Digital transformation has been on the agenda for many financial services businesses for the last five years. In insurance the industry is quickly realising that digital transformation is more than just automating processes to gain cost savings, it’s about pivoting the business towards the customer.
IBISWorld Australia notes that online-only, user friendly insurers across life, health and general and presenting real competition to traditional insurance businesses as they are simplifying processes and bringing the customer to the forefront of their messaging.
Realigning your business to the customer has to start with the basics. Customer Communications Management is the very foundation of the business relationship with your customers.
Here are some alarm bells to look out for in your business indicating that as part of your digital transformation, you should be re-evaluating whether your current customer communications system is working.
Slow Response Times
Are your staff asking “Why does it take so long to generate communications?”
Today’s consumers expect superior levels of customer service. Customers regularly interact with companies that set the bar for exceptional customer experiences. This significantly raises their expectations for all service experiences, even those offered by insurers, including: speed of response, ease of use, relevance of content and personalisation of communications. Your distribution channel has expectations as well. They expect the policyholder lifecycle to run smoothly and that they’ll be involved from underwriting and policy issuance to claims settlement.
Too Many Errors:
Are your staff asking “Why does our call center get so many calls about inaccurate information in our documents?”
Unfortunately, human errors account for the majority of mistakes in customer communications. With regulations changing constantly, customers’ demands for more, better and faster service and personal information spread across a variety of unconnected systems and databases, your customer-facing resources find it increasingly difficult to ensure that every communication contains the right information.
Lack of Personalisation:
Are your staff asking “Why can’t we make our communications more meaningful and personalised?”
The days of delivering generic communications in batch are over. Standard documents with different address blocks and “cut-and paste” information are being replaced with highly customised communications containing content relevant to each individual policyholder (or agent) and delivered in real time and in the preferred format or channel.
Too Complicated
Are your staff asking “Why are our communications systems so hard to use?”
Your infrastructure has morphed over the years to respond to both business trends and ever-changing regulatory demands. These have driven the number of systems in your business to an all-time high. Complex interfaces and tools built by, and for, IT make it difficult for your end-users to take an active role in managing communications processes. As such, there is a heavy dependence on already over-burdened IT resources for what should be an intuitive application.
Stuck with IT
Are your staff asking “Why does it take our IT staff days, even weeks, to edit or create templates?”
Why is your IT department editing and creating templates? A design interface that still requires significant IT programming is costing you time and money, and maybe even customers. With all the issues facing IT in helping to run and grow your business, it’s no wonder creating templates, or making changes to an existing one, are not high on their priority list.
These are some of the indicators that highlight that customer communication management is something your team should be reviewing.
To view a full checklist of pain points see our e-book 9 Signs your Customer Communications Processes Need Improvement.
To go through these pain points and possible solutions in detail feel free to contact us!
