Whether it’s for financial reasons, personal preference, or simply convenience, there are many reasons why families need flexible funeral payment options. While it has many benefits for your families, it also can save your funeral home time and money.
Let’s go over three payment options that your funeral home can offer your families to make the funeral payment process less of a headache for everyone involved.
Save time and give families convenient funeral payment options with online credit card payments
A study by ACI Worldwide found that about 70% of those surveyed prefer online payments, like through a website, for making a one-time payment. So if your funeral home doesn’t yet offer credit card payments through your website, now is the time to start.
Benefits for your families
For your families, credit card processing on your website:
- Gives them a more convenient option.
- Allows for more flexibility.
First off, paying online through your website is way more convenient than driving to your facility to make the payment. Families can pay on their own free time instead of scheduling a meeting with your staff. It also offers more flexibility if multiple family members are paying for the expenses. Oftentimes, they can split the payment among several people.
Benefits for your funeral home
Not only does this payment option benefit your families, but it also benefits your funeral home, since it:
- Saves your employees’ time.
- Helps you stand out from your competitors.
Depending on the payment solution you choose, you could set up the credit card payments to automatically flow into your funeral home management software. This way, you’re not stuck manually entering that data, and you eliminate the chances of errors. It also lets you stand out from your competitors. For instance, your convenient, flexible payment options could be the reason that a family chooses to work with your funeral home instead of your competitor.
Stay in control and give families the support they need with crowdfunding
CNBC reported that less than 4 in 10 Americans have enough savings to cover an unexpected expense of $1,000. For this reason, if a family experiences an unexpected death of a loved one, they’ll likely need to raise funds for the funeral expenses through a crowdfunding campaign. To help make things easier for your families, you could offer crowdfunding directly on your funeral home’s website.
Benefits for your families
For your families, the two main benefits of funeral crowdfunding on your website are that it:
- Provides them with additional help with other expenses.
- Gives them support from their community.
As you know, families face many different expenses after a loved one’s passing, or they may want to find a way to honor their loved one’s memory. Through crowdfunding, you can offer them a way to pay for additional expenses, such as medical bills, charitable contributions, a memorial scholarship, and more. Families also gain a sense of support from their community members’ generous donations and kind words.
Benefits for your funeral home
If your funeral home offers crowdfunding directly on your website’s memorial pages, your team:
- Stays in control.
- Keeps visitors on your website.
By offering crowdfunding directly on your website, you can stay in control of the funds raised and the campaign duration, instead of handing the reins over to a third-party crowdfunding service. You also keep visitors on your website by having the donation option available on their loved one’s memorial website, which is better for your SEO.
Offer your families more while giving them peace of mind with life insurance assignments
Limra’s 2020 Insurance Barometer Study found that at 84%, the main reason for owning life insurance is for covering burial costs and final expenses. This means your funeral home could benefit from accepting life insurance assignments as payment for the funeral bill.
Benefits for your families
The main benefits for your families are that this payment option:
- Lets them keep their safety net.
- Provides them with peace of mind.
For instance, instead of draining their savings account, they can keep those funds and use the life insurance assignment as funeral payment instead. They also get the satisfaction of knowing that the expenses are paid for at all once, rather than needing to apply for a loan or decide who is paying for the funeral. Deciding who is paying can lead to awkward conversations between family members, so using a life insurance assignment eliminates potential conflicts.
Benefits for your funeral home
Depending on the program you use, life insurance assignments as funeral payment:
- Eliminates time-consuming tasks.
- Offers your families more options.
If you use a virtual life insurance assignments program, you can ditch the physical paperwork and take the process online. Even better, if it integrates with your funeral home management software, it can sync with the data already entered in your cases, instead of re-entering the information. Oftentimes, this means your funeral home gets paid faster, as well, and your families get a payment option that lets them plan their loved one’s funeral without worrying about not being able to afford it.
Get started today, get paid tomorrow with FuneralPay
To give your families the flexible and convenient funeral payment options they deserve, we developed FuneralPay. The e-commerce platform lives in your Pulse Business System, so you get an integrated system that auto-populates data from the deceased’s record to save you time.
With FuneralPay, families have multiple options, such as:
- Paying with a credit card on your funeral home’s website.
- Raising funds through A Helping Hand™ crowdfunding campaign on their loved one’s Book of Memories™ online memorial website.
- Submitting a claim through Funeral Insurance Assignments directly in your Pulse Business System.
Enjoy getting paid faster with FuneralPay! Click here to book a free 15-minute demo.
