Insurance customers want digital engagement for payments
A relatively rudimentary rule of business says you should make it as easy as possible for customers to pay for your products. This principle holds true today: simplicity and convenience are paramount in this new digital world, especially for businesses with less tangible solutions, like insurance.
Paying premiums is the most frequent interaction carriers have with policyholders, and receiving claims payments is the most sensitive, making payments the cornerstone of the customer experience. Insurance carriers should understand policyholder preferences and offer simple, accessible options to pay and receive payments. Even so, customer preferences are rapidly evolving. Customers across all verticals expect personalized, simple and convenient interactions that keep pace with the changing technological landscape.
Insurance often gets a bad rap, both deserved and not, for being sluggish when it comes to digital innovation and evolving technology trends. Our firm worked with Regina Corso Consulting to ask a representative group of U.S. consumers which bills they pay and how — and whether they’re satisfied with those methods. In the fourth iteration of the State of Online Payments report, one message was clear: Consumers want to leverage digital innovation to pay bills, but it’s not always clear how to do so.
Make customers aware of digital payment options
This may seem obvious, but your customers can’t avail themselves of choices they don’t know about. While paying bills online (via a portal or similar) has become table stakes in recent years, this is hardly the extent of payment methods available to consumers today. Insurance and utilities customers also have the option to pay their bills via mobile apps — but many aren’t aware of that fact.
Significantly, according to the State of Online Payments, almost three-quarters (73%) of survey respondents who had managed their insurance billing online reported a preference to receive insurance claim payments directly to their bank accounts. Smaller percentages reported a preference to receive them as a paper check (14%), through PayPal or Venmo (8%) or through a prepaid card (5%). It is in any insurance company’s best interest to make sure it’s easy and accessible for customers to enroll in the bill payment options they’re likely to prefer. Speed and ease of payment are particularly important in the insurance industry, as these factors drive not only customer satisfaction, but overall policy retention rates as well.
When it comes to making sure customers are aware of their options, there’s no such thing as over-communicating. For instance, billers should consider a notification strategy whereby they can inform customers of paperless options. Moreover, these notifications should include clear, easy-to-access links to quickly enroll in digital options.
Remove obstacles to digital adoption
The data in the State of Online Payments report suggests that despite customers’ demonstrated preference for paying bills online, they still face issues doing so. Sixty percent of survey respondents reported regularly facing trouble when paying or receiving bills.
While some of these problems may be due to the tools the biller is using, a top complaint among those who reported issues was a familiar problem: forgetting account usernames and passwords. Twenty-three percent of those who reported issues said the relatable and common inconvenience of losing track of login credentials is a roadblock to comfortably using online payment systems.
This shows the importance of user-friendly guest checkout routes. Optimizing these one-time payment routes may not seem ideal for companies that are looking to increase automatic payment adoption, but it is critical to maximize successful customer engagements. This is most effectively done by adding opportunities along the guest checkout to enroll in paperless billing, automatic payments or payment reminders, which helps drive adoption (and can help achieve other results, like decreased costs and increased operational efficiencies) for an organization.
Overall, Americans are continuing to embrace paperless routes when paying their bills, with 20% and 26% of survey respondents preferring online bill portals and mobile app payments, respectively. It’s critical that all customer-facing businesses — from grocery stores to insurance companies — meet their customers where they are when it comes to payments.
