May 12, 2015

Getting More Done with Less: An Exception-based Processing User Spotlight

By: Patrick Masi

If you've had a chance to participate in recent industry education conferences – such as SILA, NetVU, or the upcoming IRI Operations and Technology conference – you may have run into someone from Vertafore talking about exception-based processing. In case you missed us, exception-based processing is the idea of using automation to take care of routine compliance, so your team of licensing specialists can focus on the difficult exception cases.

Recently, I spoke with a customer who had an interesting experience after implementing a Sircon solution to help with modernized exception-based processing.

After going live with the service, her team of licensing specialists started noticing several changes. They weren't getting as much overtime anymore. There seemed to be less day-to-day stress and there were fewer onboarding tasks they had to do. So they started getting nervous – is the company losing business?  Are producers choosing other carriers instead of us?

The customer mentioned that she was caught off guard by the question, as she was unsure of the answer.

Let's take a step back

So what happened here? Previously, this carrier was paying its employees overtime in order to satisfy regulatory compliance requirements. Not only were they paying out overtime costs, but they occasionally had to hire temporary employees as well. These licensing specialists and temps were completing day-to-day tasks such as manual appointments, looking up data on state websites, and re-keying in information from a form to an electronic source (i.e., spreadsheet or on premise legacy software). 

Fast-forward

After implementing a Sircon solution, all of that was being handled by automation. This left only exceptions, or cases that could only be handled manually, for the team to focus their time on. 

So when the customer did some research on their company's sales for that quarter, she found that business was actually up! Not only was business thriving, this carrier was saving money by keeping current employees on a regular schedule, and handling compliance without hiring temps.  

The customer had actually achieved the mythical "getting more done with less."

Heading to IRI Ops & Tech in May? Let us know, we'd like to see you there and talk more about exception based processing!