Maximising Your Renewals

Typically, it costs FIVE times as much to acquire a new customer, as it does to sell your product or service to an existing customer. That's a huge difference, isn't it?

Renewal time is hectic. Piles of policy files to sort through, renewals made late or not at all, irate customers reporting miscalculated premiums or even worse, not bothering to renew at all. There is lots of paperwork, maybe even the need to hire extra temporary staff.

Perhaps there is no need for this crisis and expense…

Dump the system which doesn’t work and use SCHEMATIC! Our scheme automation system, SCHEMATIC, replaces all of this renewal activity with a few clicks. You could have an easy to use, error-free renewal process, making the most of your existing business, and leaving you free to pursue new business (or your golf ball, with all that new spare time!)

The renewals process is different for each company with different rates, different reminder processes, quirky renewal and age discounts, for example. The twenty years experience we have at Whitespace allows us to distill the underlying principles and encapsulate them into SCHEMATIC so that it exactly matches your business process.

To find out more, email Lucy or Dermot, today. Or read more detail below.

Three easy steps to cover three stages

Renewal can be broken down into three stages – Inviting Renewal, Renewing and Reminding Overdue Renewals.

Inviting Renewal

You set the number of months before renewal that you send out renewal invitations – a default value which you may decide to allow some users to override for special cases. When the time comes, you are reminded (by diary or by report) to invite renewal. One click on “Invite Renewal” creates a separate renewal policy, and sends the letter to the customer. The separate renewal allows you to produce different quotes for the customer’s renewal, tailoring it to their needs. At the same time, you can make distinct changes to the policy currently on cover – e.g. it is possible that a client may need a temporary addition that lapses before their renewal date.

Making the Renewal

One click makes the renewal live, creating the appropriate payment requests, and keeping a record of the old, pre-renewal policy for your claims history. Your scheme can have “valid from” and “to” dates - SCHEMATIC will select the appropriate scheme based on the renewal date. This is very useful where there are lots schemes or scheme variations.

In SCHEMATIC you specify one, two or as many renewal reminder letters as you want, to go out on specific dates. And you can lapse policies where renewal has not been successfully achieved – SCHEMATIC will remind you to do this, and write out the cancellation notice for you.

Single Renewals

Small companies, or those schemes with low-volume high-value policies, use the SCHEMATIC Single Renewal method. When you enter a policy, you make a diary entry to invite renewal, say, 2 months before it is due. When you log in, the diary reminder will appear, and remain there until dealt with. SCHEMATIC will write out the invitation to renew, renew the policy when the customer accepts, and allow you to make diary entries for reminders on overdue renewals.

Batch Renewing

Companies using SCHEMATIC, which process more than 50 renewals a month, use batch renewal. A regular report is produced telling you which policies are due for renewal, and alerting you to those that have significant premium increases or decreases.  Special cases can be dealt with individually e.g. for especially high premium increases, where you want to apply a discretionary discount. Schematic then writes out the whole batch of renewal invitations (for postal or e-mail dispatch). When the customer accepts renewal, you renew with one click.

Think out of the box

How about payment by instalment? Regular automated payments make it more likely for a customer to stay with you, and with Schematic’s Book-keeping and Diary modules, instalments can be administered efficiently. Better still, consider converting your policies to monthly BACS debits. Then you simply tell the client once a year about their new premium– they need to do nothing to keep on cover. If they have to do nothing to renew, they are more likely to stay with you.

Put SCHEMATIC on your Christmas list and ring us for a demonstration, call Lucy or Dermot on 020 7240 0208.

Find out more about SCHEMATIC.