Doing things they way they’ve always been done is costing you more than you think.
When you take the common sports saying: winning solves everything and actually deconstruct it – you realize, winning can often delay or sideline foundational issues that are lurking around the corner.
Over the past decade, the insurance industry has seen a huge explosion of investment, growth, new technologies, and consolidation as there’s been a lot of “winning.” As the market hardens and we reckon with headwinds like the aging out workforce, difficulty hiring, carriers leaving states – now is when we really see where the cracks are in our industry.
One of the most prominent challenges that agencies of all sizes share are legacy billing workflows that require an enormous amount of manpower and time to manage. While other industries have embraced technology to increase efficiency of their employees, insurance falls behind severely, often unable to measure and judge efficiency effectively across their business.
A few big contributors can be attributed why this is the case:
- Slow implementation of fully digital payments prohibits automation
- Not really understanding the true cost of doing business and its impact on margins
- Lack of internal ownership leads to teams “to do it how it’s always been done”
- Few solutions that optimize the entire workflow versus single point solutions (which often can cause more work integrating multiple tools together)
Regardless of why it’s the case, when leaders and teams take a hard audit of their billing process, time and time again the same conclusion is made: teams are spending too much time managing repetitive administrative tasks instead of spending time on revenue generating activities for the business.
With this new year, spend the time to walk through the process again with the team, highlight the manual steps that occur every time your team has to collect premiums from a customer, and find a solution that can automate these tasks away.