A clean bill of health

Within every industry, when it comes to collections there is the requirement for every commercially-minded collections function to balance core activity against customer retention, whilst at the same time demonstrating excellence in customer service.
   
This juxtaposition of opposing priorities is particularly taxing within the healthcare sector as there is an added requirement to balance the need for effective risk and recovery processes against ethical and medical considerations. To suspend healthcare provision mid-treatment – whatever the justification financially – is unlikely to find much favour emotionally. Indeed it is a national newspaper headline waiting to happen.
   
Within the private healthcare industry, collections activity with regard to enforcement of payment terms has to be collaborative and heavily geared towards facilitating, rather than demanding, payment. Bupa UK is a good example of this. Its priority has always been around how to facilitate payment more easily, engendering customer engagement as part of the process.

IMPROVING COMMUNICATIONS
Bupa UK’s first action has been around improving both the frequency and the content of its customer communications. It now has, for example, a four letter dunning cycle with personalised communication only capturing non-disputed balances; it has fixed ledgers with collectors individually assigned to customer portfolio to promote stronger customer relationships; and it has customer portal access directly into the collections system – allowing customers to communicate at transactional level within their own account including the ability to record a dispute.
   
To monitor the effectiveness of this communication, it also has an online Billing Survey, checking the temperature to ensure what it is delivering is being understood.
   
As well as customer communication Bupa has worked to improve accessibility for customers to its accounts information. It can now provide customer online access to statements and copy invoices; the online ability to settle an invoice directly via the collections system; and customer online access to manage eligibility lists – for example the customer’s ability to make changes to who is eligible to receive operational service.

BILLING ACCURACY
Improving communications is one thing; what is absolutely essential is in making sure the invoice is right in the first place. To this end, again, Bupa has taken action to improve the accuracy of its billing operations. It now has, for example, a workflow based Dispute Resolution system with chained events that escalate if an issue is not resolved within fixed timelines thus ensuring resolution span times are kept to a minimum. It also has an automated online credit note approval system ensuring speedy production of credit notes.
  
Arguably its most innovative initiative is an invoice validation system, a custom-built technology into which all invoicing data is imported and checked against customer specific formats before being released as a validated invoice to the customer.
   
To give some idea of its success, it has halved the number of Credit Notes (comparing Q1 2009 & Q1 2010) by preventing incorrect invoices from being released to the customer without prior intervention to ensure that customer billing stipulations are met. The system is capable of checking price, products and fixed order numbers. The validation system is also capable of recognising the format (e.g. alpha numeric sequence) of a customer order number and will hold an invoice until the format is checked and the invoice released – a capability that may indeed even be unique in the credit management space.
   
And so to the fourth strand in Bupa UK’s drive to improve cashflow performance: the impact of behaviours and standards on the collections process.

PEOPLE POWER
Success, perhaps not surprisingly, is largely the result of employing the right people, and making sure they are fully empowered. It is also essential that the collections team has the power to communicate. In Bupa UK’s case, all members of the team have end-to-end knowledge of the customer journey from operational service delivery to payment allocation. All of them have similarly spent time on the operational booking and lead management systems to fully understand how operational service is felt from the customer perspective.
   
Knowledge and training is also critical. Bupa UK’s collections team recently attained Quality in credit management (QiCM) accreditation for its work in delivering best practice. Finally, the work of management in recognising the achievements of the team is key. Harnessing people skills alongside technology to solve issues and generate greater levels of customer service is the utopian world to which we all – in the sphere of credit management – aspire.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Web: www.icm.org.uk