1. Give business users a more active role.
2. Optimize IT’s role.
3. Centralize templates and content.
4. Content—create once, use multiple times.
5. Empower frontline business users.
6. Offer a multi-channel choice.
7. Listen to your policyholders.
8. Review regularly, improve continuously.

The results achieved by other insurers that have followed these eight steps provide demonstrable proof that such results can be quickly and cost-effectively achieved. These results include:

• Significantly improved customer satisfaction – Insurers that implement these eight steps are better able to communicate with policyholders in a one-to-one manner that creates strong, positive relationships. The result is that policyholders are more satisfied in the short term and they remain more satisfied in the long term.
• Better allocation of limited budget pounds – Many of the best practices associated with these eight steps—especially those that support multi-channel delivery—enable insurers to achieve substantial cost savings. These savings can be allocated to further improvement of the customer experience or to other urgent priorities.

• More effective fulfillment of the insurer’s mission – The ability of an insurer to fulfill its stated mission is contingent upon its ability to inform policyholders about available products, services and support. By enhancing the customer experience, execution of an eight-step strategy ensures that this information delivery and support are performed with excellence.

• Compliance with regulatory mandates – All insurers are being required to fulfill federal and/or state mandates for response, customer service and/or organizational transparency. The eight steps facilitate that compliance within time, resource and budget constraints.

• Improved staff morale – Insurers can’t perform well if their front-line employees are discouraged and unmotivated. By empowering these employees to have real impact on the organization’s performance—and by making that impact measurable and rewardable—these eight steps consistently result in noticeable improvement in staff morale.

• Deeper insight into policyholder needs and marketplace conditions – Insurers have to keep up with the changing needs of their policyholders as well as broader changes in the economy, society, technology, etc. Implementation of these eight steps promotes this insight by enabling insurers to better capture and act upon information about policyholders and the world in which they live and work.

These benefits are available to any insurer. The key to achieving them is to start with the first step. A standout customer experience isn’t something that happens overnight; it is the result of a methodical, ongoing strategy. But such a strategy typically starts yielding its initial benefits right away, as insurers become intentional about delivering exceptional document communications. And it is from this starting point that they go on to achieve the kind of operational excellence to which every insurance leader aspires.

Do you have a beneficial strategy in place? Now you can. Read the “Eight Steps to Exceptional Member Experiences for Health Insurance Plans” whitepaper to find out how.

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

There are eight proven steps that insurers can take to implement these modifications. These eight steps are based on nearly three decades of experience with hundreds of clients and have repeatedly enabled insurers to break the lockstep relationship between service quality and service cost. They also provide a practical methodology for making the transition to more effective document-communications management with minimal disruption to ongoing operations.

1. Give business users a more active role.
2. Optimize IT’s role.
3. Centralize templates and content.
4. Content – create once, use multiple times.
5. Empower frontline business users.
6. Offer a multi-channel choice.
7. Listen to your policyholders.
8. Review regularly, improve continuously.

By adapting these best practices to their own specific situations, insurers can fulfill rising customer expectations, comply with internal mandates, improve staff morale and gain deeper insight into conditions that impact the insurer’s mission—as they increase revenues and reduce costs.

What other steps can be taken to ensure exceptional customer experiences?

Read how Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield creates personalized documents from anywhere in the world: Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield Case Study.

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

Acquire new policyholders – Generate error-free proposals, illustrations, policies, notices and other point-of-contact communications.

Proposals, illustrations, policies, letters and even e-mail and web content can be used to acquire new policyholders. Many life insurers use time- and resource-consuming, manual processes to generate document communications. This not only wastes money, it also increases the risk of missed opportunities and allows for errors that can cost even more. An effective document communications solution can help life insurers avoid these and other expensive pitfalls. Utilizing pre-approved document templates and automated data integration, the solution removes most of the time-consuming, error-prone manual processes from the equation, enabling insurers to drastically reduce generation times, production costs and errors.

Retain existing policyholders – Improve document personalization and accuracy, which improves policyholder satisfaction.

The key to delivering superior customer care is responding faster to inquiries and delivering a more personalized experience. Your customer-facing employees must be able to solve problems and get answers to your policyholders quickly and accurately. Dynamic document communications provide up-to-date information for your policyholders, logically arranged according to preset business rules, all presented with a professional look that enhances the policyholder’s confidence in your organization. From proposal generation to policy issuance, you will streamline your interactions while delivering the personalization and accuracy your policyholders demand.

Strengthen policyholder relationships – Cross-sell and up-sell to your policyholders through tailored communications.

Cross-selling and up-selling additional products and services to your existing policyholders is easy when you really “know” the policyholders. Leveraging data provides valuable insights to extend policyholder relationships in addition to improving customer satisfaction. The right document communications solution can help you nurture your policyholder relationships by giving you the ability to tailor content to the policyholders who are the most likely to be receptive to them. You will be able to streamline data acquisition from your core business applications and databases while ensuring the delivery of documents via the policyholder’s preferred channel. A powerful rules engine drives deeper personalization of content from a policyholder’s stored transaction history. And with the ability to dynamically insert TIFF or JPG images, PDFs and message lines into any communication, you have the tools to tailor specific content to each unique policyholder.

What are the other ways to improve policyholder relationships? Find out how MTL Insurance attained the ability to exceed customer expectations – every time: MTL Insurance Case Study.

This is an edited excerpt from the “Cincom Eloquence® Helping Health Insurers Find New Ways to Run and Grow Their Business through Improved Document Communications” brochure.

According to a survey of 500 individuals representing over 200 insurers and over 200 agents, brokers and MGAs and a report titled, “CCM and ECM: Insurer Priorities and Plans” (December 2010) from Strategy Meets Action (SMA),” the top three business drivers are all about enabling growth, not improving operational efficiencies or reducing costs.

Improving customer service was the number-one driver followed by a better understanding of customer/market needs and improving customer retention. Many insurers are changing their marketing messages to downplay their low rates and are focusing on customer-experience delivery. Unfortunately, insurers seeking to deliver a consistently excellent customer experience currently face many challenges including:

Rising expectations

Companies like Amazon have made exceptional customer experiences a core component of their business strategies. Customers’ interactions with these companies raise their expectations about all aspects of service including speed, ease, relevance and personalization. These expectations are then projected onto insurers as well.

Multiple communication channels

Today’s customers want to interact across multiple communication channels including phone, e-mail, the web, mobile, fax, interactive voice response (IVR), interactive chat and/or walk-in visits to brick-and-mortar offices. This presents insurers with the new, additional challenge of providing a consistent level of service and consistent information for customers regardless of channel.

Constrained budgets

A downturn in the economy is reducing consumer spending, and insurers are not immune to the pressures. Consumers are always looking for the best coverage for the best rate, and insurers, along with competitors, are scrambling to meet the need. The result is tighter budgets for most departments within insurers. Any 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.

Legacy systems integration

Few insurers can afford the cost or business disruption of a wholesale “rip and replace” of their existing information systems. Whatever initiatives insurers implement to improve their customer experience, they must be capable of effectively integrating with existing technologies and resources.

Retiring subject-matter experts

Many insurers are experiencing a generational shift as their aging “baby boomer” staff retires. They take years of irreplaceable expertise and experience with them when they go. Such losses can have a significant adverse impact on customer service—unless insurers can take immediate action.

Ongoing legislative/regulatory change

National regulations are not static and neither is the information insurers have to provide to their customers. This ongoing flux adds to the difficulty—and potentially, the cost—of delivering a standout customer experience.

Conclusion

Insurers must somehow overcome the customer experience/cost dilemma if they are to optimally fulfill their business objectives. They must become more adept at delivering exceptional customer experiences across all communication channels within their existing resource constraints.

To really succeed, they have to keep getting better at continuously doing more with less.

How can you face the challenges plaguing insurance companies? See how Molina Healthcare did: Molina Healthcare Inc. Case Study.

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

Reduce Document Costs

Significantly reducing costs in your policy generation and correspondence strategy requires implementing a single, automated solution that reduces manual processes, template development, training and rework for all interactive, batch and on-demand document generation.

Accelerate Time-to-Market

Time is money. So, dramatically shortening the time it takes to move new documents into production is one way insurers have realized significant cost savings and improved policyholder relationships.

Reduce Error Rates and Improve Brand Consistency

Using automated data acquisition, version control and reusable content components that are built once and used throughout your template library not only helps you eliminate costly errors, it also allows you to maintain your company’s brand equity, ensuring that all documents have the proper brand identifiers in their designated places.

Mitigate Compliance Risks

Document communications solutions significantly reduce the burden and costs associated with state and federal regulatory compliance through the centralized management and monitoring of content components, as well as comprehensive audit facilities that track changes.

Conclusion

Adopting a document communications solution automates your business-critical document processes and enables you to strengthen policyholder relationships, minimize compliance risks and reduce operation costs delivering a rapid return on your investment.

What other ways can a document communications solution help you run your business?

Find out by reading the complimentary brochure: “Cincom Eloquence® Helping Health Insurers Find New Ways to Run and Grow Their Business through Improved Member Communications”.

This is an edited excerpt from the “Cincom Eloquence® Helping Life Insurers Find New Ways to Run and Grow Their Business through Improved Document Communications” brochure.

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?

Receive the complimentary whitepaper, Driving Member Satisfaction with Document Automation, and find out how!

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

The main driver of customer relationships is personalized communication. Ninety percent of organizations face the dilemma of communicating efficiently with their customers without compromising the quality of personalized contact. This is where document communications applications come into play.

Document communications solutions allow organizations to efficiently produce documents in large volumes while simultaneously personalizing content for each individual document and automatically store and index those documents for later retrieval. More than just database manipulation, document communications applications help organizations improve customer acquisition, reduce customer churn and increase cross-selling opportunities all while providing the kind of personalization customers crave.

Customizing the communication method for each policyholder with multi-channel delivery options, including mail, fax, e-mail, the web or all of the above, is now easier than ever. Document communications solutions lead the way in transitioning from a paper-driven, labor-intensive process to electronic document delivery by utilizing these features:

• Interactivity: Dynamically assemble, generate and deliver highly personalized documents with varying degrees of complexity while interacting with customers in real time.

• Ease of Use: A thin-client interface, point-and-click access to documents and guided workflows provide a highly intuitive environment that significantly reduces training burden across the enterprise.

• Timely Response: Improve customer responsiveness with point-and-click access to a multitude of documents and document packs that provide single customer delivery of multiple documents.

• Multiple Delivery Channels: Automatically adjust document characteristics to the respective delivery channel, providing turnkey, point-and-click support for multiple delivery channels.

• Output Management: Simplify output management strategies and significantly reduce post-processing costs by combining grouping and sorting capabilities with open and published native Microsoft XML schemas.

The right document communications solution can provide an easy-to-use design environment for creating sophisticated proposal document templates with built-in business rules, variable data and mathematical calculations. Changes made to your proposal templates can automatically update all related documents for fast, accurate proposal generation. This enables you to achieve better personalization, decrease time-to-market, improve quality and ensure compliance.

Document communications solutions offer a way for enterprise-level organizations to meet contemporary customer-care challenges in an efficient, effective and profitable manner. By streamlining the process by which proposals are designed, deployed throughout the enterprise, delivered to customers and managed, organizations can strengthen and expand their customer relationships as well as gain significant savings in production cost and time.

Discover the right document communications solution for you at documentsolutions.cincom.com/resources/white-papers/.

This is an edited excerpt from the original article by Jillian Phelan.

The three Rs keeping most insurers up at night are Risk, Regulations and Return on Investment. Delivering information in real time with transactional capabilities can be invaluable. That’s where document automation can help. With the right technology, insurers can now automate assembly, generation and delivery of highly personalized documents resulting in higher accuracy, improved relevancy and faster time-to-market.

Risk: Eliminate Chance from the Equation

While no one can control the external forces that put us all at risk, insurance companies can control the internal risk created by non-compliance, errors and lost revenue due to unsatisfied customers. Insurance is about information, and with over 95% of customer information being delivered by documents, it only makes sense that insurers start here when looking for ways to mitigate risks.

The simplest and easiest pathway to document quality and near-zero-defects performance is with a dynamic document-automation solution. Using automated data acquisition, version control and reusable content components, document-automation solutions not only help insurers eliminate costly document errors, but it also allows them to maintain their company’s brand equity, ensuring that all documents have the proper brand identifiers in their designated places. Document automation provides straight-through processing that not only reduces errors, but improves consistency and time-to-market. Through web services and a services-oriented architecture, both internal and external data can be shared.

Regulations: Get It Right the First Time

The insurance industry is nothing if not regulatory and now even more so. With stricter HIPAA requirements and Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, state and federal regulators looking for ways to pressure insurers and growing political pressure and customer demands, now is not the time to take chances. When communicating with their customers, getting it right is critical. Document automation makes this process simple.

Document automation can provide the security insurers need to ensure that all of their documents meet established industry standards. It significantly reduces the burden and costs associated with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), HIPAA and state and federal regulatory compliance through the centralized management and monitoring of content components, as well as comprehensive audit facilities.

Document automation enables structured reviews of certain documents prior to delivery (e.g., legal documents signed by executive) and also supports model variations to ease the management of content inclusion or exclusion based on dates or jurisdiction. Insurers can easily track document activities through comprehensive audit trails, and impact analysis features allow authors to easily track what and where changes affect other models or components within the repository.

ROI: Profit from the Right System

Through comprehensive testing and preview capabilities built directly into the design environment, document automation can reduce document development time from hours to minutes. With document automation, insurers can easily move from document design to production without manual intervention or complex programming from IT. Document solutions can usually be implemented and have customers in production in one to three months. In some cases, solutions have been implemented in as little as nineteen days.

Document automation reduces development costs by cutting coding effort by up to 90%, and it lowers IT costs because it requires fewer programmer resources to maintain and develop documents. This enables insurers to move document authoring and management out of IT and put it into the hands of business users, which has resulted in significant IT cost savings for many customers.

Conclusion

Companies often select document-automation solutions to replace a homegrown and/or aging document solution that cannot handle the increased demands of their growing business. These existing solutions do not offer document automation’s ease of use for the business user and often require IT personnel to perform basic functions such as the creation or maintenance of document templates. The ability to reallocate expensive IT resources to projects not associated with document production is where most customers discover operating cost savings.

An area of opportunity for customer satisfaction may be found in customer documents. Customer correspondence in the form of letters and statements, applications and notifications, beneficiary forms and prospectus booklets all combine to represent the face of any organization. As a result, documents have great scope and importance due to their direct influence on customer satisfaction. By improving the accuracy and quality of key customer documents, managers are likely to make significant improvements to the performance of their system overall and take strides to ensure the continued satisfaction of their customers.

Documents Drive Satisfaction

While electronic communications are growing, printed documents remain the primary means by which organizations communicate with their customers. Surveys indicate that nearly 90% of all communications between an organization and its customers are in the form of printed documents. Despite the pivotal role documents play in customer service, most organizations still struggle with the process of creating and revising customer documents with most projects taking days, if not weeks, to complete. This, combined with the prevailing concerns over data accuracy, integration and control, and the manual rework and assembly of documents, suggests that now may be an opportune time for managers to initiate document system upgrades to enable a more accurate and agile document workflow.

The Investment Implications of Customer Documents

Whatever the price tag, 100% of the investment made to upgrade information technology ultimately gets manifested into a document. Customer documents like statements, letters, applications and notifications literally represent the final “product” of any organization. Despite their importance in customer care, however, customer documents are often an afterthought during information-system infrastructure planning; the implications of these vital touch points overshadowed by the scope of the bigger technology initiative.

The danger for organizations is to invest heavily into infrastructure enhancements and overlook the documents that are ultimately output from the system. If this important customer interface is broken, customers perceive that their entire “product” is broken. Poor documents can lead to dissatisfaction that reflects poorly on the performance of the organization in the eyes of management and more importantly, customers.

A Strategic Approach

Customer satisfaction is vital to the ongoing viability of any organization and ultimately provides a measure of overall business performance. By adopting a more strategic approach to customer documents, organizations will find fruitful opportunity to improve customer satisfaction. While evaluating the technological and administrative aspects of core application enhancements, consider the ultimate product of those systems: customer documents.

• How will system upgrades interact with and improve customer documents?
• Will enhancements enable greater accuracy and control of customer documents?
• What opportunities exist to bolster relationships with customers and ensure their ongoing satisfaction through documents?

The key for “document strategy” advocates will be to successfully include document system enhancements in the overall scope of infrastructure improvement plans. Information-system managers must foster the sponsorship needed to include document systems as a line item in RFP efforts and embrace customer documents in the process of system enhancement. Organizations are in a position to ensure that their customer documents ultimately do their part to improve and maintain customer satisfaction.

Want to ensure that your documents improve customer satisfaction?  Visit documentsolutions.cincom.com/solutions/deploy/.

This is a summary of an article by Lori Gelter, Cincom Systems.

A document-strategy designer is similar to the navigator of a ship—a sailor must know two things before he can chart a course: his current location and the location of where he wants to go.

Picking a particular destination for your document strategy may be relatively easy—save money, increase efficiency or bolster customer service. But determining the precise distance and direction your “ship” must travel requires that you know your exact location at the time of your departure. As a result, when mapping benchmarks for your document strategy, you must understand where you are now and where you want to go in order to make the right directional decisions.

Baseline Assessment

A Baseline Assessment provides a starting benchmark for your strategy. The more closely your strategy is tied to the needs and goals of the organization, the more likely it will be given sponsorship, support and funding, and the more likely your efforts will result in meaningful improvement.

Perform a Baseline Assessment in three steps.

Step 1.   Understand the key business needs, pressures and constraints that your organization must satisfy and manage.

• What are the hard numbers that measure company performance?
• What are the business pressures that your company must manage?
• What are the constraints, requirements and expectations that your organization must live with each day?

Step 2. Examine the specific objectives and strategies that are defined in your company business plan.

• What are your long-term objectives and overall strategy?
• What are your organization’s short-term objectives and operational strategies?
• What are the specific ways your company tracks the achievement of these objectives?

Step 3. Understand the mission and vision of your organization.

• What are the reasons your company exists?
• How does your company envision success?
• What are the specific initiatives underway to achieve your company’s mission and vision?

By following these steps, you will perform a comprehensive yet manageable assessment of your organization. The process you choose to improve must be one that is critical to the successful achievement of your organization’s goals.

Chart your course at documentsolutions.cincom.com/solutions/.

This is a summary of an article by Kevin Craine, MBA.