Frank Heaps
Director, P&C Product Marketing
StoneRiver
Day in and day out aging billing systems still process tens of thousands of transactions throughout our industry. However, these hard-working systems cannot meet the needs of your executive team, nor can they help your company exceed customer expectations.
Management wants flexibility, consolidation, and lower cost of operations. The executive team wants to define personal and commercial insurance products that are a bundled package of rates, underwriting, and billing options. Without a modern system that allows flexibility in bill plans, you face the possibility of losing business. For example, if a customer can’t pay an invoice, it leads to late premium payments, policy lapse, and eventually, loss of a customer. With system flexibility you can increase payment frequency, so the amount of each bill decreases. The result? You save a customer.
Managing and maintaining multiple billing solutions is complicated, as many carriers can testify. These systems stem from implementation of line-specific solutions or from acquisitions over the years. While a carrier might offer many bill plans across all lines of business, the reality may be that the variety of bill plans span multiple systems for different lines, with no single platform to offer all plans for all lines and to allow for creative product packaging.
Can older, brittle systems be enhanced to meet the management team’s goals? Yes, but the workforce that created and maintained these solutions will soon be retiring, and younger talent cannot be found to replace them. Extending, enhancing, or trying to integrate these disparate systems is a short-term solution to a serious operational business challenge.
Your customers want to view their billing accounts, update their information, and pay online. The competition within the insurance industry is tougher than ever. Customers across all demographics want access to a person, to technology, or to both, depending on what they need. Carriers need to provide all of those contact methods. Extending customers the ability to view their bill accounts, make minor changes, and pay online gives them more power, which increases their overall satisfaction with the carrier. Older, more rigid systems cannot easily handle the required flexibility of bill plan changes and maintenance, nor do they lend themselves to natively working with self service / handheld applications.
There is little doubt that these two critical needs will drive many IT initiatives to improve billing capabilities. Carriers can reap the rewards of modern billing systems with a platform upgrade: system consolidation, flexible bill plans / payment plans, account billing, and consumer self-service through the web or handheld apps.