Improving Personal Lines Insurance Customer Billing: Case Study

A Top 10 Property & Casualty Insurer was looking to overcome challenges specific to their personal lines billing process in the U.S.  

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
A top 10 Property & Casualty Insurer¹ was looking to overcome challenges specific to their personal lines billing process in the U.S. To improve their processes, they needed to answer the following questions:

• Why do customers lack an understanding of their billing statement or its components?
• How can the company make the billing statements easier for customers to understand?
• Where are the pain points in the current billing and payment process?
• What cross-industry billing best practices could be adapted by insurance companies?

J.D. POWER ENGAGEMENT
The insurer engaged J.D. Power for a consulting project that focused on evaluating and improving the personal lines billing process.

ENGAGEMENT OUTCOME
J.D. Power worked with this insurer to assess their current situation. The first step included analyzing both J.D. Power and the insurer’s customer experience data and operational and financial metrics to identify near-term opportunities and gaps against benchmarks and best practices. J.D. Power conducted stakeholder interviews at various levels of the organization to understand internal pain points, common customer complaints, and company strategy and systems around billing from multiple perspectives. The client and J.D. Power formed a joint team to review and enhance the client’s Customer Experience Strategy as it pertained to billing. Using the insights gathered from data analyses and stakeholder interviews, the strategy evaluation focused on:

• Bill structure, language/readability, graphics
• Payment systems, fees, discounts, and multi-line customers
• Digital/website delivery & servicing options as they relate to billing

The team then worked together to identify and prioritize improvement needs and opportunities. Internal Key Performance Indicator (KPI) metrics were established for tracking continuous improvement.

RESULT
As a result of this engagement, the client improved in both the J.D. Power Auto and Home Insurance Studies.

In the Auto Insurance Study, they achieved:

• A 19-index point improvement on the Billing Process factor over a 2-year period
• Improvement on 7 of 11 Key Performance Indicators related to the Billing Process over a 1-year period

In the Home Insurance Study, they achieved:

• An 18-index point improvement on the Billing Process factor over a 2-year period
• Improvement on 5 of 8 Key Performance Indicators related to the Billing Process over a 1-year period

¹Based on direct premiums written per year.