Insurance agency leaders are balancing the urgent business need to introduce more automation with the equally important requirement to ensure their finance and admin teams’ fear of being replaced doesn’t result in a high staff turnover. One of the best use cases to showcase the benefits of automation comes with something near and dear to all agents’ hearts - the Direct Bill Commission (DBC) process.
Automation in the insurance industry is helping agencies boost efficiencies while cutting costs. By lowering the tedious manual processes, agents are freed up to focus on more strategic planning and operational activities that drive agency growth. This makes the value of automation an obvoius choice for business leaders.
However, despite the obvious benefits of automation, many finance and admin staff remain skeptical of process automation and newer AI technologies, fearful that their value may be questioned and that they could potentially be replaced.
Currently, the staff turnover rate of insurance workers in the US is around 12 to 15%, whereas it was averaging just 8 to 9% over the past decade. This is a growing concern for managers who are mindful of the time and expense of training up new staff each time one leaves.
[Related Topic: Addressing High Staff Turnover Through Intelligent Data Management]
One of the main reasons for staff leaving is worker burnout, which can often be brought on by the frustration of repetitive manual tasks that take time, often include errors and omissions, and result in soul-destroying do-overs.
One process that is particularly plagued by labor-intensive, manual intervention is the handling of direct bill commissions.
Many agencies opt for direct billing, where the carrier bills the insured directly. The commission earned by the insurance agency is then passed on via a direct bill commission statement from the carrier. Reconciling monthly commission can be a real headache for agency finance and admin teams, especially those that have countless clients, deal with multiple carriers, or have to manage complex commission structures.
The risk of the manual process is of genuine concern for agencies because even a small mistake could result in underbilled revenue for the agency. This, in turn, translates into underpaid agents . Doing things manually also makes it difficult for agents to get a clear picture of their overall earnings and adds risk for the business, which will find it harder to ensure compliance, leading to fines or penalties.
[related Topic: Slash Manual Inputs and Boost Operational Excellence with Synatic]
This important, but complex process often requires multiple staff to ensure accurate and timeous results and so it’s not surprising that the prospect of automation can evoke a strong reaction from teams who may feel their core competency is being questioned and job security threatened.
The Synatic AutoDB Commission solution is a tool that empowers an agency's workforce, rather than making it obsolete.
AutoDB Commission is a complete solution for DBC automation. It will collect commission information and commission statements from multiple carriers, significantly reducing the time required to gather all relevant information. Once it has automatically completed all data conversions required, a customizable rules engine quickly completes calculations.
Not only does the engine eliminate errors and omissions, but it also automatically imports completed commission reports directly into the AMS, making a single source of the truth available to all relevant teams across the agency.
Synatic's powerful toolset gives agencies a suite of enterprise functionality that enables automation and workflows for data management, removing cumbersome manual processes and smooths the process for all the teams involved.
[Related Topic: How to Automate Direct Bill Commission Calculations]
While agency finance and admin teams may have initial reservations about handing over the very important processing role of direct bill commissions, the benefits soon win them over.
An automated DBC process eliminates much of the tedious manual work and minimizes errors - no more manually downloading, parsing, and entering data from carrier commission statements.
[Related Topic: Simplifying Insurance Work to Retain More Workers]
Automated systems can process and properly distribute commissions far faster than manual methods, ensuring agents receive their earnings sooner. It also means agents benefit from real-time access to their commission data, giving them, and their managers, a clear understanding of their earnings and performance. This plays a vital role in transparent conversations between leaders and staff that are often missing when they are consumed by resolving disputes caused by errors and omissions before any meaningful engagement can begin.
Most importantly, an automated DBC system means agents can spend more time on revenue-generating activities like prospecting, selling, and providing excellent customer service instead of manually tracking commissions with Excel Spreadsheets. This not only means better job satisfaction and improved productivity.
If you want to learn how you can eliminate your staffs fears about tech and provide them with a compelling reasons why further automation holds the key to a happier, more productive workplace, contact Synatic today.
