Repurpose - Don’t Reinvent: Data and Content for a Highly Efficient Customer Communications Management Strategy

Perhaps more than most other types of businesses, customers expect their insurance companies to know who they are and to be willing and able to communicate with them on a personal level. However, developing the means to forge strong and long-term customer relationships in the quickly changing landscape of multiple communications channels and devices can be challenging. One response is a comprehensive customer communications management (CCM) strategy to utilise existing data and content resources in new and dynamic ways. 

What is changing in today’s information ‘big data’ driven revolution is not the data itself so much as the wide variety of delivery channels and technologies currently available, including print, websites, email and text messaging, tablets, social media, mobile devices and even wearables, each with its own specific transmission and formatting requirements. What is not changing quite so fast are the often ageing and inflexible computer mainframes and operating systems where most customer data is stored and processed in separate silos for sales, accounting, claims and other internal business groups. 

Developing the CCM solution

Building and implementing a CCM strategy means pulling relevant information from many of the organisation’s disparate silos and repurposing it for effective multichannel customer communications. For many insurance organisations, this might require working with multiple, isolated legacy applications and systems and may involve the parallel development and management of multi-channel communication applications in order to unlock data from obsolete print-centric software. Without a doubt, this can be a costly and disruptive undertaking. 

Rather than moving forward with such a complex process, insurance organisations may take the holistic, evolutionary approach of adopting a CCM strategy that circumvents the need to rebuild data structures, content and business logic, while recognising and exploiting the value that exists in their current environment and legacy systems. This can be achieved by designing a CCM solution with an open architecture that enables the organisation to easily access all relevant information and pool the data contained in legacy and siloed front and back office applications, systems and workflows. 

As part of this CCM strategy, insurance organisations may need the ability to mine their numerous data sources, which can include CRM, ERP, SAP, ECM and Web-based XML data. Combining the information the organisation may already have - somewhere - about customer preferences, life stage and previous transactions, provides a rich, multi-dimensional view of each customer and makes it possible to produce more relevant and finely targeted messaging and delivery of customer communications.

CCM in practice

Before moving forward with CCM, the organisation must consider its value. What can CCM mean in real terms? In one example, redesigning the regular monthly billing statement to include personalised colour graphs and marketing messages in the white space can help both to clarify that information and differentiate the organisation from its competitors. 

In this instance, data that has been formatted for previously text-only, black and white statements is contained in an AFP print stream. While there are many ways to convert an AFP spool into other formats, the ability to directly ingest an AFP exit spool and analyse it for the wide range of data required to generate the new communications dramatically reduces the need to recruit IT resources. If business users can automatically intercept the AFP exit spool and examine it for both relevant data and unused white space on a record-by-record basis, they will be able to identify where to put messaging on each statement and what messaging to use, directly from the spool data. 

Existing customer information and content can be quickly reformatted and recomposed with variable images, marketing messages, dynamic colour graphs and other eye-catching and relevant content without the need to enlist IT support or disrupt any of the backend systems and processes. 

Summing up

Briefly stated, a CCM strategy can allow an insurance organisation to:

• Create and manage structured, interactive and on-demand communications

• Repurpose existing legacy applications

• Design dynamic communications that may include colour graphics and charts, while controlling content to support compliance and brand consistency

• Optimise document production and delivery across any channels such as print, email, text messaging, web, mobile and other digital and paper channels.

This type of CCM strategy offers the potential for significant cost savings and countless process efficiencies when compared to upgrading legacy software that has limited formatting capabilities and that was not designed to include colour and/or graphics.    In today’s difficult and highly competitive business environment, insurance organisations must be able respond quickly to the market with personalised and relevant messaging that grabs and holds each customer’s attention. Making an appropriate investment in the capacity to repurpose existing data and content helps streamline the customer communications workflow as well as enabling effective outreach to customers with information they want through the channels they prefer.