How your insurance organization services its clients and accounts is largely dependent on the quality of output from your administrative processes. If you’ve got slow turn-around times, mistakes and requests for more information and other inefficiencies, your organization is bound for poor service – no matter how pleasant your staff may be.
The way your staff is trained plays a big role in how your insurance organization delivers service. At ReSource Pro, we’ve optimized training to ensure that we deliver excellent service to each of our clients consistently, enabling them to deliver superior service to their clients. Here are several critical success factors that we’ve learned from our experience that you can use to bolster your internal training.
GET STRATEGIC ABOUT TRAINING
Through our experience working with hundreds of insurance organizations, we’ve found that lack of training is the most prevalent issue. It’s important to define a strategic approach to training that ensures staff have the knowledge and skills to complete tasks accurately and efficiently, at every level. This means creating training and development plans for every position and then consistently executing on them throughout the organization. This will increase staff contributions and lead to happier employees, managers and clients…and who doesn’t want that?
STANDARDIZATION
By standardizing procedures, you can ensure that everyone in the organization is doing things in the most effective and efficient way possible. Standardization doesn’t mean that your organization isn’t allowed to be flexible to adjust processes to fit your needs, on the contrary it provides better insights into the processes and therefore increases the flexibility you have. The documented standardization become your standard operating procedures (SOP) and is the foundation for effective training, as it ensures the trainer and trainee are on the same page.
EFFECTIVE TRAINING DELIVERY
Many insurance organizations use ‘shadowing’ as their primary training method: a new employee watches a veteran do the job they are expected to do. This simply isn’t very effective when done in isolation. Let’s say that veteran does certain things inefficiently – now you have two employees that adhere to poor, unproductive processes. Or maybe that new employee is forced to create their own process to overcome a lack of effective training on how to do the same thing according to your SOPs.
Training and developing staff effectively involves delivery methodologies that ensure new employees have the skills to perform. A well-delivered training session includes setting clear goals and expectations, monitoring and providing timely feedback, and the right combination of teaching, mentoring and coaching.
PROVIDING THE NECESSARY TOOLS
For employees to do their jobs effectively, they need access to the right tools, information and coaching. Certain background information, terms and glossaries, checklists, and ‘cheat sheets’ can be good on-the-job tools, if they are developed in accordance with the SOPs and provided as part of the training.
THE BOTTOM LINE
We’ve experienced in our own business that the effective training and development of employees leads to increased output of high-quality work, improved customer service and greater employee satisfaction and retention. It also saves costs by eliminating re-work and reducing exposure to risk through inaccuracy.
People are the greatest asset any company has and a critical aspect of creating a strong operations foundation. It’s why we invest in training and development for our own employees and help our clients with training their staff through on boarding and beyond.
