As mobile and social networking technologies flood the enterprise, insurers have gained valuable new avenues to interact with customers and business partners. Yet, keeping messaging coordinated and consistent in this multichannel workplace has become increasingly difficult. Insurance Networking News asked Doug Cox, director of North America Enterprise Business at Boston-based GMC Software Technology about what insurers can do to achieve a unified communication strategy.
INN: What technologies can help insurers simplify their multi-channel customer communication strategies?
DC: With multichannel communications, coordination and consistency are critical. Most companies today understand that communicating one-on-one with their customers is imperative to continued business success. The challenge, however, is often in the successful implementation of enterprisewide, collaborative solutions that make it possible to communicate consistently across all interactions with customers. The ability to "silo bust" and draw from content across independent silos of communication is necessary. An integrated solution that drives multiple applications from a single platform and makes it possible to create communications from multiple inputs and formats
is critical.
INN: What does the advent of mobile technologies mean for customer
communications?
DC: One word: Speed. Mobile is clearly changing the way we communicate. With new channels opening up all the time, we can only expect that the two-way communication cycle with customers will continue to accelerate. With one click, we can get connected and get feedback within a matter of seconds. So content becomes very important and drives the need for a customer communication strategy that will effectively integrate mobile with the other channels of communication.
INN: Do insurers need to
fully abolish information silos before embracing a unified communication strategy?
DC: Absolutely not. We know that is not going to happen. So the good news is that technologies exist that can tap into existing silos within the organization to make it possible to create coordinated, consistent messaging that meets an organization's unified communication goals. They can be worked seamlessly into enterprise architectures and work with formats, processes, and data flows already in place to support a universal range of output formats.
INN: Can technology ease regulatory and compliance issues surrounding customer communications?
DC: The answer is yes, but there are a couple of considerations. First, privacy is a separate issue from security. Insurers must have systems in place that protect sensitive data when it is at rest and when it is in transition. The technology use needs to be HIPAA- and PCI-compliant. It also needs to be able to define what level of access each employee is allowed. Additionally, having the ability to universally encrypt data across the platform is critical.
Second, the system must also have the agility to quickly and efficiently respond to the changing regulatory landscape and reduce any disruption associated with compliance issues. Having the ability to include or exclude specific content based on effective dates to support required processes for regulatory filings and changing regulations is necessary to a secure workflow.
INN: Are legacy systems
incompatible with a modern multi-channel communications framework?
DC: As customer touch points have expanded across numerous channels, delivering consistent, personalized communications has become increasingly complex, particularly when you are still working with a mainframe environment. However, technology has advanced to the point that it possible to directly access legacy system data from multiple sources, in any format, and transform it into customer-centric documents without the need to change entire systems or processes and without disrupting current business and data flow. This enables an agile migration strategy that allows for migrating pieces of data over time, avoiding a "big bang." It doesn't feel like a huge change, and it makes it easier to bridge the gap between the old and new way of doing things, yet you can still reap immediate value.
INN: How can insurers standardize multi-channel communication?
DC: Ensuring the ability to coordinate communications across all of these channels is important. A key step is providing an integrated framework that can leverage data across the entire solution. The content delivered on a printed statement may be in a completely different format than the content delivered to that same member via a different channel.
A critical success factor is having the ability to create flexible content that automatically changes to match the delivery channel.
