Part 3 in a Series
These are the facts of life: things change. People take jobs, leave jobs, get married, change their names, have children, and break up. All this adds up to changes for a group voluntary benefits insurer.
Because the challenge is so incredibly common, it’s likely you’ve employed a legion of operational teams that spend their days manually reconciling resulting mismatches between invoices and payments. In addition to the enormous administrative burdens, it may impact your cash flow, create customer service headaches, and strain relations with your distribution network.
Speed payments processing? There’s an app for that!
But it doesn’t have to be that way. With the right technology, your billing department can now quickly build an app, for any desktop or mobile device, to help automate invoice and payment reconciliation. No matter whether a billing specialist is processing payments from a list of a client’s group members or handling a self-bill, business-friendly tools eliminate the need to stand in line for IT resources.
For example, the current billing paradigm typically requires billing specialists to investigate mismatches before they can process a payment. By adopting an innovative billing solution, your business users can create an app that enables specialists to input known information and process the payment and move on to the next one. An exception notification is automatically sent to the appropriate employee for investigation and resolution.
Your billing department can also develop another app to automate reconciliation by gathering the necessary information from various sources and processing it. If a particular payment can be reconciled automatically based on the rules your company establishes, then no human intervention is required. The much smaller remainder of outstanding exceptions can be handled manually with fewer employee resources.
Together, apps like these can help you improve experiences, increase the accuracy of future invoicing, and, most importantly, deliver excellent customer service.
Getting persona-based apps to empower your business users
As we’ve discussed in our two previous billing blogs, enabling your business users to develop billing apps, without any assistance from IT, requires technologies such as a DXP (digital experience platform) and APIs (application programming interfaces).
In a nutshell, a DXP is the intuitive business user layer that enables creating apps quickly and easily, typically using drop-down menus and other customer-friendly fields. APIs are the information translators that extract data from underlying systems, whether internal or external, and provide it in the correct format within the DXP. They are a fundamental building block for the interconnections required for positive customer experiences.
To gain the most versatile, user-friendly app creation tools, we recommend adopting a coretech solution with the following DXP and API characteristics:
Intuitive Billing Agent Personas. The most sophisticated and intuitive DXP solutions offer pre-built “personas” based on common types of insurance users and the tasks they need to complete, such as payment processing and reconciliation. Personas streamline app creation processes and enable users to gain confidence quickly due to their no-code business-friendly tools that empower rapid innovation.
Expansive Open API Library. It’s not enough for a solution to offer a handful of “open” (non-proprietary) APIs, versus those which are closed (proprietary). To gain the most flexibility for creating the desired customer experiences, you need a solution that provides flexibility to interconnect extensively. For example, interconnecting with a single internal or external resource can require dozens of APIs. This means the best DXP solutions supply hundreds of APIs or more.
Extensive Ecosystem Support. A DXP with multiple types of insurance-centric communications protocols will supply your business users with the widest array of options for connecting with multiple types of systems, ranging from policy administration and data lakes to billing partners and insurtechs.
Eliminate headaches to support innovation in a rapidly-evolving marketplace
Regardless of which solution you choose, you can make today’s headaches a thing of the past. Simultaneously, you’ll advance your firm’s ability to innovate, enhance distribution relationships, and improve your bottom line. The only question you need to ask yourself is: what are we waiting for?
For details on coretech solutions that contain robust DXPs and APIs, check out the blog, Coretech delivers on frictionless customer journeys. For more specifics on selecting a powerful, intuitive technology solution, see our previous blogs in this series, Next Billing Wave: Using an Insurance DXP to Connect the Customer Experience Dots and Next Billing Wave: How Insurance APIs Empower Business Users to Amp Up Customer Experiences.
