In recent years, P&C insurance companies have madesignificant technology investments aimed at the digital customerexperience.

Challenged by InsureTech, mature P&Centerprises are looking to improve their customers' claimsexperience through such digital innovations as self-servicecapabilities, artificial intelligence, chatbots and SMSmessaging.

All of these efforts to streamline the claims process areessential if carriers hope to differentiate themselves in amarketplace that is increasingly commoditized and prone to quickcustomer churn.

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Messaging matters

But carriers need to do more than improve the agility of theirclaims handling. To truly succeed in enhancingthe customer experience, they need to assess whether they have theability to create content that will resonate with customers;content that is both highly relevant and personalized.

Without the ability to place the right content in their claimscorrespondence, all of the investment to speed the claims processwill be undermined by the negative impression that thecorrespondence makes with the customer.

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Case in point

Imagine a customer with an automobile claim using an insurer's mobile app to report the claim andset up a phone call with the adjuster.

Following the phone call, the adjuster may have acquired a greatdeal of relevant information that could be used in subsequentcorrespondence to make the experience highly personal for thecustomer.

For example, if customer Mike and his wife, Sandra, and theirson, Bobby, were in the car when the accident happened, theadjuster may want to include a personal message with the follow-upcorrespondence, such as “Mike, I'm sorry about your accidentbut I'm so glad that you, Sandra and Bobby are OK!”

However, the adjuster may not have the ability to send anythingbut boilerplate forms from the insurer's legacy customercommunications infrastructure.

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Where to start

Developing a strategy to enhance content begins with gaining aclear and detailed understanding of the overall state of theorganization's content.

The reality for many large P&C insurers is that they toooften have content that is inaccurate, redundant, brandedimproperly, etc. Sorting through that content and finding anintelligent way to organize, minimize and implement a plainlanguage refresh of the content is essential.

A strategy for accomplishing the goal of organizing content isto establish a “center of excellence.”

Many organizations have disparate technologies in place forvarious functions, such as onboarding, email communications andclaims. Gathering together the stakeholders from all of thesedisparate functions to define a centralized communications strategycan go a long way toward breaking down these communication silosand intensifying the focus on customer experience across theorganization.

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More legacy tech challenges

In many cases, legacy communications platforms use statictemplates for their correspondence. There may be a block of contentthat is repeated in 100 different variations of a letter.

Changing that content is a monumental task, requiring making thechange to every single one of the static templates. Typically,these changes will be accomplished by IT, which can be atime-consuming project. We know of one insurer that has a six-monthbacklog just to make a small regulatory change to itscorrespondence. In cases like that, it is nearly impossible to makechanges to improve the customer experience because stateregulations that take priority continue to change and tie up ITresources.

One way to solve this dilemma is to move from a static to adynamic template approach to creating customer communications. Unlike the staticapproach, dynamic templates will allow a change to be made once toa content block and immediately populated to all appropriatecorrespondence templates, avoiding the need to involve IT resourcesin the process.

Put personalization in the hands of those who know the customerbest.

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Lest we forget

Finally, insurers should adopt an approach that will enablethose closest to the customer, such as an agent, broker oradjuster, to easily reference the conversation or otherwisepersonalize the correspondence they send within defined rules thatensure those communications remain compliant and retain aconsistent look and feel with other customer communications sent bythe organization.

For P&C insurers, the quality of the claimsexperience will largely define the customer experience anddetermine whether a carrier will benefit from customer retention orsee churn.

Taking the necessary steps to ensure that your claimscorrespondence is consistent, timely and highly personalized isessential to differentiate in today's competitive marketplace.

Patrick Kehoe is executive vice president of productmanagement for Messagepoint, Inc. Kehoe has more than 25 years ofexperience delivering business solutions for document processing,customer communications and content management. To contact thiswriter, send email to [email protected].

See also:

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