Proper insurance staffing ensures teams have the right talent and expertise to facilitate efficient claims processing, underwriting, and customer service. However, recruiting qualified insurance professionals can be tedious and expensive, especially in the face of labor shortages and mounting competition.
To overcome this challenge, insurers are increasingly turning towards alternative solutions such as outsourced insurance staffing, which can significantly alleviate the hiring burden for internal teams.
With outsourcing, insurers can tap into a pool of qualified candidates, and streamline the recruitment process, while having more time and resources to focus on core business activities. Throughout this article, we’ll discuss how you can assess your staffing needs and identify whether working with a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) partner would benefit your organization.
The Importance of Specialized Insurance Staffing
Forward-thinking insurers rely heavily on skilled professionals with relevant technical knowledge and deep industry experience to help them compete and innovate in the modern marketplace.
While generalists can deliver basic support, it takes uniquely qualified staff who have specialized in certain insurance workflows to accurately assess complex risks, develop sophisticated pricing models, and ensure regulatory compliance.
In other words, teams that aim to process claims efficiently, provide superior customer service, and underwrite policies accurately must entrust each of these critical workflows to specialized staff who can confidently make strategic decisions that impact the bottom line and influence the policyholder experience.
Challenges in Insurance Staffing
Finding the right staff to support your operations is easier said than done. Even if you’re aware of the advantages of hiring specialized professionals, insurers commonly have trouble fulfilling their staffing needs.
Finding Qualified Talent
Insurers may simply be unable to find the right local talent to fill vacant roles. This is especially the case for insurers in rural areas with a limited labor pool. The odds that they’ll be able to find and hire a professional with the relevant skills as soon as a role opens can be quite slim.
To prevent roles from sitting vacant for an extended period, insurers may soften their requirements for hiring, bringing on employees who meet only a fraction of the skills and qualifications they were initially seeking.
High Recruitment and Hiring Costs
Another limiting factor is how expensive the hiring process is. According to Indeed, companies can spend anywhere from $2,000 to $20,000 to hire a new employee, depending on the specific role and location.
You may incur these costs through lost productivity while the role remains vacant, the hard costs spent on recruiting and interviewing candidates, and the emotional costs that come from frustrations among existing employees and the hiring committee throughout the recruiting process.
The longer the recruitment process, the more costly it becomes. If the process is inefficient, ripple effects can be felt throughout the entire organization, all the way down to policyholders.
Accommodating Fluctuating Demand
Finally, insurers may struggle to accommodate fluctuating demand with the appropriate staffing levels. Insurance demand is not always steady throughout the year, and they may require more or less support depending on the given season, local weather conditions, and other factors.
For instance, insurers will have a much greater need for claims processing support specialists following a large storm in the area that causes significant property damage.
It’s typically not practical for insurers to temporarily hire extra staff in-house to accommodate this surge, then let them go once demand normalizes. So, they may attempt to meet demand with existing resources, which can be frustrating for current employees and result in a poor experience for policyholders.
Assessing Your Insurance Staffing Needs
First, assess your current workforce to ensure you have the right team of professionals to lead your organization to success. This means identifying what’s missing from your current team and where you have any talent gaps that could detract from the quality of service you offer policyholders.
Maybe you determine a specific department is short-staffed, certain workers’ skills are not being adequately utilized, or the team is lacking certain skills altogether. Any of these talent-related problems can lead to inefficiencies and keep you lagging behind peers.
Here are some questions you can ask yourself to better grasp your current insurance staffing resources and how this could impact your performance:
What Positions Are You Missing?
Start by identifying any unfilled roles in your organization. This can occur for many reasons, like if key personnel leave and you struggle to fill their position. On the other hand, new roles continue to emerge in the industry as technology advances, creating new jobs that previously didn’t exist. You may recognize new roles to add to your team to remain competitive and keep up with industry standards.
Each insurance function is essential in supporting the policyholder experience and driving loyalty. Let’s take a deeper look at some core roles and why having enough people power in each area is critical to success:
- Claim Processing: Effective claims processing helps you maintain a high level of policyholder satisfaction and can reduce the costs associated with fraud and unnecessary payouts.
- Policy Administration: This function is critical to accurately maintain and update administered policies to meet regulatory requirements. It also helps ensure policyholders receive the appropriate level of service and support, which can help support their experience, satisfaction levels, and retention.
- Risk Management: Without a good risk management team, you may be left with too much exposure to certain risks. This role is essential to help you reduce exposure and minimize potential losses.
- Underwriting: At its core, underwriting helps maintain the company’s financial stability, making sure the premiums you charge are sufficient to cover potential claims.
- Customer Service: The level of service policyholders receive can impact their satisfaction levels, churn rates, and loyalty, ultimately helping you sustainably grow your business.
Is Your Team Overburdened?
Insurers continue to face staffing shortages as the older cohort enters retirement and fewer young professionals enter the field. As such, your existing employees have likely taken on roles and responsibilities outside their scope to pick up some slack.
Even when done temporarily, this can lead to frustrations among your team. If these issues become prolonged, you could be overworking your team to the point of employee turnover, poor performance, burnout, etc.
Do You Have Enough Resources to Support Onboarding?
Even if you find the right talent to hire, you may be disappointed by the outcome if you don’t have adequate processes to support them once they join your team. The hiring process can be costly, but you must also have adequate resources to invest in onboarding and continued support for new hires.
This can include setting up new hires with a mentor, developing a knowledge-sharing program, and other methods for getting them acclimated to their new position. The goal is to help them succeed in their roles to avoid going through the costly hiring process again sooner than you have to.
Maximizing Growth Through Strategic Insurance Workforce Solutions
Instead of going through the hiring process independently and putting additional stress on internal teams, many insurers turn to outsourced insurance staffing support. There are numerous reasons why this type of partnership is, in many cases, the right move:
Access to Specialized Talent
One of the main benefits of partnering with an outsourced insurance staffing firm is gaining access to qualified teams with specialized talent and skills. This is especially beneficial when the specialized role is hard to fill or costly to recruit for internally.
In many instances, BPO providers have teams of professionals with specific knowledge and experience in claims processing, underwriting, and customer service. As mentioned above, these workers can help you improve the quality and efficiency of your operations and focus on your core operations.
Cost Savings
Outsourcing is often more cost-effective than hiring and training internal staff. Specifically, you can save on salaries, benefits, training, and more when partnering with a specialized BPO provider.
This is particularly true for insurers that face fluctuating staffing needs during peak seasons, as they can adjust their team’s size according to the current demand without spending time and money hiring in-house.
Enhanced Flexibility
Working with a BPO partner makes it easier to scale operations up or down to meet the market’s and your policyholders’ needs, which can fluctuate due to seasonal trends, natural disasters, or economic fluctuations.
These sudden workload increases or decreases can be challenging to manage, especially for in-house teams with fixed staffing levels. But, with the right insurance staffing resources, you can instantly expand your team size.
Covenir: Your Onshore Insurance Staffing Expertise
At Covenir, our expert teams can step in and offer your policyholders the high-quality, on-brand service levels they have come to expect. Rather than going through the expensive recruiting and hiring process, you can rely on the experienced professionals on our team to give you the people power you require to offer an engaging and proactive service.
We have you covered from back-office support like underwriting support and premium services to frontline roles like customer service and FNOL and claims. We know the industry inside and out, so we can create the custom staffing solution you need to focus more on growth and innovation and less on recruiting and hiring.