If you’ve been tasked with keeping your insurance organization up-to-speed on critical innovations, you’re probably already on a journey to enhance your #1 policyholder engagement point: the premium payment experience. 

If you’re just getting started on the innovation front, you may be wondering why the premium payment experience is so critical for insurance organizations like yours – or maybe you just need a refresher!  

Let’s overview why premium payments are your most important policyholder engagement point and how the payment route can be easily innovated to improve retention rates, reduce call volumes, and enhance your policyholder experience. 

Why is it important to innovate the premium payment experience? 

By its nature, the insurance space has extremely limited policyholder touchpoints. Couple that with the crowded, competitive nature of the market and retaining your insureds all comes down to one thing: who can provide the best, most effortless policyholder experience at these engagement points? 

Policyholder engagement points typically come down to: 

• Purchasing or cancelling policies 
• Making claims 
• And making premium payments 

Of those “big three,” premium payments are far and away the most consistent engagement point – and often one of the most stressful, considering that your insured’s sensitive payment information is involved. All this considered, it makes sense that the quality of your premium payment experience is directly correlated to retention rates. 

In our research report, Keeping Up with Millennial Policyholders, nearly 50% of the Millennials surveyed are looking to switch insurance carriers in the next year. One of the main reasons? Thirty percent of respondents are looking for a better and more digital policyholder payment experience than they had with their last provider. 

This preference isn’t limited to younger generations either; results from our survey, The State of Online Payments, indicates that 76% of customers age 61+ prefer to make payments online or through a mobile device. 

To make matters more complicated, digital disruptors that are aware of this shift in policyholder preferences (i.e. Lemonade, Hippo) are now swooping in to offer policyholders innovative payment experiences at low costs. 

With competitors prepped and large segments of policyholders looking for an immediate change, your organization’s risk of turnover is high. Unless, of course, you can implement innovative insurance technology where it counts. 

Get started: The Insurance Innovation Checklist 

Wondering where to get started? Already on your way but wondering how you’re doing so far? Our free Insurance Innovation Checklist is here to help. 

The checklist will help you evaluate whether or not your organization is implementing the best practices for an easy-to-use, innovative premium payment experience. It will also offer areas your organizations can begin improving if you’re not quite there! 

This is an interactive worksheet that you can use for team brainstorming or solo planning – either way, it’s a great starting point on your organization’s road to better policyholder retention.