Ultera/P8 for Policy Owner Services

Business Challenge
The rising cost of doing business, coupled with stiff industry competition, is driving today’s insurers to improve operational efficiencies and reduce administrative costs. Additionally, customer expectations and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) necessitate aggressive response-time requirements.

Reliance on manual, paper-based business processes hampers an insurers’ ability to meet customer demands and compliance obligations, as well as being able to respond to new product introductions and ongoing changing market dynamics. It also impedes an insurers’ ability to access policy information to respond to customer queries at the point of initial contact, resulting in lengthy and costly call center follow up. This delayed response can reduce customer satisfaction and retention, ultimately affecting the bottom line.

Updating legacy systems and implementing new business processes often requires significant lead time and resource commitments. As such, insurers need solutions that streamline processes and reduce costs, help them comply with regulatory requirements and SLA’s, and equip services representatives with information needed to achieve high levels of first-call resolution to improve response times. These solutions must also enable insurers to quickly and cost-effectively supplement existing business systems and be able to create and modify business processes as needed.

Solution
IPD’s Ultera/P8 for Policy Owner Services supplies the capabilities that insurers need to improve operational performance, reduce costs and comply with SLAs and regulatory requirements. With Ultera/P8 for Policy Owner Services, provider transactions received by paper, fax, e-mail or via a self-service portal are captured, cataloged and stored in the IBM Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repository. The solution leverages the content captured from these sources to enable secured access to electronic documents from every desktop. Ultera/P8 for Policy Owner Services then applies configurable business rules to automate work distribution to the appropriate person at each step in the business process. It also enables policy owner representatives to manually create work items with and without any associated documentation.

The solution helps improve customer satisfaction and retention by allowing services representatives to respond in a timely manner. Supplying the tools needed to efficiently create and organize follow-up tasks resulting from phone calls and correspondence, Ultera/P8’s for Policy Owner Services “service action form” enables service representatives to specify and complete the activities needed to resolve each customer inquiry. Fully integrated with other systems, the service action form interface also provides a consolidated view of all information needed to drive decision making. Tasks performed are notated at each step, providing a thorough audit trail of each inquiry, enabling representatives to immediately view information concerning work in progress.

Value Proposition
Ultera/P8 for Policy Owner Services delivers a low total cost of ownership and a compelling return on investment, with complete payback in less than 12 months. In addition, IPD clients report dramatic performance improvements and business returns, including cycle time reductions of 50 percent or more, productivity increase of better than 45 percent, and processing cost reductions exceeding 40 percent, with assured compliance, and within a fully configurable solution that is often deployed across most of the core operational areas of insurance organizations.

Ultera/P8 for Policy Owner Services is proven to implement faster and with lower risk than custom- and integrator-built solutions. Many IPD clients require no coding effort whatsoever to implement solutions to meet their exact requirements.