My Experience With Offshoring Insurance Operations

I worked with one of the largest US health insurance companies for just under a year. My job was to manage the commission operations for their existing systems while the regular staff focused on a large software implementation. Most of my team was in the US and we had one offshore resource in India.

The client had committed to reducing their on-site head count and increase the amount of work being done offshore. Our group was part of this initiative. So, part of my job was to find ways to take operations work and move it offshore.

We started planning in May, and finally by September, we had hired an additional 6 resources in India. Their performance, however, was dismal. To make things worse, the biggest selling season for the company was coming up in mid-November. An estimated 30% of the entire year's sales occurred between November 15 and December 31 every year during what is called “open enrollment” season.

Having 7 people sitting idle during this period was unacceptable. And on top of everything else that was happening, we got a ton of new work in late September that absolutely had to be completed within 6 weeks.

With this background, I was sent to India on September 29. My mission was to see if I could get the team up to speed and productive in 4 weeks. Management had pretty much lost their faith in the offshore model and this trip was a last-ditch effort to salvage the team. Actually, failure on my part would have meant that our team would not be able to manage the open enrollment volume. This failure would have repercussions throughout the organization.

On paper, we had 4 weeks to deliver results. Practically speaking, however, we had only 1 week to restore confidence. So, we had to show results immediately.

To address this, I focused the team's attention on the following capability areas:

1. Assign responsibilities based on competencies.
2. Develop competencies for core activities.
3. Improve client interactions.

Sitting in the US, it looked like our team was grossly incompetent. When I got there, however, I discovered that the team members were actually very bright and more than competent. They just needed direction and some hand-holding to perform at the expected level.

By focusing all of our attention on these 3 capability areas, we were able to demonstrate value to management within the first 2-3 days. By the third week, we had already accomplished 90% of what we had planned. And after I returned, we successfully managed a greater volume of business, with dramatically fewer issues, than the company had done just a year before, when all of their resources were on-site.

This was possible because, out of the 84 capability areas that I normally look at, we were able to focus our attention on just 3. And this focus allowed us to deliver great results in just days.