Auto insurance companies produce lots of documents for their customers. While many consumers have transitioned to digital communications, there’s still a large segment of policy holders that receives this information in the mail. Managing this can be expensive and cumbersome. Many auto insurers choose to outsource statement printing services.
By doing so, many benefits are possible, including cost savings, improved accuracy, consistent quality, and enhanced compliance. Here’s what you need to know about auto insurance statement printing services.
What Are Statement Printing Services?
In this context, auto insurance statement printing describe hiring a company to handle the entire lifecycle of communication distribution. These activities fall into the category of transactional print and mail. This specific area of customer communications has compliance requirements, as the documents include PII (personally identifiable information). As a result, the processes and outputs must abide by regulatory rules to keep this information private and secure.
What Type of Company Can Provide Auto Insurance Statement Printing Services to Auto Insurers?
Commercial printers are not all the same. The majority of these print any type of business mail, mainly in the promotional space. These documents don’t have compliance obligations. To be confident in outsourcing, you should partner with an organization focusing solely on transactional print and mail.
Compliance, accuracy, and quality drive the operations of these companies. Their production areas and workflows follow rigid guidelines to ensure PII is safe and handled appropriately. It’s the first question you should ask a potential vendor.
Does Outsourcing Really Save Money?
If you currently have an in-house print and mail shop, your costs continue to rise. Even if your volume decreases as people transition to digital, you won’t get much relief from capital and operational expenses.
Those costs include:
- Equipment and technology: These are seven-figure investments that also need continuous maintenance and upgrades.
- Labor: Wages and benefit costs are rising and you may also deal with the cost of turnover.
- Materials: Paper and ink are expensive, and you can’t capitalize on bulk purchases because the quantity you need is low.
- Postage: Only sophisticated, high-volume statement printing services can get the best rates with their postage optimization strategies that include presorting, commingling, and using the USPS Intelligent Mail® barcode (IMb) to sort and stack.
- Overhead: The space for production has real estate costs in addition to utilities, building maintenance, and security cameras.
auto insurance printing services reduce costs
When you outsource, these expenses are no longer on your budget. You’ll pay your provider a per-piece cost that includes all the savings they realize on materials and postage.
You can expect to save up to six figures each year.
How Does Auto Insurance Statement Printing Services Support Accuracy?
In transactional print and mail, mis-mailings can be serious. The risks include noncompliance and reputational harm. Mitigating this requires a carefully constructed environment focused on accuracy.
Here’s how we’ve attained a 99.9999% accuracy rating. It involves several pillars:
- White Paper Factory™ (WPF) framework: This production process uses reams of white paper fed into printers that produce fully variable documents. It marries fully composed files with in-line production. Every document has dynamic content for each customer printed together.
- Intelligent insertion and integrity cameras: These cameras read the 2D barcode on each document to ensure the inserter puts the correct pages in each envelope. Another camera takes an image of the inserted envelope to validate the process.
- High-speed cameras: These tools track documents throughout production.
- LEAN manufacturing process that incorporates over 270 standard works to ensure quality assurance
- This level of accuracy is industry-leading and may be cost-prohibitive for an internal print and mail facility.
How Does Outsourcing Impact Compliance?
The compliance piece of this work comes down to the maturity of the vendor. If they only do transactional production, they should have all the basics, like complying with regulations that impact the auto insurance industry. That’s the minimum. A robust compliance program should be part of the company’s culture and include things such as:
- Having a compliance officer on staff
- Data security and cybersecurity practices that exceed regulatory rules
- Physical security for the entire building and access-limiting key cards for the most secure areas
If a company has all these things and more, you can expect that compliance will strengthen and not be a worry for you.
Do Statement Printing Services Have Quality Assurances?
Quality is crucial in print and mail. Some vendors may only think narrowly in terms of print quality and brand representation. There’s also another component of quality around consistency of production. The key is for every workflow to be the same across locations, shifts, and operators. We do this with a quality assurance (QA) program that includes:
- Applying Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma principles
- Developing over 270 standard works, which break down every task to ensure it’s completed the same every time
- Auditing standard works continuously, which we do up to 40,000 times a year with an average grade of 99.89%
- A culture of continuous improvement
We choose to focus on QA for quality control. With the latter, it’s an inspection framework. It happens after the job is completed, so there’s no opportunity to find and resolve root issues.
Are Auto Insurance Statement Printing Services Right for You?
Now that you know the basics, it’s time to consider the benefits of outsourcing your auto insurance statement printing. Quality, accuracy, and compliance can improve while costs decrease. It’s an excellent move to reduce internal strain and focus back on your core competencies.
Learn more about our auto insurance statement printing solutions today.
