Novarica’s recent Property/Casualty Billing Market Navigator highlighted several emerging trends, including the growing importance of providing policyholders with a flexible, “retail-like” payment experience. More and more, insurers are prioritizing the improvement of customer service; however, the pandemic has increased the speed at which ease-of-use capabilities are being implemented.
Realigning the Role of Billing
Online self-service is a baseline expectation of competent providers, and more consumers than ever expect mobile self-service. These factors make billing a critical component of digital transformation. Billing platform providers have put considerable effort into improving end-to-end billing processes.
Insurers are expanding the payment methods they accept and are using payment portals. Some are leveraging third-party payment providers whose solutions integrate with insurer billing systems to isolate core systems from these changes. Insurers are customizing bill presentment and billing messages based on policyholder preferences and customer knowledge. Often, insurers target billing for analytics and predictive modeling to drive customer messaging involving required down payments or suggest alternate installment plans.
New Methods of Communication and Payment
Insurers are improving digital capabilities to support new payment methods, cloud deployments, SaaS pricing models, real-time billing information via web and mobile channels, straight-through processing, monthly self-reporting, pay-as-you-report for workers’ compensation, and the agility necessary for new products and billing plans.
Billing presents critical opportunities for insurers to interact with their best customers; errors can be costly. These costs can be direct or indirect. Direct costs include cases of mistaken cancellations that lead to pricey reinstatements, billing errors increasing call volume, or additional processing, which is often manual. Indirect costs include the impact that poor billing performance has on customer experience and retention.
Benefits for the Insurance Carrier
The impact of investing in new billing solutions can be significant. Many insurers find that legacy billing technology limits the efficiency of internal operations, effectiveness of customer service, and speed to market for new or modified billing features.
Legacy billing technology can also be an obstacle to delivering functionality to agents and policyholders. Modern, configurable billing systems with strong rules, tools, and workflow capabilities can address these issues, providing, among other benefits, improved time to market for new products with creative billing options, customer service levels, and customer and agent satisfaction.
Many insurers are reviewing billing capabilities and their impact on customer experience. Modern property/casualty billing solutions are maturing, giving insurance carriers better options for modernization. Novarica’s report profiles 15 vendor solutions, summarizing the vendor organization, technology, differentiators, client base, supported lines of business, deployment options, implementation approaches, upgrades/enhancements, and key functionality.
For an in-depth look at these emerging trends and vendors in the property/casualty market, see Novarica’s latest Property/Casualty Billing Systems Market Navigator.
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