Tackling the "bad debt" problem in healthcare
Context & Objectives
A major health insurance player was facing a late payment issue that put a major drag on working capital and reduced the capacity to finance strategic projects. They solicited Agilytic to better understand and ultimately reduce accounts receivables by improving the speed of payment recovery.
Approach
Understand first
The first part of the project was to understand the causes of late payments through a debtor segmentation. This phase challenged preconceived notions about causes and customer behaviours and led to a much clearer understanding of the bad debt drivers.
Act on the learnings
Based on the identified causes, Agilytic oversaw a systematic A/B testing programme to validate the optimal message/channel/timing in each late payment situation.
Results
Results of this project were two-fold:
A better understanding of the drivers of late payments helped prioritise projects for maximum impact
The systematic testing approach to test customer communication led to a significant, double digit improvement of our client’s working capital position
