Opinion: A Key business issue for Insurers

By Fokion Natsis , Territory Manager – Africa, from Interactive Intelligence

Insurers are renewing their focus on top line growth, seeking ways to increase premium volumes while at the same time improving profitability. A variety of growth strategies are being pursued, including adding offerings to their product lines, using new channels, and expanding targeted geographic regions. In addition, almost all are working to increase penetration of existing products in existing markets. A critical success factor for all of these strategies is good customer interactions, the kind that result in improved customer satisfaction, higher retention, and more cross selling and up selling. The systems used to manage these strategic customer communications are commonly known as customer communications management systems (CCM).

At the root of every good customer interaction is good content – content that is relevant, accurate, timely, immediately accessible, and very easy to use – content that is available to automatically guide and assist the employee or agent with each and every interaction with a customer. Increasingly, this content needs to be served up directly to the customer or prospect. Content management must incorporate all types of content including voice, structured data, and unstructured data. The systems used to manage this critical content are usually referred to as enterprise content management systems (ECM).

As insurers strive to make every interaction with the customer a more productive touch point, they are gaining a better understanding of the key role that communications and content play in creating a superior customer experience. Content management is now viewed by many leading insurers as a critical business issue instead of merely an operational area with an efficiency and cost reduction focus. Central to the ability to drive new business growth, as well as retain and increase business with existing customers, is a fundamental technology enabler – integration of content and communications solutions with core systems for underwriting, policy servicing, and claims. The objective is seamless integration between transactional systems and CCM and ECM solutions. This interwoven integration provides an environment where ECM systems are able to manage and dynamically deliver appropriate and relevant content and the CCM systems are able to optimize customer interactions.

Winners in the next decade will recognize the key business value of integrating content and communications to drive growth – forging ahead of their competitors by integrating all types of information for quick, easy use in all interactions across the enterprise.