ITA Pro Magazine - February 2014

Businesses often face difficult choices: Do we make our decisions based on what is more profitable, or do we opt for what’s best for our customers? When both options can be achieved simultaneously, there is usually cause for celebration. An e-delivery for billing solution, which included print and mail fulfillment and business driven content management capabilities, purchased from CEDAR Document Technologies did exactly that for Penn National Insurance.

“This is a way to improve
customer service by giving our
policyholders more to meet their
expectations while at the same
time lowering our costs and
bolstering our productivity,” says
Warren Dutka, manager, internal
operations for Penn National
Insurance. “It’s one of those rare
occurrences where you can have
No project is simple though,
and with this one, Pennsylvania-based insurer also was in the
midst of a billing solution project implementation with Guide-
wire Software.

“As part of that project we knew we wanted to do e-de-
livery for billing,” says Sharon Marburger, director, internal
operations for Penn National Insurance. “Internally, we were
considering whether we wanted to build that ourselves. The
timing was perfect.”
The decision to select CEDAR for the e-delivery for billing
portion of the billing project took just three to four months,
according to Marburger.

“We embedded [CEDAR] into our plan for the billing im-
plementation,” she says. “This portion of the project was driven
by our plan, not CEDAR’s. It took about six months [to imple-
ment the CEDAR solution], but it was not because of CEDAR’s
inability to meet a deadline, it was driven by our overall billing
project implementation timelines.”
Penn National Insurance already had a large project team in
place for the billing implementation project, so they carved out
a small subset of that team to work on the e-delivery for billing
implementation, points out Marburger. CEDAR provided
project management from their team, as well as additional
resources.

“They were flexible with our schedule,” she says. “CEDAR
was more than willing to move along with us and their project
manager was very accommodating. That helped us reach the
target.”
The insurer offers policyholders the option to enroll in
automatic premium payment from their checking account, but
paper invoices were still mailed. Consistently, their customers
wondered why the carrier was still sending them a paper bill.
With e-delivery for billing, paper invoices are eliminated and
the customer can tell the carrier whether they want a reminder
e-mail that the money is coming out of the checking account,
which is something the carrier couldn’t do before.

The e-delivery for billing solution has worked as expected, explains Marburger. The insurer now has CEDAR involved in a campaign to increase policyholder acceptance of e-delivery for billing, and in the future e-delivery for policy.

“CEDAR is working with us on important things to consider
as well as things to avoid,” says Dutka. “They have helped us to
construct a campaign that should help maximize the number of
customers that sign up for e-delivery.”
An additional benefit comes in the form of marketing new
products and services to policyholders. Prior to their partner-
ship with CEDAR, they could not pursue tailored messaging
on invoices or insert brochures without a significant effort or
manual processes.

“E-delivery for billing is an opportunity for us,” says Dut-
ka. “Now instead of ‘just’ asking people to pay their bills, our
new system—which includes customer-centric messaging—
can be considered a new marketing tool for our company.”
“CEDAR was able to easily integrate with our legacy billing
system and now we have redesigned the invoice to make it more
user-friendly,” says Marburger. ITA