Patra’s Outsourcing Services Ease Open Enrollment Hurdles

Thank you everyone for joining us today. I’m really, really happy you could make it.

Today, we will be discussing how to manage your peak volumes and staffing challenges, using outsourcing and and hopefully how to improve your operational challenges during the open enrollment season.

Today, we’ll go through an overview of you know, who Patra is, what the common challenges that retail agencies face today why outsourcing can help, and then we will stop for questions and answers at the end of the presentation as well.

I know we set aside about an hour for this presentation. It will likely be more towards thirty minutes. So we’ll give you some time back in your day, but we did want to allow ample time for questions and answers at the end of the presentation as well.

So let’s get right into it and talk about who Patra is. So we offer technology enabled services for the insurance industry.

So, Patra’s been working with insurance organizations for fifteen years and addressing operational efficiencies.

Since two thousand and five, Patra has leveraged people and technology to power insurance processes.

And this frees up account management staff from doing the time consuming back office tasks and allows your team to focus on more customer focused tasks.

So Patra truly is a global company. We have over thirty six hundred team members globally.

Two hundred and fifty of them are licensed professionals and, The US licensed staff is supported by a large and diverse staff of administration and operations personnel.

We have six processing centers of excellence, including two InvisAG and one contact center in Manilla, but we are headquartered, right here in the US out of California.

Our customers make up recipients of some of the most notable and highest ranking insurance awards. So this is just some examples of the, the customers that we work with. We really do take pride in being a trusted partner for our, agency partners and sharing our for teas with a network of leading and innovative insurance agencies, to help achieve high performance and revenue growth.

So what is challenging your agency’s operational efficiency?

Sure as we move forward, some of these things probably ring true for you. Employee turnover, just finding good qualified staff to work on your agency’s tasks, keeping up turnaround time, keeping customers happy, EMO exposure, pricing competition.

The bottom line is retail agencies have been forced to compete, on a higher level to remain competitive in the market. You’re forced to do more and more every single day for your customers to remain competitive.

So you often face challenges when it comes to operating your organization’s efficiently and, retaining a profit.

The concern for financial health often causes agencies to take on additional servicing to remain competitive. This leaves agencies exhausted and pulled in many directions.

It could also impede the development of new skills for employees and deters them from being creative.

So these are just some of the concerns that brokers are facing today that we are able to assist with moving forward.

Outsourcing in general will reduce employee turnover and limit hiring needs.

Lower labor costs, focus on your core competencies, promote growth, offer consistent turnaround times and reduce your liability on your bottom line.

On on demand is, one of our service models that focuses on leveraging our global processing centers to address specific tasks.

On Demand is an a la carte menu services, and you can choose one service or many services to contract with, with Patra.

And then we do our part to train our teams to process your work behind the scenes and deliver that back to you. So everything that I’m gonna go over today is truly an a la carte menu of services that you can choose from, but the way we’ve set it up is to look at these services as a renewal cycle.

So as we jump into how Patrick can help, we’ll start with the pre renewal services.

As your staff is getting ready for those first renewal meetings and pulling, renewals and gathering other quotes and and marketing, Patrick can help.

So for larger groups, we do pull claims experience on a regular basis, either monthly orderly or annually for your team.

We’re able to just pull that as a document retrieval service, or we’re able to pull the claims experience and put that into a more digestible format for your clients to share with them at the renewal meeting.

We’re able to pull the claims experience and adjust the census, manipulate the census into the right format for your marketing needs, and we’re able to send through the entire RFP if that’s something that you’d like us to help with.

More frequently, Pietra is used for online quoting, carrier renewal extraction, and renewal and alternate spreadsheets.

So spreadsheeting in your format can be really time consuming.

We would use your format for these, side by side comparisons once proposals are obtained and We process that data entry into your format, but we also use a quality assurance team to peer review all of our work to confirm its accuracy, both in the data in that spreadsheet, but also in the formatting of that spreadsheet prior to sending it back to your staff to use and to review prior to that renewal meeting.

This often saves hours of time for your staff so that they can focus on their core competencies and that face to face client interaction.

During the renewal service, This is really when your clients have made some decisions. Right? So you’ve had those strategic conversations with them. And at this point, they have made their decisions on plan designs for the upcoming policy year. They have contribution strategies, decisions on tiers, etcetera.

And all of that information needs to be put into multiple places.

And Patra’s data entry services can help with that tremendously.

So starting first with open enrollment materials or benefit guides.

We are able to plug and play and enter that information into your benefit guide format on your behalf.

And then have that peer reviewed as well to confirm accuracy prior to delivering that back.

For your review and to share with the employees of your client groups.

We’re also able to both build out new benefit admin portals or enter renewal data into your current benefit admin portal to make sure that that information is accurate prior to opening that up for online enrollment for the employees of your clients.

Compliance documents and notifications are also, really commonplace to have to distribute Most of that is truly data entry, whether it’s into a template or into a compliance system spitting out wrap documents, a PDs, SMRs, or state mandated notifications.

Is there any questions on that so far.

Brooke, there are no open questions at this time.

Okay. Great. And and, please, everybody on the call, if you do have questions about more specific, processes that you’d like me to dive into at this time, feel free to enter that into the Q and A box at the bottom of your screen, and we will address any questions that you have.

So in addition to those data entry services and making sure that we’re, entering all of your client’s decisions into the right places in real time. We also, process all of the ads terms and changes for client. So we do this both through a benefit admin portal. So we’re very system agnostic whether you use ease or employee navigator or any of the other benefit admin portals out there were able to process all of those electronic changes as well as any paper or PDF documents sent to your, sent to your agency.

And we do that in, turnaround time of anywhere from twenty four to forty eight hours on average.

With that turnaround time increasing during the fourth quarter to an average of seventy two hours. But what we’re really doing is filling in the human need for those groups who don’t have eight thirty four file feeds set up, and we’re going in and really processing that with the carriers manually.

And again, going through a one hundred percent peer review and quality assurance process to make sure that we’re doing it accurately and timely so that temp IDs can be pulled and you have those available for anything that’s been processed.

After the renewal has been complete and all the eligibility has been processed.

The plans have been set up, and you, you feel like you can really take a deep breath at this point, right? And and just relax a little bit. But this is one you have to provide billing reconciliations.

You want to make sure that your clients are starting off on a good foot for the new year, and starting off with a clean and accurate bill.

If that’s something that you’re providing today, Patra takes on that billing reconciliation need comparing, the accurate enrollment from your benefit admin system to the carrier invoice and a line by line audit. So and we would look into and provide any discrepancies and make sure that those are corrected immediately.

We’re also processing agency management system updates So these are often a a huge project during the first quarter.

This is something that, your staff is spending a lot of time on. Again, just entering the data from all of the client decisions and potential changes that have taken place through open enrollment.

Patrick can process this in real time Meaning as your clients make their decisions, we can update your agency management system so that you can start fresh in post commissions accurately starting right on January first as an example.

We also provide enrollment confirmations and benefit admin audits if that’s something that you’re interested in.

Ongoing throughout the year. We’re always doing special projects for our customers. So it does not have to be an ongoing service that you’re using us for. We do often do special projects that may take a couple weeks or a couple months for some of our, agency partners.

We’re also providing COBRA assistance, compliance assistance, and actually one of our top selling services is commission posting. So these are Just a few of our top selling services for the employee benefits division, ways that agencies are taking some of the back office work off of their staff’s plate to give them more time in the day to find a little bit of balance, but also focus on the strategic work that they were hired for.

So if you have any questions on that, I’m happy to answer those. But at this point, I’ll dive into our employee benefits division by the numbers.

So we do provide more than sixty unique processes. I touched on just a few of those today, everything is so customizable with Patra that really if you can find, a task that your agency needs help with, And it follows a specific workflow or set of instructions.

Patra can take on that back office task and help you with that.

Eligibility is one of our highest volume services, and of the hundred thousand eligibility transactions that we process on an annual basis, we are turning those around with a ninety nine point two percent accuracy rate. And this kind of lifts the need for that billing reconciliation for customers it lifts the need, for liability concerns as well, as we assist you through that process.

And our production has increased by two hundred and twelve percent since two thousand and nineteen, saying a lot with the the pandemic in in twenty twenty, we still have been growing and growing year over year.

As I mentioned before, we are very system agnostic.

We work within any system that you’re using and support you as if we are a remote employee.

So any system that you’re using, we will use within your environment.

We do have quite a bit of expertise within, these systems, but we are, again, benefit or and system agnostic.

So I do see a question. So and I I’m about to move on to a different type of service. So I’ll, I’ll address that question first before I move forward. The pricing model for the on demand service, of a la carte services that we just went through, this is an hourly rate. So this is something that really sets us apart from our titian, where we’re not charging, a per case fee. We’re not charging a full time equivalent model fee where you’re charging we’re not charging for one person to work on your on your system for forty hours a week. We’re simply charging an hourly rates and we’re going to charge you down to the minute for however long it takes us to process that work.

There are no minimums.

So whether you have five hours of work for us a week or five hundred hours of work for us a week, that’s all okay. We’re able to adjust our teams and really scale with you for the busy times of the year. And for the slow times of the year as well. So we will scale up during open enrollment, and we will scale down when you, when things kinda calm down for you. So that’s a really nice differentiator for Patra.

Okay. So moving on, we just talked about, we just talked about our on demand services. So, again, this is an a la carte menu where you can pick one service and kind of run with that, and then implement new services on top of that so that you have a very, broad portfolio with Patra on how we can help.

Another service that we offer is for small account solutions. And we call this our select model.

Our select team seamlessly integrates with your agency to efficiently manage and grow your books of small business.

Now, small business can mean different things to different people.

And different things to different agencies.

But the way that our agency partners usually choose to break that down is either by number of enrolled lives. So we that could be ten or less, five or less or fifty or less depending on the agency that we’re working with. Or to break that out by a revenue component. So let’s say they, a company earns less than three thousand dollars a year in commission.

That would maybe go over to Patra. So it, it’s really flexible and it’s really your decision, what that book of business looks like. But we discovered that agencies are finding that their small books of business require a lot more hand holding than their larger customers.

It’s a lot more work, and it’s much less profitable, if profitable at all. So what we’ve, put together is a select model to reduce staffing challenges and help agencies increase their revenue.

Patra allows the agencies, employees to shift their focus where we take on the customer service in a very boutique level of service to an entire small book of business.

How this works is we would get through, recruitment. We would root, a dedicated account manager who works for Patra. So we would, you know, pay their salary, their vacation, their benefits, etcetera.

But you would be involved in that recruiting process, and we would make sure that this person is familiar both with your region and tenured in the industry and already licensed.

Along with that, we offer every service under the sun for these customers. We’re doing everything from processing their eligibility to answering employee specific questions on claims. We’re marketing every renewal and we’re up selling. So we’re talking to these clients and building a relationship with them, talking about how else we can round out their its portfolio.

So we’re truly introduced as an account manager for your agency to this book of business And the reason we’re able to do it so efficiently is that this account manager has our offshore teams doing all of the back end work in their back pocket. So they’re able to manage a very large book of business.

We do have one question that this came through.

Sure.

Okay. They ask how long does a typical recruitment process take for the select account manager?

So the recruitment process, included is included in the implementation timeline. So all in, we’re looking at sixty to ninety days to fully recruit and have everything implemented and live to take over that book of business. So, two to three months is, is a good estimate for the select model.

Now, just to clarify for the on demand model, implementing one service at a time for your overall, agency customers, that implementation is generally four to six weeks.

So much quicker to to implement kind of one service at a time to relieve your staff. But to take on an entire book of business in the select model, which is also a different pricing structure. That’s a sixty to ninety day time frame.

So if any of this interests you now is definitely the time, to talk about this with open enrollment looming. I know that we’re all thinking ninety days ahead.

So to us, it’s already here. Right? So if you’d like to schedule something one on one, if you’d like to discuss a project timeline or how soon things can get implemented or dive into any customization for your specific agency, we’re happy to set something up privately.

To get started, you can visit our website and select contact us. Just tell us how to help your organization.

I hope that we can help you out and I hope that this was helpful for you today.