Of the few certainties in life, there's no way to avoid death or the anxiety it creates. Most people fear being taken advantage of when planning a funeral in a vulnerable state of bereavement or worry about affording the price.
"That's a bad combination," says Mark Duffey, co-founder, president and CEO of Everest Funeral Concierge, which for nearly 20 years has been embedded with employer-paid term life policies with certain carriers worldwide or purchased as a standalone benefit.
"We're kind of an OnStar for funerals," he says, comparing the concierge funeral service to General Motors' subscription-based connected vehicle service that provides emergency and roadside assistance.
If someone is at a hospital when a loved one passes away at 2 a.m., for instance, most people have no idea how to respond when a nurse asks what they would like to do with the body. But with Everest, they could reach a call center anytime to begin the process.
A proprietary price-finder database helps users of the service find the most affordable or appropriate local option across the U.S., Canda and U.K. Assistance navigating one of life's most challenging moments can be invaluable when there's a 250% difference between the highest and lowest cost provider for the same service in the top 200 markets, he says.
Once the right facility has been identified, a licensed funeral director then would then handle all the logistics such as deciding on a traditional burial vs. cremation, choosing a headstone or mausoleum, addressing budgetary constraints or religious issues, navigating cross border or international travel, creating estate documents and securing document storage — even helping resolve family squabbles over various details.
Duffey notes the difficulty that someone who's emotionally drained following the death of a love one encounters along the way because of all the moving parts that are involved in planning a funeral and burial.
"There could be 100 decisions you need to make in the first 24 hours, and you don't want to make any of them," he explains. "You're going to have dozens of phone calls because of all the little things that they're going to have to go over."
Noting that Everest assigns someone to handle each case, he calls it "a high-touch, white-glove service" without any digital apps or logging in. Although clearly an unusual benefit offering, it may carry more weight and value not only to employees and their families but also the employer that makes it available.
"What we're finding is when things that are emotionally important for employees, like a death of an employee or spouse, employers generally view that as more core and that you don't have to explain the benefits for something like that vs. something else," he observes.
Everest, which historically has partnered with life insurance carriers, is currently engaged in discussions with most of the top brokers in the benefits space to talk with their employer clients about adding the service as a standalone benefit for their employee base.
"We're doing that already in the U.K.," Duffey says, "and we're getting close to it in the U.S. where brokers are realizing this is something that people really want, and it has not as much to do with the money as it does somebody taking care of them and not having to worry about being taken advantage of because the company pays the fees."
The very service he offers hit close to home for Duffey, who relied on one of his company's senior advisers to help plan his father's funeral. The experience served as a wakeup call that if someone like him who's an industry expert struggled through all the decision-making, it must be much harder for the average consumer for whom the services he provides could prove to be incredibly helpful.
As a pre-planning tool that costs just pennies a day, "it's a great thing to add at a time when health insurance carriers have raised premiums again," notes Julie Fenske, vice president of group benefits for Everest Funeral Concierge.