Consumers are always looking for the best coverage at the best rate, and insurers, along with competitors, are scrambling to meet the need. The result is tighter budgets for most departments within insurers. Even in cases where departments receive additional funding, that funding may be earmarked for specific purposes other than improvements in customer service. As a result, insurers must typically come up with strategies for improving their customer experience without hiring additional staff.

Before designing the strategy to address the customer experience/cost problem, it’s important to understand exactly what constitutes an effective customer experience. At the core of any good customer experience is information. Insurers that can successfully deliver the right information to the right customer at the right time via the right channel will achieve superior customer satisfaction. Those that can’t won’t. Therefore, any effective customer experience strategy will focus on communicating timely, consistent and personalized information where and when it is needed.

Yet, few insurers have given any great thought to what is often their most common and consistent form of communication with customers: their document communications. Insurers may do a better job of providing information to their customers on a more frequent basis but still struggle to effectively engage with their customers, often suffering from disjointed or inconsistent communications that also create satisfaction issues and impede customer loyalty. Effective document communications ensure that customers are engaged. An engaged customer is a satisfied customer. A satisfied customer is a loyal customer. And, a loyal customer is more likely to produce greater lifetime value to the insurer.

Efficient, effective document communications aren’t something insurers accomplish by just trying to get employees to perform tasks more quickly or by just implementing a piece of software. They have to have a strategy. A strategic approach requires insurers to understand who their customers are, what their customers want and how those needs can best be met through document communications. Based on this understanding, the insurer can begin to modify its document-communications processes, policies and systems to optimize the customer experience—regardless of resource or budget limitations.

How would you define an effective customer experience?

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This is an edited excerpt from the white paper, “Eight Steps to Exceptional Customer Experiences for Insurers.”