Payments as a Gateway to Modernization
Anyone who works in insurance knows that the billing and payment experience is a critical touchpoint in the customer journey. Streamlined payment systems that maximize operational efficiency are often the simplest, most effective way of improving policyholders’ overall experience. That said, a next-generation payment system, rather than an entire system overhaul, can provide a quick win by successfully impacting customer retention, operational efficiencies, and time and cost savings. In this week’s podcast, Jacqueline Guerrero, Senior Alliance Director at InvoiceCloud, joins Stephanie Lobeck, Product Manager of Sapiens CoreSuite for Workers’ Compensation solution, for an in-depth discussion on the importance of the customer experience and how the payment experience plays an essential role.
Stephanie Lobeck |Jacqueline Guerrero
Stephanie Lobeck: Hello and welcome to the Sapiens Insurance 360 podcast. I am your host today, Stephanie Lobeck, Product Manager of the CoreSuite for Workers’ Compensation solution here at Sapiens, and I’m so glad that you’re out there listening! This is where we discuss the latest news trends and issues from across the insurance solutions and technology spectrum.
So I know from my almost 30 years of experience working with insurance carriers, for them, the billing and payment experience is a critical touchpoint in the customer journey. Streamlined payment systems that maximize operational efficiency are often the simplest and most effective method of improving policyholders’ overall experience. A modernized payment system, rather than waiting for an entire system overall, can provide a quick win by successfully impacting customer retention, operational efficiencies, and time and cost savings. On today’s podcast, “Payments as a Gateway to Modernization,” we’ll explore these critical issues. And with us to provide expert insight is Jacqueline Guerrero, a Senior Alliance Director at InvoiceCloud. InvoiceCloud is a Sapiens partner and their mission is to simplify payments and collections through improved innovative SaaS technology that improves customer and client engagement. Jacqueline has been with InvoiceCloud since 2021 and she has significant experience in project vendor business development and customer service management. Jacqueline, welcome to the program!
Jacqueline Guerrero: Thanks for having me, Stephanie! I’m excited to be here!
Stephanie Lobeck: So Jacqueline, in the intro, we spoke a lot about the importance of the customer experience and how payment experience is such a critical part of that. So tell me what happens when carriers fail to meet consumer expectations, especially new customer expectations.
Jacqueline Guerrero: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great question, Stephanie. So a policyholder, paying their premium is one of the first interactions they have with their insurance carrier and with everything in life, first impressions are huge. If the payment process is complicated or unclear, customer frustrations [are] going to grow and turn that new customer into a potential churn risk. If it’s complicated to pay a premium as a policy holder, I would personally start thinking, if it’s this complicated, now imagine what it’s going to be like if I ever have a claim versus if that interaction is simple and pleasant, the carrier has the opportunity to grow customer loyalty and trust.
Stephanie Lobeck: Thanks for that, Jacqueline. So on another note, how does customer frustration manifest in negative ways? What are carriers seeing?
Jacqueline Guerrero: Yeah, so customer frustration usually manifests in three negative ways. So starting off with high call volume and support requests, a subpar payment experience often leads to more customer service inquiries. It puts pressure on support teams and increases operational costs as they work to resolve issues that could have honestly, easily been avoided with a smoother process that would allow their customers to easily self-serve. And then that leads ultimately low customer satisfaction. If a customer perceives carriers as difficult to work with, it’s going to be harder to regain their trust, even if improvements are made later. And then negative word of mouth, reviews, social posts, etc., can significantly damage a carrier’s reputation and deter new customers. So with everything going viral, daily, hourly, whatever that may be, it’s crucial that a carrier really invests in their brand reputation and then unwillingness to act. If it’s too difficult to pay, the customer might abandon the process altogether. This directly impacts the carrier’s revenue, it delays their collections, and then a policyholder might switch to a competitor.
Stephanie Lobeck: Great. Thank you so much for that context, Jacqueline. So many great points there about the impacts, and we want our carriers to focus on what they do best and they want the customer experience to be a great experience throughout and they can give them what they need in the insurance product that they’re providing.
Jacqueline Guerrero: Exactly!
Stephanie Lobeck: So to switch gears a little bit, let’s talk about the reality of a full-scale digital transformation. What challenges should a carrier consider through that process?
Jacqueline Guerrero: Yeah, so carriers should really pause and instead of doing everything all at once, which is going to overwhelm resources and potentially put the company at risk for failing a project. They should start really with optimizing customer-facing experiences like billing and claims payments. Crunchbase found that organizations on average waste 4.2 million on failed projects. So I think it’s better to take that crawl, walk, run approach, and focus on what will give the highest impact with the least amount of effort. And that’s payments. Payments is the simplest, most effective method for improving that policyholder’s overall experience because when you really think about it, premium payments is the most often interaction policyholders have with their carrier and claims is the most sensitive. So it’s crucial to get these engagement points right.
Stephanie Lobeck: So now can you explain how a carrier can actually reap the benefits of enhanced customer experience without the hazards of that entire system overhaul?
Jacqueline Guerrero: Yeah, absolutely. So payments, whether it’s premium collections or claims disbursements are a quick win for carriers. It impacts retention, operational efficiencies, time and cost savings. As we all know, core systems can take years to upgrade. So investing in payments allows your policyholders to have a modern experience, while the carrier figures out which core system they want to upgrade to on the back end. And then our payment solution requires no system downtime. And we have proven integrations with the Sapiens core systems such as Workers’ Comp, P&C, MPL, so they really make for a quick and painless update to your existing system.
Stephanie Lobeck: Well, we love to hear no system downtime, so we are running a little short on time. So one last question for you, how do real-time integrations support positive business outcomes such as increased online transactions, those reduced phone calls that you talked about, and some significant time savings?
Jacqueline Guerrero: Yeah, I’m glad you asked that. So real-time integrations are really now the expectation for customers in this digital age. Customers expect to get their information instantly, and so it’s worth that investment to have a real-time integration in order to stay competitive and relevant within the market. Real-time integrations enhance the customer experience. So whether I’m paying my premium and I want to see my balance due at zero as soon as I issue my payment, or if I have an urgent claim request and need the funds immediately, a real-time integration is necessary to build that customer loyalty and satisfaction. And then carriers should not only consider real-time integrations, but they should look to find cloud-true SaaS solutions. So instead of doing everything in-house, which some carriers have historically done in the past, they should focus on what they do best, and let the vendors that specialize in their field and the core systems focus on the competencies that they need. So then it’ll free up their team’s time and resources. For example, last year we were able to provide 300 updates in a year, and that would be unlikely for a carrier to be able to do that and just in payments alone. So it’s key for them to embrace that change and modernization, and allow vendors with cloud and real-time integrations to their core systems help them get to that next level. And last year we, or this past year, we published a case study with a AFR who has been reaping the benefits of a real-time cloud integration and they’ve been seeing amazing stats such as a 62% total electronic payment adoption. So that means they are streamlining and automating operations for their carrier staff, which translates to less manual tasks for their team. They saw a 10x increase in paperless adoption, which led to $95,000 saved in print and mail. So significant cost savings there, and we all know postage and costs are just going up. And then they saw a 97% policyholder retention rate. And then there was this interesting stat that I don’t think all carriers keep track of, is that they actually saw a nine-year decrease in their average policyholder age. So this means that we allowed them to grow their business while appealing to a younger demographic. So even more sustainable growth for their business and [it] really highlights that, even more to carriers that it’s really important to stay relevant with the times and provide customers with solutions and resources to fit their needs. Modernizing payments provides policyholders and agents with the tools to self-service and really feel empowered. And then with our Workers’ Comp carriers in particular, they’ve told us that their customers are so happy that they’ve upgraded their payment solution because now they can pay how they want and when they want. Not all of their business owners work a traditional 9 to 5 job that’s out of computer. So they love that they can pay their premium at 11:00 pm, 2:00 am, whatever that may be for them. So it’s just really showing that payments are a high impact, low-effort way to completely modernize your customer experience journey. Now we’ve seen this with the huge benefits with a AFR and our other 225 carrier customers.
Stephanie Lobeck: Thank you for all of that, Jacqueline, those are some amazing statistics that you provided there, and really shows [that] staying relevant is not just about age of the end consumer, it’s also size of the business. And so we want to make sure that we can accommodate our clients, our carriers, whether they are servicing small sole proprietors or large companies. So some really great information there on how we are staying relevant and giving them an amazing product to be able to assist them. So thank you so much for joining us today, Jacqueline. We’re seeing how carriers can receive so many tangible benefits from implementing a payment solution transformation, and you’ve really walked us through the hows and whys and provided some great advice for those considering this monetization. So to our listeners, as always, thank you so much for spending your time with us today. We love hearing from you, so if you have comments or would love to follow us on social media, please reach out to us on our channels and don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast. We’ve got more coming. So stay tuned to Sapiens Insurance 360. Bye for now!
