An outsourcing journey
Helen Moran shares InjuriesBoard.ie’s experience of outsourcing and how it manages the relationship with the service centre provider.
One of the State’s smaller agencies has outsourced services since its establishment, resulting in clear benefits in its work. Helen Moran is Director of Business Support Services at InjuriesBoard.ie which was set up in 2004; its formal name is the Personal Injuries Assessment Board. As an entirely new body, the board had no legacy issues. It was consciously modelled on an in-house/out-house delivery model and tasked with becoming self-funding.
Outsourcing began at the outset. Initially, InjuriesBoard.ie envisaged that it would need around 111 staff but the Department of Finance approved 85 staff places plus an outsourced service centre.
This has saved €1 million per annum in staff costs. “We very much recognised that there was no value in us becoming experts in areas such as managing post, managing calls, servicing telephone queries and collection of fees,” Moran added.
InjuriesBoard.ie deals with all personal injury claims in the State except for medical negligence cases. It has removed around 70 per cent of claims from the costly litigation system. Claims assessed by the board are now processed in months rather than years.
In 2004, the average cost of an injury claim was 46 per cent of the claim due to various legal and medical fees. This is now down to 8 per cent. The agency is still fully self-funding, drawing its revenue from claimants’ and respondents’ fees.
At the very start, a team of qualified assessors was recruited to complete the core work of assessing claims. The service centre deals with a high volume of non-core activity: 15,000 medical appointments, 30,000 claim applications, 60,000 telephone calls and over 1 million items of post per annum.
The board mapped out the claims process from end-to-end to get a “real understanding of what needed to happen” and decide what was core and non-core.
Moran explained: “We never outsourced a process that we didn’t understand fully internally. Day one, we gave out the post, we gave out the incoming calls: fairly simple routine activities.” The issuing of statutory notices, though, was not transferred until every element of that process was fully understood by the agency’s own staff.
“The outsourced model gave us the flexibility to avail of back office solutions and that wouldn’t have been available to any agency of our size,” Moran said. The service centre gives it the flexibility to outsource additional work when vacancies arise.
InjuriesBoard.ie is now procuring its third service centre provider. As well as the front-line service centre functions, payroll, internal audit, statistical reporting and IT support are now also outsourced. The agency is also considering whether to outsource the preparation of files for assessment but the assessment and decision-making processes will never be outsourced.
Perceived risks included loss of control and loss of direct contact with customers but these can be easily overcome by good service level contracts. As soon as a call is finished in the centre, InjuriesBoard.ie can listen to it and become aware of any issues. The agency also has real-time access to new cases as soon as they go live.
It is also possible to underestimate the amount of work required to outsource the function and to manage the ongoing contract. It’s better to have too many than too few performance indicators. One of the agency’s managers spends at least half of his time managing the day-to-day relationship with the service centre provider and running reports on KPIs.
InjuriesBoard.ie initially put its employees on-site to share their knowledge with the service centre staff. Every step of the process is now written down in a defined process manual. Quality assurance involves listening to how someone handles 10 calls with consumers and assessing their performance.
The agency has gained a lower, flexible and predictable cost base. Productivity improved by 17 per cent in one year alone and it is “constantly looking at ways to refine the process”. InjuriesBoard.ie prefers having a dedicated service centre – rather than shared services – as it is handling sensitive medical information.
“It can be beneficial, it’s not a panacea,” Moran said in conclusion. “I think that’s important to know and the [benefits] and risks have to be evaluated.”
