Kansas City Life Insurance

Kansas City Life Insurance

A lot of people are familiar with the company Kansas City Life. In fact, there are in excess of 500,000 policy-holding clients from coast to coast. The company was established in 1895, making it one of the oldest life insurance companies in the country.
Case Study: Kansas City Life Insurance
Industry: Insurance
Service(s): Lineage Optimize & Lineage Accelerate

Challenge

Today, more than 120 years later, it’s a force of more than 2,500 individuals serving 48 states and the District of Columbia. The Kansas City headquarters alone boasts more than 400 associates.

From that central hub, the company mails out information to its agents and customers. According to Jim Fetters, Kansas City Life Insurance’s manager of the mail/records center, a typical month can see anywhere from 140,000 to 160,000 individual pieces of mail being processed. These items include billing statements, marketing tools, informational packets, regular correspondences, coverage alerts, and more. In such a fast-paced, high-volume department, efficiency and accuracy are prerequisites for success.

A Lineage customer for more than a quarter century, Kansas City Life faces the challenge of staying abreast with the latest pieces and technology to help accommodate increased productivity, impeccable accuracy, and unrivaled dependability.

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"When you go with Lineage, you get great products and you work with great people who support those products. They’re very hands-on, and they take care of you.”
Jim Fetters, Manager of Mail/Records Center, Kansas City Life Insurance

Solution

Keeping up with the volume of mail being pushed out from the Kansas City Life headquarters requires machinery that’s reliable. While the company has a few machines that have been with them for years, it was the upgrade in 2014 to a pair of high-volume mailing systems that tied into the existing accounting system that really increased the department’s proficiencies.

With speeds up to 300 letters per minute, each IS-6000 metering system decreases the time necessary to process outgoing mail while also eliminating the need to manually sort mail by size and keep track of postage costs. Fetters points out that today, he has six individuals on his team regularly working with the machines. In addition, the company also upgraded to the incredibly flexible EMS postal accounting software, which lets Fetters know about every piece of mail that has been sent out from every machine – and their costs – with visibility right from his computer.

“We mail a lot of different things from a lot of different departments,” said Fetters. “Having that kind of access and up-to-date information is critical to me from both an operational standpoint and a financial one. My department provides the postage upfront for all our departments, and then we recoup the amount spent at the end of the month from each of those departments for cost allocation purposes. We have over 700 off-site offices that we mail to, so tracking is very important to us.”

The combination of the IS-6000’s reliability and the accuracy of customizable information afforded by the EMS Mail Accounting Software combine to offer Fetters – and Kansas City Life – an insurance policy against breakdowns in information and service.

Achievement

“The folks at Lineage do a great job,” said Fetters. “They’re there for me and my team when we need them. And as importantly, they always treat me like a valued customer.”

For Lineage Regional Solutions Manager Joe Germano, that sort of attention to personal service is what keeps Lineage and companies like Kansas City Life at the forefront of their respective industries.

“For us, building those relationships is what it’s all about,” said Germano. “Our long-term relationship with Kansas City Life is a testament to what can be achieved when you really care about someone’s business. It’s a privilege to continue to be a resource for them.”

“When you go with Lineage, you get great products and you work with great people who support those products,” added Fetters. “They’re very hands-on, and they take care of you.”

That’s our policy.