Published on the 09/07/2020 | Written by Cincom

Four best practices to empower customer facing resources…

Most insurers recognise the need for consistent customer communications. Since insurers have a variety of customer-facing employees and business partners who interact with policyholders, it is vital that the insurer’s brand is well represented and that the communications are accurate and effective. And, the heightened focus on improving the customer experience is shining a new light on customer documents and communications since they are important contributors to the overall customer experience.

Heightened focus on customer experience is shining a new light on customer documents and communications.

There are four ‘best practices’ that insurers can employ to promote consistent customer communications for all of their customer-facing resources:

1. Organisational focus: Insurers of all sizes and business lines have been assigning overall responsibility for the customer experience to senior executives. Alternately, some have put together crossfunctional teams whose charter is to view the company from the customer’s perspective. These executives and teams should review the customer communications that the company and its representatives have had with customers over time, and assess how these communications can be accomplished more efficiently and have a more positive impact on the customer experience. Doing audits or reviews on a regular basis (quarterly or semi-annually) will provide a snapshot of the documents, correspondence and other communications that an average customer would see or be a part of. Standards should be established and guidelines put in place for what software to use.
2. Common software platform: It is not uncommon for an insurer to have multiple software systems for generating document communications. Insurers may use Microsoft Word, legacy composition tools or manual approaches – and most of the time a combination of these – to create content for communications. One of the most important steps an insurer can take to ensure a consistent process among frontline personnel is to provide a single common software platform for the creation of customer communications. Migrating to a single customer communications platform makes is easier to enforce standards, manage templates and content and train users.
3. Template design and management: Designing and managing templates for letters, statements and other documents are key elements needed to support customer-facing resources as they communicate with customers. A modern system that provides sophisticated authorisations and workflows allows subject-matter experts in each area of the business to create standard, approved content. This may include logo placement and branding elements managed by Marketing, text blocks managed by Legal and Compliance, e-signatures created and maintained by departmental areas or rules to trigger specific coverages or claims language managed by the appropriate individuals or teams. The ability to create, change and manage all of these communications components in a secure fashion is required to ensure brand consistency, compliance and effective communications.
4. Training and usability: It is important to put the right tools, processes and content in place to enable the creation of customer communications. But the final and crucial step is to train customer-facing employees to leverage these new capabilities. Having a customer communications platform that is designed for business users makes this step easier and much more likely to succeed. Making them aware of the standard templates and the available content to take advantage of not only improves the chances that they will really get the most out of the system, it also helps to enhance the consistency and accuracy of all communications.

The vast capabilities of a modern customer communications application enables your business to leverage its unique competencies to improve communication efficiency and effectiveness to deliver real value, build trust and expand customer relationships.

Want to see how you measure up?
Use this scorecard to quickly assess how you are doing with your customer experience.

For more information contact Cincom

W: www.cincom.com.au
E: info@cincom.com.au
P: +61 2 8875 1400