Insurance companies have a lot on their plates assisting policyholders with their healthcare, vehicle, home, life, and other coverage. Amidst all these responsibilities, managing the printing and mailing of documents shouldn’t be one of their concerns. Yet, it is a common reality for many insurance companies.
The insurance industry produces a ton of paper due to stringent regulations and processes surrounding billing, claims, policies, and other materials. It’s also an industry that’s been slow to pursue digital transformation given the sensitive customer data, such as health records, social security numbers, payment information, and income reporting, they manage. But even riskier than not digitizing data, processes continue to manage the burden of print operations and costs in-house.
Even if we know that print will be around for the insurance industry for the foreseeable future, companies can and should explore ways to streamline and save on their print operations while considering digital adoption. Often, this means pivoting away from in-house print management to outsourced solutions that open the door to greater efficiency, cost savings, and automation while freeing up internal resources to shift to other, more valuable tasks.
The costs of managing print in-house
Many insurance leaders are now questioning why they keep their print centers and feel misaligned with investments as operating margins in the industry and capital investment decisions remain under pressure. And that’s with good reason:
- The research firm Gartner estimates that the average business spends between 1 and 3% of their total yearly revenue-generating documents and vastly underestimates their total print expenses and needs. Imagine how much you must multiply that amount if you’re an insurance company constantly printing documents.
- Printers, copiers, ink, and bulk paper supplies take up space, which costs money. On average, just 250 standard file cabinets take up 2,500 square feet, which adds up to $135,000 per year.
- The price of paper itself surged 45% over 2022.
- A PriceWaterhouseCoopers study found that the average employee spends eight hours managing paper documents weekly, which increases productivity costs and takes them away from other more value-added tasks.
There’s also the factor that print costs fluctuate for insurance companies based on shifts in demand. New laws might dictate changes to printing and mailing policy documents in a highly regulated industry. There’s also the marketing aspect if you want to launch a direct mail campaign tied to a new product, service, life, or seasonal event.
So many of these costs could be reduced for insurance companies that outsource their print operations.
The benefits of outsourcing print
Hiring an outside company to manage your print operations costs money. But it can more than make up for the costs of keeping the function in-house for a variety of reasons:
- Reduced capital expenditures: Outsourcing print means you’re no longer responsible for purchasing, storing, and maintaining all the related equipment. Your outsourcing partner likely has more modern, sophisticated printing equipment and other more efficient systems than your own.
- Improved employee productivity: Taking print tasks off your employees’ plates frees up that time for other duties.
- Consistent quality: You’ll get access to experts in managing end-to-end print production processes, so you benefit from consistent output.
- Built-in disaster recovery: If you outsource print, you ensure your transactional mail—invoices, statements, and other sensitive documents—deploy on time, every time, in the event of a disruption to your current print and mail solution. Outsourcing disaster recovery can improve businesses’ ROI by 15%.
- Improved transparency: When businesses shift to outsourced print, some start seeing more information and data surface than when they manage operations in-house. Internal print management often leads to information sitting in silos across departments and not being centralized in one primary system everyone can access.
- Extended marketing communications support: Even print statements can serve as marketing vehicles for your company, so ensure your print partner can do more than just the basics, with the ability to handle creative design and execution across online, offline, and digital platforms.
- Digital capabilities—if you want them: There might come a day when you want to extend your payments and marketing communications beyond print. It makes sense to outsource print to a partner with deep experience in offline and online payment, presentment, and promotional channels and methods you can test into new digital media when the time comes.
The outcome of many of these benefits is improved customer experience. Customers will receive well-designed, relevant, timely mailings, boosting their satisfaction and loyalty.
Outsourcing print with OSG
OSG elevates your policyholders’ financial experience by offering insights and strategies for enhancing customer communications, statement presentment, and payment options. Simultaneously, we provide an omnichannel payment experience to improve overall collections performance and yield valuable information about customer payment preferences. Our approach carries several benefits for insurance companies:
- Experience in migrating companies away from in-house print operations to outsourced for the first time
- Proven efficiencies—we helped one firm cut down their number of letter templates from 400 to 50 and envelopes from 50 to 10
- Guaranteed compliance with all necessary data security and privacy standards and security via fully monitored production facilities with exception-based, self-monitoring systems that are fully redundant, repeatable, and monitored 24/7, 365 days a year
- Flexibility to choose the best outsourcing setup for your business, including a hybrid of paper and digital documents, in addition to launching a complete digital adoption program and omnichannel marketing campaigns
- Reduced vendor bloat for firms using multiple companies for in-house and likely paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for unused software
- Decreased labor costs in addition to capital expenditures
- Distributed facilities worldwide and a tight working relationship with the USPS to ensure precise printing and delivery
- Continued workflow and data protection via business continuity and disaster recovery policies and procedures to safeguard your business in the event of an incident
Let go of the burden of managing print in-house at your insurance company. Contact us today to learn how we’ve helped businesses like yours save time, money, and labor with outsourced print