Piedmont Transforms Payment Services, Reducing Manual Payroll Tasks by 90%.

About

Piedmont Payment Services focuses on providing payment services for voluntary insurance benefits, specifically employee-paid benefits. When an employer or membership organization, like a union, does not manage payroll deductions or bill reconciliation for these benefits in-house, Piedmont streamlines the process end-to-end on their behalf.

They facilitate the collection of employee payments, hold and reconcile the funds, and pay the insurance carriers directly. This process eliminates the administrative burden from the employers, making it easier for agents, brokers, and organizations to offer voluntary insurance products without complicating payroll processes.

Problem

Piedmont faced challenges with their split direct deposit process, one of the three main payment methods they offer. Historically, setting up split direct deposits required employees to manually input banking information into their payroll systems, which involved numerous steps and left room for error.

Piedmont’s support team often had to spend significant time guiding employees through the process, which was cumbersome and inefficient. Additionally, the manual setup led to high abandonment rates, as many employees found the process too complex to complete. Ready to improve the overall user experience and deliver an optimized service to employers and employees, Piedmont to explore new solutions, eventually bringing them to Truv.

Truv Solution

Direct Deposit Switch

The Story

Ready to improve the overall user experience and deliver an optimized service to employers and employees, Piedmont Payment Services explored the consumer-permissioned approach to direct deposit switching. Piedmont recognized that its existing method of handling split direct deposit setup was both time-consuming and prone to user error. Employees often had to navigate through multiple steps in their payroll systems, input banking information manually, and frequently required guidance from Piedmont’s support team.

Piedmont had previously worked with another consumer-permissioned data provider, but the relationship did not offer the process improvements they were seeking. When introduced to Truv, Piedmont saw an opportunity to make the process more efficient, both for their support team and for the employees they serve. Truv’s solution offered automation and integration that could reduce manual inputs, streamline the payroll updates, and significantly improve the user experience.

Several key factors led Piedmont to establish a joint venture with Truv. Primarily, Truv demonstrated a deep understanding of Piedmont’s needs and offered a solution that felt like a better cultural fit: partnership-centric. The partnership’s success was built on a foundation of trust and a mutual requirement for effective communication, with Truv actively listening to Piedmont’s challenges and offering hands-on support to ensure successful implementation, go-live, and steady growth.

Secondly, the ease of the DDS product’s functionality and user experience that seamlessly automates the process and allows employees to setup the switch in less than 60 seconds, allowed Piedmont’s customers to easily update their payroll information using an instantaneous, secure process with employees.

Instead of navigating multiple steps in the payroll system manually, customers received a text and email with a secure link. Once clicked, they were guided through a simplified, automated process that drastically reduced the need for multiple touchpoints, support calls, and human intervention.

Since implementing Truv’s direct deposit switching solution, Piedmont has experienced significant improvements in both operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. With one of Piedmonts’s clients, an airline union, Piedmont was processing upwards of 7,000 calls in a single week, during the open enrollment period, due to the complexities of the manual setup. In the first year of implementation, Piedmont’s team noticed that a 14-step manual process was reduced down to a 1-step process with Truv, and the number of support calls shrunk by nearly half, down to 4,000.

In preparation for the next enrollment cycle, Piedmont focused on educating agents and brokers on how to help employees use Truv, and the total the number of support calls decreased exponentially by 60%, down to 1,500 calls. In total, during the first two years of leveraging Truv, the team reduced support phone calls by 80%.

In an effort to increase adoption of the new process, Piedmont ramped up it’s education on the technology, training agents and brokers on best practices to set them up for success with employees. With user experience top of mind, Piedmont drove a significant increase in volume. Piedmont also saw a drastic reduction in the time and effort required from their own support team, as well as the field agents responsible for enrolling employees.

By integrating Truv’s automated solution, the setup process became much more efficient, saving time and reducing frustration for both Piedmont’s internal team, agents and brokers, and the employees they serve.

As Piedmont continues to expand, including into international markets like Southeast Asia, strategic implementation of technology and consumer-permissioned data is at the forefront of Piedmont’s path to expansive growth.

About Truv

Truv empowers 150+ lenders to instantly verify income, employment, and asset data directly from the source. With best-in-class coverage, configurable workflows, and a focus on consumer-permissioned data, Truv helps financial institutions streamline underwriting while dramatically reducing costs. Truv's full suite of solutions provides GSE-eligible reports for submission to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, protecting lenders from buyback risks and delivering market-leading data quality. Learn more at truv.com