Question:  Insurance companies face thedifficult reality that two critical needs must be balanced. So,reduction of operational costs often gets pitted against theprovision of better customer service when it comes to prioritiesand budget dollars. Is there a way to achieve bothgoals?

Wilson: Integration ofapplications has always proven effective when attempting to createa more efficient overall process. The efficiencies gained by theseintegrations allow for more of a decrease in policy and claimprocessing times, in turn cutting down on costs and improvingoverall customer service.

Additionally, given the advancement of technology, claimssystems and policy administration systems are making it easier tointegrate with other business applications. Many carriers are ableto leverage internal resources for these integrations, so the costfor doing so has decreased.

However, one of the biggest integration benefits that manycarriers overlook is the ability to integrate all businessapplications with communications and customer interactiondetails.

For years, a phone system has been simply a phone system. Withmany carriers making the move to software-based communicationplatforms, they have the ability to share data between not onlytheir administration systems, but also link all policyholderinteractions with these systems.

Many common insurance interactions, such as claims reporting andinquiries regarding coverage, are handled by manual businessprocesses which access information in various systems withdisparate workflows taking place.

Metrics are tied to each business application, but not theoverall process. The result is lack of insight into performance andinteraction, resulting in an inability to effectively impact it.Hence, the increased interest right now in business processautomation.

What's exciting is that the business process automation fieldhas advanced, and today, insurers have new options that are notonly simpler to deploy and use, but also more powerful.

For instance, insurers can now opt for solutions which utilize acommunications platform as the basis for the entire businessprocess lifecycle. This takes the concept of simply routingworkflow items, and expands it with insight into how long eachprocess is taking and what's happening during thatprocess—including every communication related to theprocess—through real-time monitoring and end-to-end reporting.

These new solutions are more flexible as well, and insurers canuse them for high-level process control, which enables aproliferation of existing applications to work together (includingERP, CRM, and even Excel spreadsheets), or use them as part of abusiness process.

So, whether managing other applications or working in concertwith them, the implementation and integration of communicationssolutions can dramatically reduce processing time and improveprocessing accuracy to deliver measurable cost savings and improvedcustomer service for insurers.