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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! 

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Ultimately, the liability of protecting your customers’ data is still your responsibility– so do your due diligence. 

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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. 

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Outsourcing Insurance Claims 

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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. 

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Effective BPO translates directly into the bottom line: lower costs mean higher profits. 

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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.

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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. 

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Ultimately, better and faster ROI claims processing depends on your systems and software stack.

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Updated on January 3rd, 2024