It is no surprise that a streamlined consolidated invoicing process can differentiate your firm as the best Third Party Administrator and help you win more business from your existing broker partners and make you more competitive for new contracts, too.  However, your manual business processes are standing in the way of the potential growth opportunity. Hiring more team members could work, but you’re replicating the same problems your team already has. Instead, you’re scaling the same issues you’re already having.

The best administrators differentiate in a few important ways: excellent customer service, competitive cost, and compliance measures (also considered Risk Management).  

Excellent Customer Service 

As the common business maxim goes “people do business with people they know, like, and trust” and this couldn’t be more true in the complex business of third party administration.  Brokers prize excellent customer service and a TPA’s ability to meet the complex demands of their plan requirements. Because they’re working with employees who demand excellent benefits, it’s critical to optimize your TPA’s value around providing great customer service. Find solutions that free up your team to focus on providing excellent service and troubleshooting participant issues instead of manual work and data entry. When you use a solution like TPA Stream, you have better accuracy and improve any performance guarantees associated with your customer service requirements.  

Cost Management

The unfortunate reality is that employers think of benefit services as a commodity. This translates from employers to brokers and from brokers to third party administrators. Employers do not realize there is a lot of value to be added from having great customer service until there is an issue with one of their employee’s benefits – and this service is something they’ll pay good money for. (In fact, if an employer buys benefits and they’re not backed by good service, it’s actually detrimental. They’ll lead to reduced retention even though the employer is spending more money.)

Third party administrators should focus on driving their costs down with technology that automates their back-office processes while maintaining excellent customer service for brokers and end employers. 

 

Table Stakes Compliance and Risk Mitigation 

Risk and compliance isn’t glamorous and is often taken for granted. You may not think it is important, but it really is; this is why brokers bring you business! To manage the complexity of plan administration, and the risks stand to be high if you don’t provide compliant benefit programs. 

For example, if the IRS finds an employer to be out of compliance with COBRA regulations, the minimum they can charge is $2,500 for each beneficiary who is affected by the compliance violation, OR $100 for every day the employer was not compliant, whichever is a greater cost to the employer. If the IRS determines that the violation is on a large scale, the employer can be fined up to $15,000. While this doesn’t necessarily ease the pain, there are limits as to how much the IRS can fine: either 10 percent of the employer health plan costs in the previous year, or $500,000—whichever is the lesser of the two.

Finding secure technical solutions reduces the likelihood of human error and risk. 

Differentiate your TPA through Automation with TPA Stream

There’s a simple solution that helps your administration team differentiate: TPA Stream. TPA Stream’s Consolidated Invoicing solution securely automates the manual week-long data matching and entry task of your team in just one hour. This reduces your risk, drives down your costs and refocuses your team on value added tasks like customer service. TPA Stream instantly creates invoices that meet the most complex of broker requirements instantly. 

Our partners have told us they’re able to reduce errors exponentially, resulting in better service for their clients, too. Most importantly, your broker partners will love you for only sending one invoice each month to their clients.

Let us learn about your needs and show you how we can help with a demo.