Communication Intelligence and 'Straight-Through' Policy Production
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Facing increasing costs, reduced productivity and subscriber churn, insurance carriers worldwide are reforming their legacy automation processes and replacing their outdated technologies.
Automation Reform With CCM & Communication Intelligence
In order to make the underwriting and policy production processes more accurate, productive, cost-effective and customer-responsive, insurers need tools and strategies that:
- Streamline policy production
- Improve the accuracy and consistency of critical information, such as quotes
- Support straight-through policy production workflows
- Strengthen risk pricing from the transactional level to the business portfolio level
Best practices and new technologies in CCM support these critical process reforms with communication intelligence.
Top Priorities: Automating Policy Production & Underwriting Processes
Some of the most urgent reform needs for insurers center on faster and more efficient underwriting to gain new revenue, increase profitability and improve customer satisfaction:
- Improving quote–to–bind ratios, which are falling due to competition, “instant quotes” and higher–than–expected quotes resulting from poor data quality
- Standardizing customer data access and aggregation processes for better decision-making and risk management
- Improving the accuracy and speed of quote-generation to reduce excess costs, while generating new business
- Increasing both customer and agent satisfaction and long-term loyalty
- Integrating back office systems and data with customer- and agent-facing Web portals featuring tools such as EBPP
Improve the Underwriting Process With Communication Intelligence
Underwriting and policy production processes at most insurance carriers are filled with internal and external communication problems:
- Cycle of inaccurate and incomplete data from customer to agent to underwriter and back
- Inefficient manual interventions
- Multiple hand-offs
- Inaccessible information from siloed IT(Information Technology) systems
- Inappropriate geographical benchmarks, such as ZIP codes
These communication glitches encourage inefficiency and a strong potential for error. To resolve these core issues, insurers need communication intelligence.
CCM provides a strategic framework for this intelligence, optimizing every information point — digital and physical — across all departments and business units.
CCM, Communication Intelligence & Straight-Through Processing
CCM and communication intelligence focus on increasing efficiency, accuracy and overall responsiveness. For insurers, this enables straight-through processing, which accelerates key aspects of policy production such as:
- Quoting
- Binding
- Policy creation
- Policy delivery
- Data quality
- Storage and delivery
- Web-based invoice presentment and payment, such as EBPP
CCM Best Practices & Solutions for Insurers
To encourage and support the efficiency of straight-through processing, CCM best practices and solutions can be applied to:
- Access and aggregate data from multiple back-office systems
- Clean and correct information, including addresses and geographical locations for automated territory assignment
- Enhance the customer/agent experience with greater accuracy and shorter waiting times for quotes
- Automate time-consuming, error-prone and costly manual interventions and hand-offs
- Improve quote–to–bind ratios
- Eliminate pick lists
- Provide greater accuracy in quote pricing
- Speed time–to–payment
- Manage retention risk
- Improve the quality of the business’s customer portfolio
- Comply with the different requirements of multiple states and local jurisdictions
Customer Intelligence & Data Quality
Customer intelligence can result in faster and better pricing decisions with effective data quality initiatives.
Customer Data Integration
CDI initiatives allow insurers to break down the silos of legacy environments by accessing, aggregating and integrating data from multiple systems.
Address Matching & Geocoding
Address matching corrects, cleans and standardizes addresses. Geocoding uses highly precise geographic data — down to latitude and longitude — to determine the exact physical location of each address for territory assignment.
This type of data quality initiative ensures that ZIP Codes are optimized for the delivery of mail, not for determining risk criteria. Additionally, using geographic intelligence for these specific locations allows insurers to more accurately assess risk-assignment factors and determine whether the policy application should be escalated to a supervising underwriter.
Production Intelligence & Superior Policy Design, Delivery and Storage
Production intelligence supports straight-through policy production by enabling insurers to quickly deliver clear, accurate quotes and policy information to agents and customers — in electronic and physical formats.
Effective Document Design & Composition
Good document design improves literacy, making policies easier to read and understand. With dynamic document composition technology, insurers can efficiently “mass customize” documents with subscriber-specific data, as well as automate the distribution of these personalized documents.
Insurers can utilize document composition solutions to maintain:
- Policy and contract pages for all lines of business
- Schedules
- Endorsements
- Declaration pages
- State-mandated requirements for audit compliance
Electronic Document Storage & Delivery
With production intelligence, insurers can take advantage of electronic storage and delivery of documents, which provides easier access and printing for CSRs and policyholders.
This approach also supports distribution through multiple channels — email, mail and the Web — while preserving the visual integrity of document across these platforms.
Automated Production for Large Volume Communications
Intelligent enterprise production systems integrate document production and management technologies, sorters, inserters and other equipment to automate the production and processing of large volumes of mail and other communications.
Channel Intelligence & Web Presentment and Payment
Channel intelligence allows carriers to offer flexible, user-selected delivery channels, including the Web. Using Web-based presentment, insurers have a valuable channel to offer subscribers a range of options:
- Convenient, turnkey EBPP — anytime and anywhere
- Flexible payment options
- Customer self-service for updating profiles and providing new information
In addition to binding the policy and closing the sale in real time, delivering policy documents to the agent or policyholder through the Web and/or email shrinks the time–to–payment cycle. Insurers can use email to notify customers of account events such as a new statement or invoice, a missed or late payment, enrollment problems and policy changes.
Using this approach to channel intelligence, insurers and subscribers get the benefits of EBPP and OAM and still retain the ability to print hardcopy formats at the agent’s office or at the policyholder’s home office.
Harnessing the Power of Customer Communication Management
CCM best practices and solutions harness communication intelligence so that insurance carriers can:
- Be more responsive to customers
- Improve data accuracy and integrity
- Drive unnecessary costs and manual activities out of policy production
- Present clear information to customers via their preferred channel
- Enhance the customer experience
- Strengthen branding
- Increase customer loyalty and retention
- Improve top and bottom lines
CCM delivers these benefits by optimizing the flow of the mailstream, which are the documents — digital and physical — and packages that flow within and between carriers and subscribers every day.
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