Patra OnDemand for Employee Benefits

Good afternoon. My name is Dave Tight.

Our topic today is how to confront and conquer operational inefficiencies. I’m EVP of business development at Patra. I’ve been with Patra over thirteen years. I’m a member of our business development team. Thanks, Dave. My name is Brooke Whitney, and I’m a sales solution consultant for employee benefits here at Patra.

I act as a subject matter expert for all things employee benefits, and I have sixteen years of experience in operational, on the operational side of agencies. So let’s talk a little bit about Patra. Patra has been working with insurance organizations for over fifteen years with our primary focus on confronting and conquering operational inefficiencies exactly the topic of this presentation.

Since 2005, Patra has leveraged people and technology to power insurance processes. By taking on the repetitive time consuming back office tasks, our services free up your account management staff so they can focus more on customer focused tasks and help grow the agency.

Patra is a US based company with a global presence.

The company is headquartered in California. We open an office in Vizag India in two thousand and five. Fifteen years later, we now have four offices in India, one office in the Philippines, and two offices in the United States. We have over three thousand employees in India, and all of the process executives are college educated with a four year degree. In total, we have over thirty four hundred employees globally.

With Patra, we take pride in supporting a network of innovative insurance agencies. Many of our customers are recipients of some of the most notable and highest ranking awards within the insurance industry. What are these operational inefficiencies?

I’m gonna have Brooke go ahead and, walk us through that. Brooke?

Thank you. So brokerages often face challenges when it comes to operating their organizations efficiently and affordably.
The concern for financial health often causes them to take on additional servicing to remain competitive. This leaves them exhausted. Pulled in many directions and prevents the business from growing as it otherwise could. This also impedes the development of new skills among employees and deters them from being creative.
Some concerns that brokers are facing today include training and retraining employee turnover increased duties due to the client demand, technology administration, and E and O exposure.

So the next slide we’ll go through is how can we help in response to these concerns and in order to stay competitive in today’s insurance business environment, more and more brokers are turning to business process outsourcing or BPOs as a solution. Brokerages are refocusing internal resources on their core functions while outsourcing some of their back office business processes.

When experienced employees are hard to find, partnering with a BPO can be an effective solution that enables cost effective growth, increases output, providing top notch customer service, and frees up time for sales and service employees. Knowing the benefits of BPO will help a brokerage decide if this is a solution that could work for their business.

Outsourcing will enable you to, one, reduce employee turnover, and limit hiring. When you choose to outsource tasks, whether it be data entry, eligibility management, billing audits, renewal assistance, or small account management, you pay your outsourcing partner as a contractor. This means you won’t need to hire a new employee who will likely want to progress beyond the entry level job eventually. This saves you money on everything from benefits to training, to recruitment, and puts a stop to the turnover cycle.

Two, lower your labor costs, hiring an employee to manage your business processes often cost more than minimum wage. If you can find someone to do these tasks at a lower salary, there are other employment costs involved like training, benefits, and equipment. By outsourcing these processes, the work will be completed in a timely, efficient, and cost effective manner.

Three, allows you to focus on your core competencies. Often your key employees who you hired for their expertise in the insurance industry, sales, relationship management and consulting, end up spending a large portion of their day on transactional tasks. Your BPO partner, can take on these tasks, allowing your experienced employees to focus on their core competencies, let them do what they do best and outsource the rest. Promote growth, allowing sales to focus on sales will ultimately equal growth for your agency. Giving your account manager’s time to focus on client relationships and account rounding will ultimately lead to growth and higher retention.
Provide quicker and consistent turnaround times. Patra uses globally dispersed staff to complete work. This means that your business will run twenty four seven, which results in quicker turnaround times for you and your clients.

And last, reduce your liability, Patra offers liability coverage through our own eno policy protecting your bottom line.
So Patra’s processing experts and consultants addressed an organization’s specific workload needs to improve efficiency and we’re gonna talk about how we do that for employee benefits today.

Our on demand solutions at as an a la carte menu for any of the processes that I’m going to talk about or even processes that we haven’t brought up. What I’ll talk about today is our most frequently used high highest selling services in the EV market for on demand services. But if you have a strategic workflow, for a back office task that you’d like us to take over, we’re happy to have that conversation for you.
A solution for every part of the EV renewal cycle.

First, the pre renewal.

For larger groups, claims experience, is something that we deal with quite often. For experience rated groups, it’s important to understand and be aware of the last three years of claims experience when running a renewal or quoting plans with other carriers. Our team at Patra can pull the claims experience on your behalf, and form it the many reports required for quoting as part of your RFP process.

For census population, many brokers still rely on their customers to provide them with the required census for quoting and renewals. That census may often be delivered in a format that the incumbent or alternate carriers cannot or will not accept. Our teams are able to format the census to the guidelines of the carrier on your behalf so you will not need to put an additional burden on your staff or your clients. RFP preparation, Patra is happy to compile questionnaires, client data, client experience, and census data and send out RFPs in your format to any carriers you’d like to quote.

For small group or community rated groups, carryout renewal extraction and quoting is pulling the renewals in alternate plan designs which can be very time consuming for your staff. Even more so as getting that information into a clear and concise format that your clients can understand and review in the form of a spreadsheet. Pota Patrick can gather all quotes and renewals and enter them into your spreadsheet to assist your staff. This allows your staff more time to focus on details, client facing duties, and other renewal tasks.

During the renewal, we consider this to be after your clients have made plan and contribution decisions for their upcoming plan year. During that time, your staff is very busy getting ready for open enrollment meetings and tracking that data in multiple places. During this busy time, can help by assisting with OE material creation, updating client portals such as employee navigator, benefit point, and ease to name a few. Providing required compliance documents for meetings such as the SPDs, SMMs, and the chip notices.

After open enrollment meetings have taken place, there is an influx of ads, terms, and changes that take place. Taking that burden off of your plate is our specialty. Our eligibility service provides processing of any changes enrollments or terminations throughout the year and at renewal. We understand that fourth quarter is the busiest time of year for these changes, and we are staffed accordingly to accommodate that influx.

For post renewal services, after clients have successfully renewed with each applicable carrier, your agency may be overwhelmed with things like billing reconciliations, updates to your own agency management system, enrollment confirmations, and benefit admin situation system audits. We can take one or all of these items off of your plate to allow employees to focus on post open enrollment meetings, proactive communications and further training on these products. Ongoing client management Patra offers all of our services throughout the year, not just at renewal. Some popular services that have not yet been mentioned in our presentation include include COBRA administration and accounting and commission posting.

So a little bit about our employee benefits division, we provide more than sixty unique processes currently to our clients But like I mentioned before, if you have a task that you have not heard about, that you’d like us to take on as part of our business process outsourcing. We’re happy to do that. Another key thing to look at is our revenue growth. Employee benefits division of Patra grew two hundred and twelve percent in twenty nineteen.

And in twenty nineteen, we processed eighty four thousand eligibility transactions with ninety nine point two percent accuracy rate. It’s important to note that all of our services include quality assurance. Each process task goes to a second set of eyes to ensure it was processed accurately. In addition, we include enrollment verifications as part of our eligibility service. As far as system integration goes, there are a sample of AMS and Bend admin systems we’ve integrated with. We’re truly system agnostic, and we work with many, if not all, of the AMS and Bend admin systems available on the market.

So I wanna take a moment to talk about what def differentiates Patra to help support your back office services The day to day work is done by dedicated team members working on your processes in India, but this couldn’t be done effectively without having dedicated onshore client consultants managing the process. They become a single point of contact between your agency and your and Patra so that you can be communicating with them on a daily basis on what is going on and how how if there’s any changes to the workflow or whatnot. So they’re managing the workflow, giving you, bringing you best practices and and monitoring the production. The offshore team, we refer to them as our processing team, and they’re as I said, they’re dedicated to the agency.

They’re working twenty four hours a day through three eight hour shifts. It’s a flexible service. So you so that your client consultant will determine which shift makes the most sense for that particular service. And therefore, you could be working during the night in India, which is during the day. For some tasks like certificates or during the day in India during your night, such as census data entry. It’s a focused training team, so that they’re they’re trained narrow and deep so they can do the processes very effectively.

And by having by having a, multiple parties assigned to a particular pros process, you have service continuity. The service model is literally a an hourly billing model. You only pay for what you use. There’s no in no minimums. And you never pay for downtime. Finally, we talked about E and O. We do have comprehensive E and O So if a claim arises due to a mistake by one of our team members, Patra stands behind our work with our E and O.

One of the first steps to getting started with an agency is to have your client consultant and IT integration team work with your IT team to gain remote access to your systems.

Security is our number one priority.

Patra is SOC two certified and uses security best practices to ensure the safety and privacy of your client data. So the the next step would be if you’re interested in discussing this further, you can go to our website, click contact us, and, walk, fill out the form about how we can help your organization, and then you’ll contacted by someone on our business development team that’s dedicated to supporting your region. You can also reach out to any of us with any questions.
Thank you so much. Dave Tight signing off.