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Tag: 2021

Healthcare Member Communications Are Ripe for Transformation – Are You Prepared?

Posted on by SmartComm

By: John Zimmerer, VP of Industry Marketing, Insurance at Smart Communications

As parts of the world begin to open up, it’s easy to think that life, for both businesses and consumers, can simply pick up where we left off. But to do so would ignore the opportunities for improvement that we were forced to explore during the worst of the pandemic. One key lesson at the top of our list? The need for healthcare payers and providers to focus on timely, relevant and personalized member communications. While the pandemic provided the catalyst to accelerate the implementation of better digital conversation experiences, there’s still a long way to go, as revealed by data from J.D. Power:

  • 54% of members do not understand if telehealth services are covered
  • 48% believe the payer has not shown concern for their health since the pandemic began
  • Only 25% view the payer as their trusted partner
  • Only 36% feel the payer acts in their best interest

Clearly, there are major gaps in the way healthcare payers and providers think they are communicating to members, and how members are actually receiving those messages. In fact, recent research revealed that 63% of businesses think they are delivering excellent or very good communications to their customers, but only 51% of consumers give the same ratings to the communications they receive.

In a recent panel discussion at the Cognizant Healthcare Conference, three Smart Communications experts shared their perspectives on how the healthcare communications landscape is changing, and what leading payers and providers need to do to transform member experiences. While we invite you to view the full recording below, this post also highlights some of the key takeaways from the discussion and some best practices for delivering two-way, digital conversations.

Key Challenges Accelerating the Pace of Communication Transformation

The J.D. Power statistics show us that trust is low, and key messages, like those around telehealth coverage, are being missed or fall flat. Historically, this has been caused by both technological and operational limitations:

  • Static, mass email blasts to all customers delivering the same high-level messaging regardless of individual circumstances
  • Disconnected communication experiences that force members to provide the same information again and again across channels
  • An over-reliance on print for communicating key messages instead of a multichannel approach based on a customer’s stated preferences

These challenges have been felt across the four key areas of the healthcare member experience where it is most important to get communications right: member acquisition and enrollment, onboarding, care management and claims. If customers feel like they’re having suboptimal experiences everywhere they turn, it’s no wonder their frustration results in lower scores on the most critical customer satisfaction metrics.

Creating SMARTER Member Conversations

The good news is that many of these challenges can be solved. Leading payers and providers are taking the steps necessary to overcome traditional challenges and build the technical and operational infrastructure needed to transform the future of healthcare communications.

One powerful example of how to achieve the dream state of SMARTER customer conversations comes from Blue Shield of California, as shared at INNOVATE 2021. In their quest for 95% of communications to be digital-first, they pursued the following principles for success:

  • Make it Simple – only deliver communications that solve or pre-empt members’ needs and expectations. Rely on dynamic templates that drive consistency across channels but also increase agility. Then, streamline preview and approval processes.
  • Make it Useful – only deliver communications that provide relevant information in every channel, based on a combination of stated preferences and insights derived from advanced analytics.
  • Make it Mine – only deliver communications that are personalized, while keeping security top of mind.

These guiding principles are an important starting point for the larger question healthcare payers and providers are focused on – where are the biggest opportunities for improvement?

Here are just a few examples of how digital optimization can make a huge impact, along with real-world results:

Collecting Open Enrollment Choices Digitally 

As the largest customer-owned health insurer in the U.S., supporting 140,000 employers across 5 states, Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC) realized the importance of transforming its open enrollment processes. HCSC had 250 manual, static forms which contained 20 unique sections with 3,000 different attributes that needed to be delivered to 26 downstream internal and external customers. The need for a highly scalable solution was especially evident here. HCSC worked with Smart Communications to eliminate manual forms in favor of a single, guided, digital interview process.

Using SmartIQTM, HCSC eliminated manual re-entry, reduced their support team training time and increased the amount of time employers had to make decisions, ultimately increasing productivity while lowering cost. Learn more about HCSC’s success in Transforming Manual Forms Processes into Exceptional Digital Experiences from INNOVATE 2021.

Streamline the Contract Generation Process

A leading managed healthcare and insurance provider sought to digitally optimize and improve their employer-sponsored plans. By working with Smart Communications, they managed to optimize a manual contract generation process involving multiple internal and external groups that took 2 weeks to just 1 business day—a 90% increase in efficiency. Additionally, when used in combination with SmartCOMMTM for Salesforce, they were able to generate a contract in only 30 minutes, a dramatic improvement from where they were.

Globalization and Optimization Across the Enterprise – at Scale 

The ability to optimize across multiple brands, jurisdictions and languages can vastly improve efficiency while reducing cost. By leveraging approachable technology, payers and providers can also optimize their workload throughout the organization, instead of being in a situation where certain tasks can only be completed by IT or specific subject matter experts.

With healthcare communications at an inflection point, taking proactive steps to align technology and operations for an optimal member experience is essential. And the cascading business benefits are measurable.

If you’d like to learn more about transforming healthcare member communications, check out our white paper “From Onboarding to Lifelong Relationships.”

3 Trends Transforming New Member Enrollment for Healthcare Payers

Posted on by SmartComm

By: John Zimmerer, VP Industry Marketing, Healthcare at Smart Communications

Healthcare payers are facing several new challenges from outside forces– from government regulations to ongoing technology innovation – but these challenges offer an opportunity for payers in healthcare to embrace change, examine their enrollment processes, and reflect on goals and expectations for the future.

With member engagement expectations being set by other industries like online retail and financial services, the digital transformation bar has been set high. Despite rising expectations and new rules and regulations to grapple with, many healthcare payers have barely budged from their analog ways. In this post, we dive into three key trends that are transforming member enrollment and how insurers can close the digital gap with healthcare payer solutions.

  1. Member Expectations are Higher than Ever

Achieving growth, countering competition, controlling costs, reducing risk and maintaining compliance are perennially at the top of every healthcare payer’s C-suite priority list. But as member expectations quickly evolve, member satisfaction has now become top priority. Results of a recent survey from HealthEdge indicate that member satisfaction “dominates boardroom agendas,” along with “competitive pressures, IT and business alignment and managing costs.”

  1. Stricter Government Regulations Require Digital Transformation

In 2018, the U.S. Health Care Transformation Task Force, an industry consortium made up of healthcare payers, providers, purchasers and patient advocates issued a set of guiding principles for how best to engage consumers from the beginning of their interactions with the healthcare system. The HCTTF recommended using modern ways of obtaining consumer input and providing interfaces that prioritize simplicity, clarity and transparency, including when obtaining information and coverage from a plan. Any of these recommendations could become rules or regulations at any time.

  1. …But Digital is Still Difficult for Many Payers

Recently, when consulting firm Deloitte surveyed 35 leaders of health payers, roughly half reported that they still struggled to prioritize overhauling their healthcare payer systems. Only two respondents said that they had modernized even one of five core technology platforms such as administrative, analytics, clinical, core and customer service and engagement.

These payers are missing out on some big benefits.

When J.D. Power analyzed responses from a 2021 commercial health plan member survey (32,066 members of 147 health plans in 22 regions throughout the United States), they found:

  • Plans that invested in improving member information and communications increased their Net Promoter Scores by an average of 10 points,
  • The perceived level of trust in those health plans increased two percentage points over the last two years, and
  • 32% of members said they connected with their health plans via web, mobile app or text message in the past year.

The prior year’s study revealed that customer satisfaction is directly linked to customer engagement. Plans that offered personalized, relevant information to members had nearly 23% higher customer satisfaction scores versus plans that did not. This is notable because commercial health plans had among the lowest average customer satisfaction scores compared to other industries the firm evaluated.

Where do Payers Go from Here?

Member Engagement and Satisfaction Begins with Enrollment

The healthcare enrollment process has an outsized impact on member experience and plan profitability. That’s because it sets the bar for everything that follows. But enrollment is plagued by inefficiency and disconnected data. This creates anxiety for the member and introduces the possibility of fines for the healthcare payer.

Whether you’re signing new employers or enrolling individual plan members, you need to deliver a digital-first, frictionless experience. Yet many health insurance carriers are challenged by outdated, inflexible technology that relies on custom IT development. Traditional engagement strategies are siloed and inconsistent. Paper and fillable forms result in data errors and slow processing. Making sure healthcare enrollment forms and policy documents have the correct regulatory language by state and jurisdiction can be an incredible burden for compliance departments.

Insurers need to reimagine enrollment communications as two-way, digital conversations. This begins with prioritizing the digitization of healthcare payer systems and solutions. By improving the payer enrollment experience, carriers can reduce costs, improve overall utilization rates and increase member satisfaction.

To see how other healthcare payers have successfully transformed the member enrollment experience, check out Digital Enrollment and Onboarding for Health Insurance Plans.

About The Author
John Zimmerer is the Vice President of Vertical Marketing, Healthcare at Smart Communications, where he acts as a subject matter expert on the digital transformation of customer communications and data-centric, often form-based workflows. Most recently, John has been researching and writing about improving customer experience in healthcare and is regarded as a thought leader in this area. John has over 20 years of software product marketing experience. His areas of expertise include market research, analyst relations, public relations and digital marketing.

Salesforce Industries & Smart Communications: A Candid Conversation about Digital Transformation in Insurance

Posted on by SmartComm

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

By: James Brown, CEO of Smart Communications

I recently had a great conversation with Raja Singh, Senior Vice President, Insurance at Salesforce Industries about digital transformation in the insurance industry. Journalist Lindley Gooden hosted the exchange, and we touched on everything from pandemic pressures to cautions about cloud “posers,” or legacy systems that are managed in the cloud. Over the years, Raja and I have lived the ups and downs of digital transformation, helping numerous shared customers make the most of the journey.

Along the way, and especially over the accelerated shift this past year, we’ve gathered some insights that Raja and I discussed in a new video. Highlights from our conversation are below:

Digital transformation relies on real cloud (no cloud posers).
So many companies today claim to offer cloud solutions.  But “kind-of” cloud doesn’t cut it. When you’re considering cloud options for digital transformation, there are a few things to consider?

  • Is it immediately available?
  • Will it automatically be upgraded?
  • Is the data accessible via APIs?

By putting cloud at the core versus just moving small elements of the solution to the cloud, you get the critical mass of cloud benefits: access to the richness of APIs and meaningful savings on integration and maintenance costs. To create the new digital experiences your customers are looking for (and 85% of consumers have told us they prefer digital), you need real cloud agility.

Your customers expect better digital experiences.
We live in an immediate, digitally intuitive world. Your customers are comparing the experience with you as their insurance provider to the best consumer internet platforms out there, so the bar is high. While the initial policy purchase experience sets the tone, the claims experience is really the moment of truth. It’s a make-or-break interaction where insurers can build and reinforce lasting customer relationships with the right solutions in place. How insurers collect data during this oftentimes emotional or stressful moment is key. Nothing is more frustrating than being asked questions on a form that an insurer should already know the answer to. An intelligent, conversational questioning approach that feels like an adaptive interview is everything.

Automation is the future of insurance.
Automation is definitely a key theme of 2021. The holy grail in the insurance industry is taking what you know about a claim and the customer, and auto-adjudicating it without involving a person. So, how do we apply the right rules to speed the process along? By recognizing automation as a continuum. This will be an ongoing process of optimization where we add more rules so fewer claims get passed to humans. AI must inherently be part of this, but right now insurance leaders are automating what they know today, and adding more as trust grows in the technology.

Personalization powers better relationships.
It’s human nature to want to be seen and known. In an industry addressing incredibly personal things like your life, your health or a loss of a loved one, of course customers want to feel seen and known. The shift to customer-centricity over policy-centricity is key. Delivering a seamless process start to finish that feels personalized, truly tailored and sensitive to the situation is essential. And it’s a real business driver — 60% of consumers will abandon an interaction if they feel the information collection process is poor. Automating, orchestrating and adding intelligence into the process while personalizing the communications experience with two-way conversations is key.

You must know what’s holding you back to move forward.
There are no two ways about it—change is hard! Salesforce did a study of 300 insurance executives in conjunction with Newsweek to identify overarching industry challenges to digital transformation. Three findings rose to the top:

  • Legacy systems are holding back progress
  • Most companies lack the in-house expertise to execute transformation
  • We work in a change-averse culture

The good news is, despite how hard it is, the insurance industry is really trying. Finding and implementing these opportunities demands bringing the expertise of your business teams, product folks, designers and technologists together. But ultimately, you need cloud solutions that let ordinary business users take control of driving new ways to communicate and connect with customers.

Smart Communications and Salesforce Industries are excited to partner to help bring these industry changes to life. With deep, shared industry expertise and a shared vision of the cloud, we see what connected core systems and truly personalized, two-way customer conversations can do to make digital transformation to the industry.

Watch the video below to see our full conversation about digital transformation in insurance.

 

Could Postal Delays Lead to an Increased Focus on the Digital Customer Experience?

Posted on by SmartComm

By: Sally Schulte, Director of Product Marketing at Smart Communications

Beginning Oct. 1, the U.S. Postal Service implemented “new service standards” that could slow target delivery times by about 30%. While this will obviously have implications for online holiday shoppers in the near term, it will also have a long-term impact on how industries like insurance, healthcare and financial services communicate important information to their customers. Wells Fargo even notified customers of the potential interruptions – pointing out that the delivery delays could impact customers’ mailed payments.

As enterprises face disruptions on all fronts – whether it’s USPS, supply chain delays, natural disasters or a global health crisis– it’s critical for businesses to reimagine interactions with their customers—and focus on their digital customer experience.

This post highlights why digital customer experience solutions are key to business continuity, how companies can efficiently reach customers on their preferred channels and how an enterprise cloud-based customer conversations solution can protect the business.

Accelerating Digital Transformation for Business Continuity

The latest development from USPS has the potential to disrupt millions of individuals and companies—and further solidifies how important business continuity and contingency planning are. Constant change and disruptions mean enterprises need to be responsive and agile – something only achievable via digital transformation.

When COVID-19 took hold, 65% of business leaders indicated that the pandemic led them to identify digital-first approaches they could implement quickly. In many industries, employees continue to work from home at least part time while customers now overwhelmingly expect (and prefer) digital-first interactions. Investing in digital customer experience solutions and implementing organizational changes will allow enterprises to put the customer at the center and seamlessly manage the experience across functional areas.

Orchestrating Omnichannel Customer Experiences

With the recent announcement from USPS, companies need to rethink how they get critical information to their customers – and vice versa. Today’s customers expect to be able to initiate conversations on their own terms, making two-way, digital conversations more important than ever.

Every interaction a business has with a customer is an opportunity to shape their overall experience and in today’s always-connected landscape, customers’ expectations are increasing quickly. With the majority of customers more comfortable with digital, they prefer to interact with businesses across a number of channels.

SMS, in-app messaging and WhatsApp are just a few of the channels where customers want to be able to initiate conversations with businesses. Unfortunately, many organizations have siloed tools that only allow for one-way, single-channel communications. This ultimately leads to internal inefficiencies, compliance risks and an inconsistent customer experience. An omnichannel, orchestrated approach, however, puts the customer at the center of two-way, interactive conversations – achievable with a cloud-based platform that optimizes the entire customer experience.

Owning the Customer Experience with Two-way Conversations

Whether it’s USPS or another service provider, relying too heavily on third parties to shape the customer experience poses risk for businesses. And, this risk will only continue to grow. Today, leading enterprises should own the entire digital customer experience, from start to finish.

Conversations between businesses and customers have never been more important, especially as customers prefer a digital-first, personalized approach. And since customers’ expectations will only continue to increase, enterprises must optimize the end-to-end experience to succeed. Businesses must provide the tailored, personalized conversations today’s customers expect. Investing in pure cloud platform that delivers personalized, omnichannel conversations across the entire customer lifecycle is the best way to succeed.

—

Customer expectations will only continue to evolve, making it more critical than ever for enterprises to invest in the resources and technology that future-proof their businesses. No one knows what the future holds or what the next disruption will be, but investing in the right technology (and technology partners) that evolves and scales as customer needs change over time will be critical to long-term success.

How can businesses deliver impactful, relevant and personalized conversations at scale? Check out “Deliver SMARTER Customer Conversations in the Cloud” to learn more. 

5 Major Trends Impacting the Financial Services Industry

Posted on by Ayla

The COVID-19 health crisis has forced organizations to pivot to new ways of working. Companies and government agencies are fighting to maintain business continuity while helping their customers, employees and other stakeholders cope with the stress of a health crisis. For banks and financial services institutions, the pandemic has had a major impact on both consumer and commercial banking.

In the past 12 months, banks have had to shift customer-facing processes to digital – years ahead of schedule – while also moving staff to remote work environments and dealing with increased support call volumes. According to Deloitte, “the future showed up early” in the banking and investment management sectors and there is an “inextricable link between recovering from COVID-19’s impact and transforming operations to power success in the years ahead.”

Let’s dive into five major trends that will continue to impact the financial services industry in the months to come and discuss how organizations can set themselves up for success.

1. Customers will increasingly prefer to self serve on digital channels with higher expectations for 24/7 speed and simplicity.

Prior to the pandemic, customers were already becoming increasingly interested in a digital-first approach. According to IDC, 40% of in-branch appointments will be initiated on digital platforms and then fulfilled by specialists by 2022 and by 2023, 75% of all consumer and small business loans will be originated through AI-enabled and automated processes.

The pandemic only accelerated this, driving businesses to shift budgets toward investing in technology that improves or enables customer self-service through digital and mobile channels. Customer movement toward mobile-first experiences will likely become more commonplace, and it will be crucial to bring more engaging experiences, such as video chat, within the confines of mobile. Contactless financial transactions are here to stay.

At the same time, all of this digital activity has put a spotlight on fraud and data management. Financial services firms will continue to accelerate investment in technology to automate fraud protection around areas like identity verification and biometrics, as well as other digital solutions to improve internal efficiencies and reduce the need for employees to handle paper or continue manual work.

2. Fintech competitors will continue to disrupt.

Banks have been facing disruption from new fintech competitors for several years and this will continue. Several challenger financial institutions are entering the market as mobile-only banking providers. Apple, for example, has partnered with Goldman Sachs on a credit card offering, while Google has partnered with Citigroup to offer checking accounts. These trends will drive banks to explore and launch “born-digital” products that are increasingly autonomous and embedded in digital ecosystems. Many fintechs and challenger banks are attracting consumers with new account features, such as paycheck management.

3. Conversational banking and real-time engagement will be competitive differentiators.

Banking leaders will continue to focus on driving positive emotions and showing empathy through digital communications, however this this will be driven by robots, not humans. In 2021, banks will continue investing in the idea of “conversational banking,” using chatbots, SMS messaging and mobile apps to enable real-time engagement. According to Celent, 89% of firms are increasing budget investment in mobile and online banking.

We can anticipate that banks will need to prioritize mobile, focusing on alerts and notifications, secure messaging, card and data management and conversation services to assist customers. Furthermore, banks are looking to use incoming information, coupled with known data, to dynamically generate “next best offers” or other recommendations to engage and deepen client relationships.

4. Customers facing financial hardships will be top-of-mind.

In 2021, banks will still be dealing with defaults and lower deposits because of economic hardships created by the COVID-19 crisis. Businesses and individuals facing financial difficulties need to know how to work with their banks and lenders to negotiate loans and loan forgiveness, and banks that focus on loss mitigation without communicating empathy risk losing those customers.

At the same time, financial institutions are looking to minimize losses. In 2021, many banks will be working to identify customers that are at a higher risk of financial vulnerability, even before they have reached out to the bank, to help these individuals stay solvent and manage their expenses during an uncertain time.

In the UK, federal regulators are asking banks and insurers to use data and analytics, along with automated processes, to identify and respond appropriately to “vulnerable” customers, which includes those undergoing financial hardship. The Financial Conduct Authority wants firms to understand the needs of vulnerable customers in its target market and design products, services and communications to meet those needs.

5. Data will be the linchpin to providing a seamless, consistent customer experience.

All of these efforts rely on centralizing data, a challenge many institutions face as they cobble together “best-of-breed” systems to support various lines of business and channels. These various systems often have their own mechanism for producing client communications, which leads to inconsistent messaging, compliance challenges, and internal inefficiencies.

Although several customer channels will remain collection points for customer interactions, banks looking to improve customer engagement will need to invest in ways to aggregate and manage that data in common resource points. This will enable customer experience leaders across the business to analyze behavior and then build orchestrated journeys with relevant content– whenever and wherever they want to manage their money.

 

Interested in learning more? Smart Communications recently collected insights from industry thought leaders to uncover major trends that will impact how businesses communicate with their customers in 2021. Check out the full eBook today!

2021 Trends White Paper

5 Key Trends Impacting the Insurance Industry

Posted on by SmartComm

By: Ruth Fisk, VP of Industry Marketing, Insurance at Smart Communications

The insurance industry has been under pressure to innovate for quite some time. However, the implications of the global pandemic have only accelerated the need to be more agile and responsive to customer demands. And as we enter a post-pandemic world, insurers are continuing to pivot to new ways of working and engaging with customers.

As a result, carriers are increasingly investing in digital transformation initiatives to meet the needs of both employees and their end customers. In this post, we dive into how the ongoing impact of the pandemic, changing customer expectations, and digital transformation will continue to impact the insurance industry, plus strategies for success in the months and years ahead. Read on to learn more about key insurance industry trends customers expect from their insurance carrier.

  1. Work from Home (WFH) impacts employees and policies

Over the past 12+ months, massive shifts in where people work have forced insurers to figure out how to make their own workforce productive while simultaneously maintaining a positive customer experience. While digital solutions enabled the shift to WFH, they also exposed inefficiencies in existing processes.

According to Tom King, Director of Insurance at Salesforce, “In the insurance industry…there are a tremendous amount of manual processes and workarounds. Employees want to do the right thing and as a result, have been able to get work done despite cumbersome systems. The pandemic has forced business leaders to look in the mirror and address these issues once and for all.”

Business leaders must ensure they make the remote work experience as seamless and efficient as possible, and employees must be able to collaborate across systems and teams while ensuring security and compliance standards. This means continuing to implement processes that allow employees to be successful from home and investing in the necessary technology to support a digital-first approach.

  1. Rising customer expectations highlight digital deficiencies

Anything consumers want is now only a few taps or clicks away. With COVID-19 forcing many to rely solely on digital means to meet even their most basic needs, the world has seen a seismic shift. Now customers have heightened expectations for anything and everything to be digital, including insurance.

This puts digitally deficient insurers in a bind, as customers increasingly expect everything to be easy and transparent. Today, when customers purchase new policies or make claims, they expect clear communications at every stage of the journey, including self-service tools they can use to monitor progress themselves. Today’s consumers want digital solutions that can provide the right answer, quickly.

  1. Personalization matters more than ever

In addition to ease and convenience, consumer apps also excel at personalizing experiences and making processes simple. Salesforce’s Tom King suggested, “Insurers specifically will be measured by how well they know their customers. Experiences need to be tailored to the individual, and for this to happen the business needs to have better visibility into the customer.”

But personalization is easier said than done. It depends on great data—collecting it in a way that is frictionless for the customer, and then leveraging a technology platform that can put it to use.  For business leaders to achieve the agility and flexibility that today’s market landscape requires, they need to move to a cloud model and leverage open APIs. This will allow data from core systems, third-party solutions and more to be incorporated into tailored, personalized customer experiences.

  1. Launch new insurance products that showcase best-in-class technology

Insurers are looking to capitalize on the “next normal” by developing and launching new products that meet the needs of the post-pandemic consumer. Insurers are piloting new types of coverage, services and distribution options to address a more volatile marketplace. This year, many young drivers will hit the roads for the first time, and homeownership will become a reality for many in the midst of a red-hot real estate market. SMART insurers will tailor their offerings to gain market share among this tech-savvy crowd.

Brian Vannoni, Director of Market Insights at Guidewire Software, shared his thoughts on this trend, “There will be a next normal for society and for insurance. It will include digital-first, omnichannel engagement, a remote work environment that requires internal digital processing and closed-loop analytics and a new way of engaging with customers and employees.”

The trick is that new products require a robust technical infrastructure. New offerings will need processes for collecting information, connecting with core systems and communicating with clients for everything from issuing a quote, to onboarding and providing ongoing customer support. To accelerate innovation and decrease time to market, insurers will invest in low-code, flexible technologies that support this greater agility.

  1. Investments in digital communication technologies empower human connection

One of the big lessons to come out of the pandemic is the importance of embracing the human side of the business. Ultimately, customers want to feel like a name, not a number. But traditionally, insurers have been a bit distant when thinking and even talking about their customers. “In the insurance industry, when you buy a policy, you are a ‘policyholder.’ When you make a claim, you are a ‘claimant.’ You are never a ‘customer.’ The language we use reflects a mindset, and this mindset needs to shift to be more customer-centered,” noted Seth Rachlin, Ph.D., Executive Vice President, Chief Innovation Officer at Capgemini.

Even in a world gone digital, insurers have an opportunity to truly connect with their customers as people, wherever they are and however they choose to interact. The right technology platform is crucial in enabling these experiences – one that enables two-way, interactive conversations with customers at any time on any device.

Interested in learning more? Smart Communications recently collected insights from industry thought leaders to uncover major insurance industry trends that will impact how businesses communicate with their customers. Check out the full eBook today!

 

2021 Trends White Paper

3 Ways Insurers Can Improve Communications and the Customer Experience

Posted on by SmartComm

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

By: Ruth Fisk, VP Insurance Marketing at Smart Communications

As every insurance carrier knows, improving communications with customers is vital to a greater claims experience. Communication templates are critical to managing the myriad of correspondence that policyholders and claimants receive each day. The challenge? Keeping track of thousands at once and needing IT support to make any changes. And that doesn’t even take into consideration the complexities of ad hoc correspondence, “the significant number of one-off pieces of correspondence that may be created in claims operations on any given day.”

It’s time to take a step back and remember that insurance isn’t a template generation business. It’s a people business. Being there for customers during some of their most challenging moments is the reason insurers exist. Communications play a key role in making sure those potentially devastating experiences are as positive as possible. So, for insurers finding themselves overwhelmed with managing thousands of communication templates in custom software applications, we have good news: there’s a SMARTER way.

With the help of Smart Communications’ customer Chris Plunk, Director of Application Development for Claims IT at Farmers Insurance, we explore how to improve three critical areas of document template management for insurers:

Tip 1: Fewer, More Dynamic Communication Templates Simplify Management

The best place to start when it comes to organizing your communication template strategy is to whip existing templates into shape. Just like cleaning and organizing a home, the first step is to discard items no longer being used, to focus the larger efforts on the most relevant tools. Get rid of old templates that have run their course or were created for specific situations that no longer apply.

Also consider your most dynamic templates. The idea is to have fewer, harder working templates. This is particularly powerful when using a more scalable cloud-based customer communications platform. It’s important to focus on communication templates that do the heavy lifting in a variety of situations. This offers more opportunity for personalization and an effective way to streamline management in the insurance industry.

“Prior to implementing SmartCOMM, we had thousands of communication templates that we maintained in our custom application. With SmartCOMM, we’ve been able to reduce the number of templates by more than 50%.” – Chris Plunk, Director of Application Development for Claims IT, Farmers Insurance

Tip 2: Implement a Template Management Strategy that Creates Consistent Customer Experiences and Personalization at Scale

From onboarding to claims management, insurance carriers know how important it is for policyholders and claimants to receive consistent messages that align with their company’s brand promise. Insurers also know that impersonal, mass communications don’t carry the same weight anymore. Customers want personalized messages that speak to their unique situations. Static templates that are disconnected from evolving customer data and manually updated one by one simply don’t cut it for modern insurers who want to deliver consistent and personal communications at scale.

That’s why Farmers chose SmartCOMM™, which gave them the power to transform their communication templates into dynamic vehicles that remain on-brand and in sync with customers’ specific situations.

“We need to make sure that we’re getting the right information – worded in the right way – in all of our communications, and having these templates in place through this application really helped us achieve that.” – Chris Plunk, Director of Application Development for Claims IT, Farmers Insurance

Tip 3: Faster Communication Template Updates Yield More Response

In insurance, customer communication speed is everything. When policyholders need to file a claim, they need to do it immediately and expect a fast response on the other end. Today, it is important to think of insurance communications as real-time conversations. This makes the ability to update templates efficiently vital. In this new era, speed wins every time. By leveraging a cloud-based communications management solution for templates, insurers can cut down on template update time and IT burdens and ensure that their customers get the right messages more quickly.

“By using SmartCOMM, we’ve been able to reduce [template update] cycle time significantly, and actually push the ability to make changes to these communication templates from the IT department back into the business. What used to take weeks can now be accomplished in a few days.” – Chris Plunk, Director of Application Development for Claims IT, Farmers Insurance

3 Reasons to Rethink How You Collect Customer Information

Posted on by SmartComm

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

By: Neal Keene, Field CTO at Smart Communications 

According to a recent Forbes article , in 2021 we can expect the customer experience to become increasingly conversational. But what does this really mean for your business, and how can you ensure you’re set up to succeed?

From acquisition to onboarding and servicing, businesses must ensure the end-to-end customer experience is better than ever – and that begins with how information is collected. Customers need to provide information throughout their lifecycle with a business, which often means asking them to fill out a form. Unfortunately, this touchpoint is oftentimes neglected, creating impersonal, friction-filled and frustrating customer experiences.

Let’s discuss three ways enterprises can optimize their forms processes, ultimately reducing abandonment rates while simultaneously building brand loyalty and creating a more conversational experience.

1. Legacy tools like paper-based or PDF forms are off-putting.
All too often, businesses ask customers to either download, print and scan paperwork, or enter already known information into an online form. And if forms aren’t web or mobile friendly, customers may avoid engaging altogether – 50% of consumers prefer online forms versus a paper-based process and 35% want forms to be easy to access on mobile.

2. Nearly 60% of customers will abandon a form if the process is too difficult.
The majority of consumers – nearly 60% — recently indicated they would be likely to abandon an interaction if a company has an inefficient process for collecting information. However, in the same report, we uncovered that adaptive forms – where companies gradually collect data at strategically timed intervals – are the least common means of collecting customer information. Most organizations are still using a combination of paper (about 50%) or static, online forms (nearly 60%).

3. The future of customer conversations is digital-first.
Companies need to understand customers on an individual level to uncover new ways to meet their needs and provide additional value. If interactions are still paper-based and static, enterprises risk creating a significant gap between what customers expect and what is being delivered. Cloud-based solutions that provide intelligent, conversational user experiences allow businesses to gradually collect data at strategically timed intervals, and only ask customers relevant questions that consider previous answers with the ability to start and stop the form without losing information.

As businesses rethink customer engagement, it’s time to shift away from one-way, transactional communications to meaningful, two-way customer conversations. And, investing in forms transformation is a key step in optimizing the end-to-end customer experience.

Beyond collecting information and checking boxes, redefining how information is gathered means businesses can respond quickly and via preferred channels – a critical component of every stage within the customer lifecycle. Smart forms modernize the collection and use of customer information, empower customers to initiate conversations with businesses and remove friction from critical interactions.

Enterprises must engage their customers in dynamic, two-way conversations, which means they must more effectively collect customer information and then use that information to respond appropriately, quickly and via preferred channels – something that remains critical throughout every stage of the customer lifecycle.

To learn how Smart Communications can power your business’ forms transformation, check out SmartIQTM.

Leveraging Low Code Digital Platforms to Reduce Administrative Burden for Life Insurers

Posted on by SmartComm

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

By: Ruth Fisk, VP Insurance Marketing at Smart Communications

Life Insurers have previously been slow to adopt new technologies, but in recent years have placed a significant focus and investment in more digital-first strategies.  The pandemic was the catalyst behind this shift in focus, and is allowing Life Insurers to address the ever-changing demands of today’s digital-savvy consumer.

But what isn’t discussed enough is some of the additional benefits of these digitalization strategies, such as how to reduce administrative expenses, that are equally important to improving the customer experience and also help to reduce operating costs.

While improving the customer experience should always be a top imperative for Life Insurers, they must also focus on how to reduce administrative expenses and burdens necessary to issue policies.  Across the entire insurance value chain, leveraging low code digital platforms in their digital transformation initiatives has been proven to deliver value with specific benefits, including:

  • Operational Efficiency. Eliminate waste in processes surrounding submission, underwriting, facultative reinsurance, amendments and exclusions and policy issuance.
  • Cost Reduction. Significantly reduce the costs to issue and service a life insurance policy.
  • Improved Quality. Reduce Not in Good Order (NIGO) rates to improve quality, reduce rework and decrease turnaround time.
  • Speed to Market. Issue policies quickly to increase customer satisfaction and speed to revenue.
  • Effective Use of Resources. Reduce redundant manual processes, giving back more time to focus on the customer experience.

 

Enhanced operational efficiency, increased speed to coverage and reduced NIGO rates will be essential for the future of life insurance.  As we move into this new era for the industry, let’s investigate an approach that ultimately will improve quality and efficiency while also greatly enhancing time-to-market.

Low Code Digital Platforms for Forms Transformation can Make Your Business SMARTER

Forms transformation is a key area of any Life Insurers’ digital strategy.  Providing adaptive, intelligent interviews that guide customers and employees through any process that requires specific information to be collected, verified and then acted upon are good candidates for low code digital platforms.  Using real-time data and customized workflows to create intuitive, interview-style forms empowers customer-focused businesses to streamline data-driven interactions along the entire customer journey, from acquisition and onboarding to servicing and growth.  These could include processes that are both internal and external to your operations, including New Business Submission, Facultative Reinsurance Shopping, Amendments and Exclusions and Claims to name just a few!

As the need for transformation intensifies, companies are looking for proven solutions that provide more intuitive forms experiences, manage risk and deliver compliant and automated digital interactions.  Below is a real-life example of just some of the benefits that a Top 10 North American Life Insurer was able to achieve in their forms transformation journey.

Significantly reduced turnaround time to process claims, saving thousands of employee hours

 

 40% faster turnaround time

 
Reduced NIGO rates, leading to faster claims approvals and payments for customers

 

 67% reduced NIGO rates

2,000 employee hours saved annually
Reduced Call Center Volumes 5% reduction in call center volume

 

The Key Benefits of Low Code Digital Platforms

Capgemini, a leader in the digital transformation space, recently released a new report that supports the industry’s need to leverage flexible, agile solutions built on low code digital platforms.

The key benefits and value of low code digital platforms according to the report include:

  • Enabling cohesive alignment between business and IT teams to enhance productivity.
  • Requiring significantly less capital and operational investment than traditional software development approaches.
  • Taking products to market quickly and making product updates on the fly.
  • Freeing IT team bandwidth, enabling members to focus on high-impact and complex projects.
  • Standardizing technical assets and development methodologies across the organization.

 

It’s time for Life Insurers to transform traditional forms-based processes into intelligent, conversational user experiences. Attract customers – and keep them loyal – by delivering seamless, mobile-friendly, guided interactions while also streamlining internal systems, managing risk, and reducing demand for support services. The result? More customers ready to transact and less friction, more efficient processes – from the acquisition to onboarding to service of your customers.

Smart Communications provides an integrated solution that allows customers, employees and stakeholders to harness the value of adaptive and intuitive digital forms with the key capabilities of The Conversation Cloud™.   Don’t procrastinate, letting inaction risk stifling your insurance business. Connect with us today and we will show you how to reduce administrative expenses and engage your customers in SMARTER conversations via digital experiences.

Smart Communications has long been recognized  by all major analysts (Gartner, Forrester, Novarica and IDC ) as a Leader and Innovator in enterprise-scale Workflow and Content Automation (WCA) and Customer Communications Management (CCM) – and most recently by Aspire in its 2021 Leaderboard Assessment,  based both on our proven cloud approach, our strategy for enabling meaningful two-way customer conversations and our platform that’s purpose-built for an optimized end-to-end customer experience.

Digital Transformation in Healthcare Claims

Posted on by Mary Featherstone

By: John Zimmerer, VP Healthcare Marketing at Smart Communications

Digital transformation in healthcare had been moving at a steady but very slow pace for years – until the pandemic forced the industry to accelerate its digital-first initiatives. Despite the progress made in the last 18 months, the healthcare industry still has plenty of opportunity to enhance the customer experience through more digital interactions.

One critical customer journey where this is particularly evident is claims. From finding, figuring out, filling out and submitting a claim form (e.g., for an out-of-network service); to receiving an adjudication notice, navigating to and reviewing an Explanation of Benefits (EOB); to having to contact the payer to ask a question about the claim and submitting an appeal, the whole process can often feel disjointed and inefficient.

In this post, we dive into the future of digital transformation in healthcare and how payers can reimagine the claims experience.

The Current State of the Claims Journey

Often, claims are considered a cost of doing business for health insurers. As a key component of the Medical Loss Ratio (MLR), an insurer’s primary objective is usually to minimize the administration and operational expenses related to processing claims and handling appeals and grievances.

Many claim-related communications are designed from the inside out, with regulations and risk in mind rather than with an eye toward the customer experience. Once the templates are created, they tend not to be revised much unless required by rule or due to an acquisition. These communications are treated as individual point solutions managed by IT, rather than as touchpoints that connect a customer journey.

Here’s a summary of today’s typical claim-related experience:

  • The member, Grace, receives an email notifying her that “a claim was recently processed.” Grace wonders which claim the email is referencing.
  • The email directs Grace to log into her payer’s member portal to review the claim. Grace looks for a link in the email to click but doesn’t see one. She opens a browser, logs in to her payer’s member portal, and navigates to claims.
  • Grace deduces which claim the email was referring to. She didn’t see a visual indicator, like a “new” tag or other label, so she assumes she’s looking for the most recent claim.
  • Grace clicks on the claim line item to view summary information, then on the EOB to see details. The EOB is a PDF file, originally designed to be printed and mailed, not for viewing on a computer screen or a mobile device.
  • Grace has a question about the claim. The EOB directs her (and every other member) to call her plan’s member services department. Grace would have preferred a self-service option.
  • Grace tells the member services rep that takes her call that she is certain that she had already satisfied her deductible prior to the date of service in question and feels that her responsible portion should be much lower. The call center rep points Grace to a form to request a redetermination (i.e., to file an appeal) and asks Grace if there’s anything else the rep can help Grace with.
  • A bit frustrated that her issue hasn’t been resolved to her satisfaction, Grace says, “no,” and hangs up the phone. She starts looking for the form the rep mentioned and wonders how she’ll know the payer has received it or how long it will take before her payer begins the redetermination process.

This interaction just increased the risk that Grace will not renew her plan (i.e., churn), but her payer doesn’t know that yet.

The Desired Future State of the Claims Journey

Fortunately, there is a better way that is relatively simple to implement and will deliver immediate value. A new, orchestrated process can connect these disjointed touchpoints into a guided experience and increase member satisfaction (and NPS scores). This future state can also lower claims administration expenses, especially for individual and group plans where these costs tend to be highest.

Here’s a revised version of the scenario above:

  • Grace sees a new link in the EOB to ask a question. The virtual agent senses the context of the question and pulls in information related to the specific claim.
  • After answering a few questions, the agent prepares, and Grace reviews and submits, a request for an organizational redetermination (i.e., a Level 1 appeal). All the information required for the appeal is prepopulated which means Grace clicks more than she types.
  • The request creates a case for the Appeals and Grievances (AG) group to review the claim. The case includes the appeal form with the information Grace provided.
  • The AG employee reviews the case and creates a determination letter from within her CRM. In this case, the request is approved; however, the editing software is flexible and allows the AG employee to create different correspondence if the request is approved, denied or pending (e.g., if additional information is required).
  • Upon generating the correspondence, Grace is sent an email with the determination letter attached and an NPS survey in the body of the email.
  • The entire history of engagements and all related activity – sends, opens, clicks, etc. – is available to any payer employee authorized to access Grace’s CRM record.

This future-state scenario is achievable with The Conversation CloudTM from Smart Communications, including these solutions for connecting the claims experience:

Accelerate Digital Transformation in Healthcare Claims

Smart Communications has helped accelerate digital transformation in healthcare claims for insurers like Blue Shield of California through its ISO-certified and HIPAA-compliant Conversation Cloud platform.

Ready to enable new members to self serve and streamline claims processes to improve member experience and reduce administration costs? Watch how our solutions help organiations like yours make connected claims experiences possible.