Modernizing Customer Correspondence in Insurance
By Patrick Kehoe, EVP of Product Management, Messagepoint, Inc. —
Customer expectations have changed dramatically in recent years. While printed communications were once accepted as standard, younger generations of consumers have a strong preference for dynamic and highly personalized digital experiences. Yet despite this, print documents and PDFs continue to be the primary mechanism for many of the insurance industry’s communications, even though consumers expect to communicate via their phones using digital friendly apps and portals. This creates challenges for traditional insurers when faced with competition from digital-native market entrants that cater to consumers’ digital preferences throughout the entire customer lifecycle from marketing to onboarding through servicing.
Many of the systems that are relied on to generate these communications were designed in a time when print was the primary communication channel. They are built around the rigid structures of generating documents and lack the flexibility required to accommodate newer digital engagement. These outdated systems lock content into individual communication templates, making it impossible to reuse content across multiple channels in formats that are suitable for digital apps. In order to stay relevant and compete in a world with changing consumer demographics and expectations, insurers need to take a hard look at the systems and processes used to manage their interactions with customers.
The benefits of modernizing systems
Legacy systems come with the baggage of a print-centric, document-centric world. In that world, when you need a different version of a letter to deal with a different product variation, regional requirement, clause or coverage issue, you would create a copy specifically for that variation. It’s easy to understand how templates proliferate in this operating model and suddenly you are faced with a large inventory of communications and documents that contain much of the same content with only slight differences.
Consider the example of a simple correspondence to support a change of beneficiary. While you might start with a single letter template, you may have four different plans that this communication is used for. And it doesn’t end there, since each of these four variations now require four new variations that address the provincial regulations where each product is offered. Now, you have 16 different documents that must be adapted for three individual channels: 16 templates for print versions, another 16 email templates often in a different system, plus four additional templates for your web portal. In total, you now have 48 different templates and versions to manage—all for a single simple customer communication. Now think about having to make a change that is common to all those materials. Suddenly, you are opening up 48 different templates to make 48 of the same content updates. Not only is this process inefficient, costly and time consuming, it introduces risk of errors and inconsistencies across those materials.
Modern systems that enable insurers to manage content for print and digital communications and printed documents in one system can alleviate this challenge. By focusing on solutions that pull the blocks of content from the presentation template, insurers can efficiently create and manage content and then reuse it across channels in different communications. Consider our change of beneficiary example. Imagine, rather than creating a print document template for a letter, you create the content that is needed to be communicated inside a content management system. This system centrally manages the content and enables you to apply it to a printed letter, an email, a web page and a mobile application. In doing so, you aren’t creating copies of templates or individual letters, but you are leveraging the content and dynamically generating communications when required, pulling in the right pieces of content to form the document, the letter or the email. When you need to make a content change, you make it just once and all the resulting communications that use that content are automatically updated. Need a variation on a disclosure or clause? You can create variations of those individual pieces of content that are used when generating the communication for that particular scenario. This modular content management approach not only saves you time and money when editing and updating materials, it also gives you greater visibility and control over your inventory of content.
Addressing the evolution of customer experience, including its movement toward omnichannel engagement, means embracing a different and more agile way of thinking that leads to processes that leverage a modular approach to content management.
Modularity = adaptability
Modular approaches are used successfully across multiple industries in different ways, taking the management of insurance documents to a higher level. Modularity is perfectly suited for the insurance industry as it relates to policy building and personalization for groups or individuals. Even in an inventory of insurance correspondence containing dozens of pieces designed to communicate a different message, there are many elements that are the same. Low-hanging fruit such as contact information, logos, copyrights and signatures are easily reusable, common content components. More complex content, such as product descriptions, disclosures, terms and conditions, fees and calls to action, are also repeatedly used across templates and can be modularized for greater control and efficiency. Targeting the correct content components and deploying them across multiple channels is easy and efficiently controlled.
For digital channels that require specific formatting that is set by the delivery application and channel, it is important to have the flexibility to deliver content via APIs using JavaScript object notation (JSON). This enables the fonts and styles to be applied via a mobile app or the website CMS solution so it functions and looks like the rest of the digital experience. Operating in this way enables teams responsible for the content to maximize efficiency and control, while letting the channel experts take control of the actual experience.
Making the move easy
A change of this scope will certainly incur growing pains, but the good news is there is proven technology that can facilitate the process and offer a more efficient approach to content management by making it easy to get content off legacy systems and into modern environments. AI-powered solutions can streamline the process of content migration by automating ingestion, consolidating duplicate and similar content within your content inventory and preparing the content for onboarding into the new system. Look for solutions that specifically can break legacy communications down into logical content components to prepare your content for the advanced content sharing capabilities of modular content management systems. In addition, with the introduction of generative AI, there are solutions that can rewrite and optimize your content using plain language principles, optimizing for targeted reading levels, sentiment and brand alignment. These capabilities help to support an insurer’s ability to provide a modern experience by simplifying content and making it understandable, or even condensing it for digital channels that require more concise communications. Rather than looking to use AI as part of an external optimization process, it is critical to leverage it within the application you are using to migrate or manage the content in order to avoid having to re-onboard or implement those changes in your core system. Optimizing within your core content management system enables you to take advantage of the efficiencies of AI without adding a manual implementation burden that can be time- and cost-prohibitive.
Our current digital era has necessitated countless changes to the way we do business across nearly every industry. While enacting these changes can certainly be overwhelming, replacing outdated systems with an agile, modular approach that enables more efficient dynamic communications between you and your customers will truly be cause for celebration.
About the Author
Patrick Kehoe drives product strategy in collaboration with the product development team at Messagepoint, a provider of customer communications management software. Kehoe brings to the company more than 25 years of experience delivering business solutions for document processing, customer communications and content management.
About Messagepoint
Messagepoint is a leading provider of customer communications management software. Only Messagepoint harnesses AI-powered Content Intelligence to automate and simplify the process of migrating, optimizing, authoring and managing complex customer communications for non-technical (business) users. Customers rely on its award-winning platform to consistently deliver exceptional, highly personalized customer communications across all platforms and channels. For more information, visit messagepoint.com.
Source: Sterling Kilgore, Inc.