o Other options, such as online account inquiry, should appeal to broader demographics.

In all cases, those insurers first to actively market the new billing-related benefits stand to gain a competitive advantage. While that is a compelling reason to make use of new billing functionality as a marketing tool, there is a potential bonus–often the novel pay plans and billing options that qualify as marketable customer benefits will lighten the insurer's billing workload.

Consider account billing for multiple policies.

Under earlier systems, carriers could only issue a multiple-policy account bill that had the same effective date, or at least the same day of the month, and often the same pay plan for each listed policy.

Without these variables in place, insurers needed to issue, and insureds with multiple policies had to pay, multiple bills.

The architectures in new generation policy management systems let insurers mix different effective policy dates and pay plans in one combined bill, and produce the bills on a scheduled time frame.

The marketable benefit here is a single bill for end-users to pay instead of multiple bills spread throughout the month. Insurers benefit by having a single bill to issue.

Technology is also yielding dividends in terms of customer appeal and internal operating efficiency through equity billing.

Receiving more frequent and smaller billings, insureds can often meet their financial responsibilities more comfortably than they could with larger, conventional quarterly policy bills. That is a significant customer benefit with a big operations upside for insurers.

Since bills can be more frequent, and therefore smaller, the risk of default is lowered, and with it the potential for default processing and the work necessary for a possible reinstatement.

Customers have smaller, easier to manage monthly payments, while insurers benefit from reduced exposure to default and time-consuming processing.

Billing system advancements are enabling p-c insurers to make customer self-service on the Web a practical reality.

For the small and midsize p-c insurance company segments, where Web-based customer interaction is often just taking hold, the self-service concept can be especially fertile marketing ground. These insurers can now have a host of attractive new services to enhance their overall product offering.

Perhaps the most important online service for insurers to offer both consumers and agents is inquiry, the ability to see status.

o For consumers: “Has my check been processed?” “How much do I owe?” “When's my next payment due?”

o For agents: “Is my insured paid up to date?”

Other billing-related functions customers will value include the ability to regenerate a bill, online payment and direct payment from a bank account or credit card.

An additional benefit for the above mentioned payment options is that billing technology now allows real-time cash posting. Customers facing deadlines can be assured their payments register instantly.

This eliminates delays associated with end-of-day batch posting, which could push a payment's effective date to the next day and possibly result in a late payment.

Standalone billing is a feature that will appeal to customers who prefer to have specific policy change on their policies–such as the lease of equipment that is financed independent of a policy–billed separately. It allows billing of audits on an independent, trackable, pay plan if necessary.

Until now, the ability to issue standalone billing was a labor intensive task. However, advancements in database technology have simplified the process to the point where p-c insurers can market it as a standard service. Customers get standalone billing on demand, while flexibility in servicing clients enhances retention for insurers.