Calibration is rarely acknowledged as a core feature of insurance audits, but it can be invaluable for QA teams. Think of calibration as an integrity check for your QA process: Are your reviewers consistently following best practices?
Simply put, calibration is a process where the same files are reviewed by multiple people to ensure the audit results are identical (or nearly so). It’s an excellent way to promote objectivity in what can often be a subjective process.
Calibration allows you to assign a different set of eyes to examine file details and confirm key metrics like quality score, duplication of work and leakage amounts. It allows you to identify potential trends or biases down to the individual-reviewer level. If you recently enacted a new QA process, you should run a calibration to make sure reviewers are consistently following procedures and best practices.
The calibration process can be extremely time-consuming, especially on the reporting end. It’s easy to see why many smaller carriers do not rank it high on their list of priorities, but it can serve a vital role for your business. Fortunately, the teamthink Envoy™ software makes it easy to conduct and analyze calibration audits, allowing your team to generate better (and faster) insights than a manual process.
The benefits of QA calibration
QA insights help drive key business decisions — this much you already know. But if your audits are not conducted correctly and consistently, this can impact your company’s bottom line. Calibration helps confirm the quality of your auditors and ensure they’re consistently following best practices.
When a calibration is performed in teamthink Envoy, the reporting provides agreement scores for each phase and the overall file. By setting acceptable baseline scores, you can visualize discrepancies between initial and secondary reviewers. Each phase is scored separately, so you can see where and when individual breakdowns occur.
While one reviewer may emphasize outcomes (e.g., client settlements or customer satisfaction), another can prioritize whether handlers followed the correct protocols and rules. This ability to see both macro and micro datasets allows you to quickly determine potential issues and correct them before they become larger problems.
Moving past manual QA solutions
In today’s insurance world, efficiency matters as much as accuracy. While you could conduct a manual QA calibration, the benefits you see may not be worth the resources required to perform it. With teamthink Envoy, this is a moot point: Not only is the audit process designed for efficiency and data integrity, calibration reports can be easily exported as Excel pivot reports for further analysis. Calibration is a core feature in teamthink Envoy, providing agreement scores for each question and aggregating secondary reviews by default. This allows QA teams to streamline reporting and make calibration a key part of the audit process.
Calibration helps ensure your QA data yields accurate and meaningful insights to drive your business decisions. If your team is not erforming calibration audits, teamthink Envoy can help.