A robust billing system for the modern insurer.

Company Overview

Select Home Warranty (SHW) is a nationwide home appliance insurance company based out of New York that has been providing best in service insurance for almost a decade. SHW provides customers with insurance for their everyday household appliances like refrigerators, HVAC, water heater, microwave, and much more.

When a customer's appliance breaks down, SHW will dispatch a local, trusted contractor from their large pool of 10,000+ contractors. Their support team helps customers quickly get their appliances repaired or replaced without having to break the bank.

Business Challenge

The SHW team was having difficulties with its existing billing system. As business grew, they found their current system lacking the features they needed to accelerate growth. We needed to build a robust billing system that contained all of the primary features with some industry and company-specific customizations.

Insurance is a regulated industry with various state laws that affect the way business can operate. To comply with the various regulations, SHW must process online payments for certain states through a siloed gateway. That meant that we needed to build a payment system that connects to state-specific gateways based on the policy holder's location. This routing had to exist across the entire billing system for any transaction.

Select Home Warranty offers various payment options including monthly subscription, a single annual payment, or installment payments. The billing team was currently setting reminders for billing installments and didn't have an efficient way of handling recurring subscriptions. Our new billing system required a robust feature set for setting up and managing multi-payment policies.

Lastly, the billing system required full audit trails for payments, subscriptions, and changes to any billing related features. This audit trail would help track changes and payments to their account over time.

Approach

We started by exploring their current billing system. One of the most significant problems was older technology and poor integration with Authorize.net.

We started the project by identifying the key features and conducting user research. We spoke with the owners and billing admins to better understand the way they operate. To build a billing system that will provide long-lasting impact, we wanted to understand the various payment options, user cases, and existing data.

Once research was completed, we created a prototype of the billing system to visualize the product and get feedback from their team. One of the most important aspects was understanding the payment options available to customers. To satisfy their billing options, we needed to offer the following payment plans:

• Monthly recurring subscription
• Single annual payment
• Configurable installment payments

Working with the billing team, we iterated over a few prototypes until we found the solution that satisfied both the business and user needs. The research and prototyping phase helped us dramatically reduce the risk by building alignment early on in the project.

Once the prototype was approved, we designed the high-fidelity user interfaces and began the agile development process. One of the biggest challenges was building the new system within their current application. We opted to build a single page Ember.js application and embed it within their current custom CRM. To power the front-end application, we created a robust API to handle all of the new billing system functionality.

We launched the MVP within five weeks and spent a couple of weeks iterating and finalizing version one.