The LifeHack website posted a blog recently called Why You Should Start Your New Year in February. It resonates for many reasons. For parents, the New Year starts in September when the kids go back to school. For some companies, the fiscal year starts in October or June, so January is more of the same. The post-holiday letdown makes January resolutions doomed to fail.
Instead of January New Year resolutions, the idea is to hit the ground running with those resolutions in February.
For insurers, February is the month to resolve to improve customer communication management and automation.
Customer Communication Management for Insurers
Your February resolution to improve customer communication management will drive better customer relations. Insurers thrive when they have a complete view of their customers and manage customer information and communication with automated, integrated systems.
Today’s insurer needs more customer contact beyond point of renewal and claims filing, and to be nimble enough to manage that contact in a strategic way.
Better customer communication management comes from automating key systems and streamlining information management. It delivers on three major goals:
- Drives customer intelligence – With better enterprise document management tools, insurers gain insights about their customers, see patterns and predict the choices they will make. This makes insurers more engaged service providers, tailoring offerings to the customer to fit their choices. Personalized interaction also builds trust. Having access to the critical content needed to understand and predict a policy holder’s needs provides that personalized interaction.
Agents and customer service reps need ready access to the data to solve customer issues, predict their needs, retain and upsell the customer by delivering relevant and personalized customer experiences.
- Enables predictive analytics – By connecting systems and information, insurers can create predictive analytics by extracting information from existing data to discover patterns, future outcomes and trends. They can gain actionable insights to make data-driven decisions throughout the insurance lifecycle. It adds understanding of how customers might react to promotions, for example, and can help improve claim performance and underwriting results. At the same time, it can detect fraud or payment abuse.
When customer information is disconnected in system siloes or not managed in a document management solution, predictive analytics are impossible.
- Prescribes customer alignment – Insurers want to be able to segment customers by contribution, allowing for efficient resource allocation and business process alignment. Having a complete view of the customer means they can be grouped with like-minded customers to create personalized communication by group or segment. It means knowing your customer and growing revenues and margins from high contribution customers while lowering costs from low or negative margin customers.
Make February’s Resolution Digital Transformation
If your customer data is siloed, your technology systems don’t talk to each other, or you still have paper-based systems, you won’t manage critical content effectively to have good customer relations and provide strategic customer support. How you make decisions, manage processes, and provide customer service depends on the systems and technology connecting the information.
Better and faster communication with customers, coupled with innovations to meet customer needs, are the focus of the digital transformation required for insurer success in the 21st century.
Digital transformation is about building strong customer relationships by implementing innovative technology, embracing a digital workflow and becoming a paperless office. Consumers want products and services that resonate with their personal needs, delivered in a way that includes a sincere relationship with their carrier.
By leveraging digital processes, alternate providers and InsurTech disrupters are having an impact on customer information management:
- Insurance premiums are becoming more personalized with tech-enabled insight from wearables, mobile and other data gathering devices. Digitally intelligent insurers can build insight through relationships that exist across data sets.
- Lifestyle apps and digital engagement are affecting relationships between the insurer and the insured. If an insured is engaging with the insurer and its lifestyle apps, insurers benefit from greater insight and more informed risk assessments.
- Claims settlement is becoming faster, automated and a self-service process. Manual claims processes mean insurers spend too much of a customer’s premium on the claims process. InsurTech disruptors are putting the process in the customer’s hands with an automated review of claims, and decisions and payout approvals all automated.
Achieving That February Resolution
Your February resolution should be to connect with the right-fit partner to improve customer information management and digital transformation. The goal is to connect systems and achieve a complete customer view. The appropriate enterprise content management solution (ECM) should centralize all types and formats of critical content and integrate with your core line-of-business systems, giving users access to relevant data directly from familiar system interfaces, such as Guidewire or Duck Creek.
Resolve to pick a solution and partner that:
- Centralizes all content, going beyond a simple document repository by adding enterprise-class secure document management functionality that seamlessly integrates with your existing core system.
- Automates all supporting processes and identifies gaps.
- Consolidates disconnected data, including all related tasks, activities, conversations and other data managed outside of your core systems (e.g., via email inboxes, spreadsheets, manual paper-based databases and legacy applications).
The goal is connected, easily accessible, tracked and secure customer data.
Resolve to embrace digital transformation that improves customer experience – this is a strategic differentiator for insurers. Leveraging innovation to deliver a personalized customer experience gives insurers a competitive edge.
ImageSoft Guides Digital Resolutions
ImageSoft can help you implement your digital resolutions with industry-leading ECM solutions for insurance. Gain automated workflows, improved speed and efficiency, reduced costs and proper compliance. ImageSoft is ready to help your company reap the benefits that an integrated ECM solution can provide.
Look for more information about our solutions for life and property and casualty insurance, plus workers’ comp.
Follow ImageSoft’s Insurance Solutions LinkedIn Showcase page, and receive all the truths you need.