Transforming Customer Experience with a Modern CCM System
Introduction
Traditional customer communication management (CCM) systems used to mean siloed applications based on in-house, custom-developed code. Or worse, multiple vendor contracts that locked insurers into pricing and options for disparate tools that were challenging to integrate and costly to support. But all that has changed, as today’s CCM solutions for insurers integrate with core platforms to drive greater value and a better customer experience in a way that is flexible and easy to maintain.
Transforming Communication: The Time is Now
As the old saying goes, the best time to plant a tree is five years ago. The second-best time is now. When it comes to transforming CCM systems, the time is most definitely now. Every year, insurers face new challenges that drive them to operate more efficiently and effectively, so they can comply with new regulations, meet competitive pressures, enhance the customer experience, and capitalize on opportunities for growth.
Here are three keys that insurers should consider to plan a strategy, implement a solution, drive better team results, and a better customer experience:
- Focus on the User Experience
One of the biggest complaints about most legacy CCMs is how challenging they are to use, and how they create a burden on IT teams or other technical personnel for things like creating templates. Empowering end users so they can generate their own communications while freeing up IT resources is a major benefit for modern CCM systems.
Insurers need to look for a solution that adopts a user interface that is familiar or natural for the way end users work.
Familiar options for users include:
- A “markup” view of documents that takes advantage of embedded Microsoft® Word for all visual and formatting elements such as bold, italics, logos, signatures, charts, fonts, tables of content, indexes, foreign languages, etc.
- A visual Microsoft Visio®-like “logical” view for workflows to make it easy to embed rules logic, structure, and workflow
- A “digital” view that streamlines the design of fully responsive electronic communications
To streamline the experience even further for end users, modern systems deliver access through standard web browsers or directly from within their core applications to a central repository of templates with pre-approved content and pre-configured workflows. That opens the door to assembly and generation of correspondence while interacting with customers in real time.
As a result, manual processes for generating documents that once took hours or days can now take just minutes to complete. Re-keying data from multiple systems into correspondence is now replaced with automated data and content that eliminates errors and personalizes every communication.
- Make it Easy for IT
Putting power in the hands of end users already saves IT departments time and effort. Another way to simplify their efforts is to ensure ease of integration. Look for solutions built from the ground up on open standards, web services, and field-proven technologies to provide flexibility, reliability, and scalability.
Solutions that rely on a single code base and provide an extensive library of APIs and program exits will help streamline any integrations above and beyond core systems at any point in the production workflow. The ability to access external data in real time directly from other applications for pre-populating workflows, triggering data-driven logic, content inclusion/exclusion, template completion, and output processing will further simplify processes for users and for IT.
This approach provides for the creation of a wide range of communications including policies, notices, endorsements, claim letters, declarations, and customer-service correspondence while speeding communication response times and reducing overall costs—not to mention freeing up IT resources to focus on higher value-added projects.
- Make Sure it Scales
The third key for insurers is to make sure that systems can grow and adapt as processes change, or as the business expands.
Modern CCM solutions are built to deliver personalized, interactive communication solutions to support department-level need, while scaling to high-volume batch production and on-demand communications across the entire enterprise.
Beyond software applications, insurers should look for a CCM partner who can help to scale operations by helping map out existing processes and workflows to align with business needs. Software should allow insurers to do business in any way they choose, but vendors should act as partners to identify opportunities to streamline and improve those processes. Vendors who commit to understanding insurers’ businesses, analyzing requirements, explaining the options, and identifying a solution tailor-made for unique needs will ensure that insurers can go beyond what comes off-the-shelf to what works best.
The Final Word
With so many organizations re-focusing dollars and effort on customer experience, there has never been a better time for insurers to evaluate the systems and processes they rely on to deliver timely, effective customer communications. The good news is that the time, effort, and cost to upgrade and improve those tools and empower users has never been better.
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Shawn Cross Shawn Cross is the Partner Manager for Cincom Document Solutions, responsible for Eloquence partner relationships and integrations. He has worked in the customer communication management space for 13 years at Cincom. Prior to working as a Partner Manager, Shawn held various sales positions at Cincom, working with direct customers.