The past year of COVID-forced business pivots and adjustments has taught us many lessons. But as we see with so many things in life, we all experience recency bias. Once we’ve moved past an emergency or difficult situation, people tend to forget how challenging it really was.
While we’re still sort of ‘in the moment’ with COVID, I encourage business leaders to really analyze what happened during the past year.
Where were you unprepared? What was unexpected? How can you prevent similar unpreparedness in the future? One area of learning that we’ve seen with clients is Business Continuity (BC) as it relates to insurance print & mail.
One of our clients recently said, “When COVID hit, we quickly realized the importance and value of our decision to outsource print and mail. It would have been a significant operational, organizational, and financial impact had we still been printing and mailing from our own facility.”
COVID has told us a lot about handling print & mail internally, most notably the risk it carries. When COVID hit and carriers had to move to a virtual workforce, they were put in a real bind with their document output and they had to very quickly figure out a solution.
Contrast that with carriers that were already outsourcing the function. Our clients experienced zero down time and no interruptions to their operations during COVID. They also were able to focus on other backend operations that had to suddenly “go remote.”
If something like this happens again, what is your BC strategy?
And I don’t mean a pandemic, but rather the more normal, expected business interruptions that can occur. Look at the interruptions caused by crazy weather in Texas and Nashville recently. Weather can be unpredictable, and seems to be getting crazier by the year. Are you ready if a hurricane, blizzard, tornado, ice storm, or other weather occurrence hits in your area and causes interruptions to your print and mail infrastructure?
With all the other back office functions you have to worry about, print & mail is one of the easiest to outsource. I would encourage you to assess that now. Don’t wait for another business interruption, when it’s likely too late.
The time is now to rethink your BC strategy on print & mail.