Frank Heaps
Director, Claims Product Management
StoneRiver
This is a continuation of our three-part look at ways to retain your customers and attract new customers through innovation. Part one was about policy processing and ways to help attract new customers. Part three will focus on showing your true value to your customers. This posting examines billing and ways to be innovative as part of ongoing customer service and support.
Prior to a claim, billing is where you provide your ongoing customer service. In fact, many carriers have started to use billing methods as a marketing tool. Carries have been rolling out EFT processing, direct withdrawal and credit card payments for years. However, the generation of a paper invoice with mail delivery is still prevalent. In many cases, the paper invoice offers the ability to send payment through EFT or as a credit card payment by calling the carrier. Regardless of the method above, you still have the cost of invoice production and the expense of handling / processing the receipt of money. Our weak economy also has personal lines customers changing their bill plans to a higher frequency (quarterly, monthly, and even weekly) to reduce the amount of money paid at once. This only contributes to increasing your expense.
The adoption of Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBPP) is catching on. Again, the larger carriers are the early adopters but the technology is working its way into smaller carriers. The ability to present a summary of the bill plan, payment schedule, and amount owed is one way to flatten considerable expense from the billing transaction. The backend expense to process the transactions, schedules, etc. is still required. But, EBPP eliminates the costs of associated with printing, handling, mailing, receipt processing, and more.
Again, you need to consider your customer. Not everyone wants an invoice delivered as a PDF file nor do they want to log in on a computer to pay their policy. You can address the requirements of your younger or computer savvy customers by exposing their billing account to them in a secured means and allowing them to make payments online without further support.
What new methods of billing service is your company considering or delivering? Have you deployed EBPP? Are your customers asking for it?
Come back Thursday for the third and final part of this discussion.
Part one can be found here.