3 Ways Insurers Can Leverage the Cloud to Close Gaps Between Customer Expectations and Their Experiences

Posted on October 11, 2022 by SmartComm

By: Ruth Fisk, VP of Insurance Strategy at Smart Communications

Although the insurance industry has centuries-old roots, the world in which we currently live requires a modern approach to the technology, systems and processes insurers use to provide a great, end-to-end customer experience. Thankfully, there are such solutions on the market that can bridge the gap between customers’ expectations and their experiences with insurers.

While insurers have undoubtedly evolved the way they deliver products and services to customers, there’s still a fair amount of work to be done as technology becomes increasingly sophisticated and customers’ behaviors – and expectations – continue to evolve. In fact, Deloitte indicated that “In setting strategic plans, investment priorities, and budgets, insurers should therefore strive to maintain the momentum of creative adaptation established over the past few years, accelerating upgrades in systems, talent, and culture while becoming increasingly proactive, innovative, and customer-centric.”

It’s clear that organizations interested in staying ahead of the game must leverage best-in-breed technology solutions to digitize and optimize key touchpoints across the end-to-end customer experience. As insurers set their priorities for 2023 and beyond, we explore three ways insurers can deliver on customer expectations and provide the experiences they expect:

1. Use Pure-Cloud Solutions to Power Core Operations

Legacy platforms lack the necessary interoperability that’s needed to power core operations used by most insurance organizations. What’s more is that outdated systems offer limited APIs, making them incapable of integrating with key elements of a sophisticated technology stack. Ultimately, a lack of integrations can negatively impact the customer experience as insurers won’t have the necessary data across multiple customer touchpoints. This inhibits the ability to provide personalized, omnichannel communications and garner deep insights into how, when or why customer expectations are not being met.

On the other hand, pure-cloud solutions help to modernize IT operations—a key initiative insurers need in order to adapt more quickly to changing market demands and deliver more value to policyholders. Equipped with a suite of API integrations, solutions like the Smart Communications Conversation Cloud offer insurers the ability to connect all data, applications and history. With actionable data at their fingertips (made possible by using cloud solutions and strong APIs), insurers can realize the scalability needed to deliver personalized interactions across all devices and channels—a feat that is impossible to achieve with a manual approach. This also helps insurance companies prepare for the future and increases their internal efficiencies..

Interested in learning more about how Smart Communications can help insurers deliver SMARTER customer conversations in the cloud? Read the white paper for more.

2. Cater to a Digitally-Savvy Customer Base

Meeting the demands of today’s (and tomorrow’s) digital-savvy customers requires insurers to adopt the technology and processes that power agility and scalability. In a recent report, Tom Super, head of property and casualty insurance intelligence at J.D. Power, stated, “The bar just continues to get higher for customer expectations around digital. And while many insurers are hitting the mark on the digital basics, few are using digital in new ways to drive growth and engagement.”

Organizations should continue investing in the delivery of two-way, interactive conversations that make possible a customer-centric experience which transcends the typical, one-way transactions most customers are accustomed to. Historically, insurers considered the print/direct mail communications they delivered very carefully—a method that was used to convey the brand and its product or service promise. Given the digital-native customers of today, insurance companies need the ability to deliver impactful, personalized and relevant conversations (two-way) in real time. This is a distinct shift from one-way, paper-based transactions (that is, no longer using the best-in-class printed piece) to digital interactions that will make or break a customer’s experience.

3. Prepare to Remain Agile

While there will always be a level of ‘unknowns’ in the business world, operating as an agile organization is a necessity. To do so, insurance companies need to focus on recruiting top talent, remaining compliant, becoming customer-centric and partnering with modern solution providers that remain on the cutting edge of technology and integrate with core systems of record in the insurance space. By bringing together best-of-breed technologies, enterprises can better respond to market demands in an expeditious and scalable manner.

As insurers explore technology options, one way to adopt a more digital-first approach in the near-term is to invest in low-code solutions. Adopting low-code, cloud technology is a competitive edge that can offer insurance organizations:

Operational efficiency
Speed to market
Cost reduction
Improved quality
Effective use of resources

But, the biggest benefit of low-code systems is that they can be implemented quickly and without added burden to internal IT departments. To be an agile organization that is positioned for the future, insurance leaders will need to continue prioritizing innovative investments.

RELATED READING | ‘2022 Forrester Consulting TEI:SmartIQEnables Cost Savings, Solves Business Challenges‘

Conclusion

Smart Communications is proud to see the growing investment in innovation across the insurance industry. As we anticipate the 2022 Guidewire Connections event in Las Vegas later this month, we’re excited to discuss the capabilities that more than 100 Guidewire customers have invested in to deliver SMARTER conversations across the complete customer lifecycle. There are several opportunities to engage with us at the show, including:

Join Smart Communications in the Ecosystem Demo Theater to watch live demonstrations of “Ready for Guidewire” offerings from PartnerConnect Solution partners. These solutions — developed by members of the world’s largest P&C insurtech ecosystem — are available in the Guidewire Marketplace.
Accelerating the Time-to-Value of Digital Platforms: Elements of Cloud-Native Success on Monday, October 24 at 1:15pm PST | Co-presented by Ruth Fisk, Vice President of Insurance Strategy at Smart Communications and Ralph Severini, Global Leader of Insurance Alliances at AWS, attendees will learn how leveraging cloud-native applications and integrations is critical to a foundation for future growth.
The Digital CIO: Taking Digital Innovation to New Heights with SmartCOMM & Guidewire on Monday, October 24 at 2:15pm PST | Ruth Fisk, Vice President of Insurance Strategy will moderate a CIO panel discussion on how providing a positive customer experience and core IT strategies can align, the role of cloud technologies and the future direction for insurance. CIO perspectives from Smart Communications customers include Amy Bingham from Pekin Insurance, Cam Loeppky from Wawanesa Insurance and Tim Hays from Mountain West Farm Bureau and 360 Insurance.

Visit the main Guidewire Connections 2022 page to learn more about the event or to get registered to join us in Las Vegas from October 23-26.

Provide the Ultimate Healthcare Customer Experience

Posted on September 14, 2022 by SmartComm

Provide the Ultimate Healthcare Customer Experience: The Guide to Member Engagement Strategies

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

In a world where everyone is always on the go and as technology becomes smarter, faster and more intuitive, consumers increasingly prefer—and expect—digital-first experiences.

For highly regulated industries like healthcare, the stakes are even higher. Everyday customer interactions can be stressful, making the experience that health insurers provide at every touch point more important than ever. Recent benchmark data confirms this – with 81% of consumers indicating that communications are important to their overall experience with a company.

Unfortunately for healthcare payers, the industry lags in digital adoption, which has led to both internal inefficiencies and poor customer experience. As they interact with other non-healthcare industries that have set the customer experience bar high, healthcare members may begin looking to competitors to fulfill their needs. According to the Forrester Customer Experience Index, healthcare tracks well below the averages of most, ranking tenth out of the 13 U.S. industries analyzed.

In Provide the Ultimate Healthcare Customer Experience, we will walk through:

Key customer experience trends in healthcare
How healthcare payers can increase member engagement via cloud-based technology
The importance of omnichannel customer communications
Why Smart Communications offers the most complete platform on the market to support leading health insurers’ business strategies

Changing Customer Expectations and Regulations Drive Trends in Healthcare

The past few years have amplified the need for improved customer interactions. Globally, businesses have faced—and in many ways continue to endure—disruptions on multiple fronts. Many employers have moved their entire workforce to function as fully remote teams while continuing to navigate what the “next new normal” of work might look like. While all of these macro forces were influencing organizations to rethink how to do business, customer demands for digital-first experiences continued to increase.

Compounding to this digital transformation, the healthcare industry saw new regulations put in place, including:

Interoperability, which is “the ability of different information systems, devices and applications (systems) to access, exchange, integrate and cooperatively use data in a coordinated manner,” according to HIMSS
Price transparency, which allows healthcare patients to know the cost of a medical service before receiving it
Value-based care, where healthcare providers and hospitals are paid based on patient health outcomes
Shift to Medicare Advantage and ACA plans, providing individuals with more choices of health plans to purchase

As a result of these ever-changing market conditions, even the U.S. Federal Government has come to understand the importance of how much the customer experience matters to consumers when choosing a healthcare plan: for the 2023 plan year, member experience metrics make up the largest percentage (57%) of star ratings for Medicare Advantage plans.

Customer Experience Trends in Healthcare

On the bright side, insurers are beginning to realize the importance of making the healthcare customer experience a strategic priority. Recent findings include:

More focus on improving customer interactions. A Forrester report revealed that 15 out of the top 17 health insurers have experienced as much as a 5% year-over-year increase of their CX index scores – in large part due to these concentrated CX investments.
Higher investments in “total experience solutions.” These “consumer engagement” solutions improve the experience for both the employee and the member and are one of the top investment targets for health payers, according to Gartner.
Stagnant budgets. The same Gartner survey revealed that healthcare payers are seeing the lowest technology budget increases of any other industry. Health insurers therefore must invest wisely, strategically selecting key areas to improve that maximize the impact on the customer experience while minimizing disruption to both their members and their own organizations.

So, how can health insurers set themselves up for success?

A cloud-based platform that optimizes the end-to-end healthcare customer experience provides the agility, flexibility and innovation that homegrown or legacy, on-premise systems cannot. Below, we will dive into the benefits of cloud for nearly every touch point in the member journey, plus how optimized member communications provide health payers with the competitive edge they’re seeking.

Convert One-way Customer Communications to Two-way Conversations

To positively impact the healthcare customer experience, payers need to focus their investments in transforming their member communications. Leading analyst firms like Forrester confirm this, with recent research indicating that one of the top drivers of delivering a better customer experience is related to improved member communications.

Forrester also cites consumer preferences like “respects me as a customer” and “effective website and mobile apps” as factors that positively impact health payers’ experience scores.

To do this, health insurers must keep member preference in mind – at every step of the experience. Members should be able to start and stop interactions across channels and devices without having to re-key information. Delivering communications based on channel preference is also a must, as 61% of consumers indicated that receiving messages on the wrong channel leads to frustration with a company. At the end of the day, effective member conversations require an efficient and accessible digital experience at every step of the process.

Unfortunately, traditional ways of communicating with members aren’t as effective as they once were. So, as insurers rethink the healthcare customer experience, that means reimagining how members interact at every touch point. A big part of this is shifting from one-way, transactional communications to two-way, interactive conversations.

Delivering personalized, relevant and compliant conversations at scale can feel daunting, but the health insurers that invest in pure cloud solutions that are purpose-built to optimize member conversations will be set up for success. Cloud platforms, like the Conversation Cloud^TM, enable quick innovation, agility, scalability – and most importantly allow health insurers to evolve and scale as members expectations change over time.

RELATED READING | INFOGRAPHIC: Optimize Member Engagement at Every Point of the Health Insurance Journey

The Conversation Cloud^TM for Health Insurers

The Conversation Cloud^TM from Smart Communications empowers insurers to maximize their investments in the healthcare customer experience. Whether transforming a micro moment, such as a member-submitted claim form; to improving the access to and readability of critical communications like an Explanation of Benefits; or to orchestrate an entire customer journey such as a claim redetermination, look to the Smart Communications Conversation Cloud.

To better understand how the Conversation Cloud provides improves and transforms one-way communications into two-way, interactive conversations that positively impact the customer experience, this article focuses on four key areas where health insurers can enhance processes today:

Collect: Improve Data Gathering
Communicate: Increase Member Engagement with Content
Collaborate: Redefine Stakeholder Engagement
Coordinate: Reimagine the End-to-End Healthcare Customer Experience

Each section of this article provides examples and information to help insurers identify possible areas of investment, and in the process convert traditional communications into real-time, two-way conversations.

Collect: Improve Data Gathering

As health insurance executives start to invest more heavily in digital, they want to ensure that their investments are making a difference.

In a survey of more than 100 health insurance and provider executives, respondents cited what their organizations are currently doing and where opportunities still exist for improvement. When examining these leading indicators that impact the overall strategy for digitization investments, it’s no wonder that “customer satisfaction” is at the top of the list.

Despite more priority and effort going into customer satisfaction, this ongoing goal is simultaneously an ongoing challenge. Several points of friction are still holding digital projects back from making consumers happy. As companies expand their investment footprint across online and offline touchpoints, removing those frustrations is even more essential.

The Impact of Forms Automation on the Healthcare Customer Experience

Forms are a great example of one important aspect of a larger member journey. At some point, insurers will need to collect personally identifiable and protected health information (PII and PHI, respectively) from members. Most of the time, it’s done via a form—like web “name, address, location” fields, a PDF document, or just simply a piece of paper.

RELATED READING: Optimize Digital Forms for COVID-19 Claims

One of the greatest points of friction for members is having to provide the same data—name, address, age, etc.—repeatedly within and across forms. Consumers have a simple request: ‘Show me you know me’. Healthcare companies most often already have the data through direct engagement, an employer, provider, insurer or relationships with third-party providers.

The first trick is in making the digital connection to existing data; the next is to use this data intelligently. That means using available information and logic to hide or show subsequent questions or input fields. It also means leveraging integrations with other third-party services (for example, autocompleting address information, scanning a barcode, validating bank or other account information, etc.) to significantly reduce customer effort and enhance the customer experience.

Challenge

Static forms and similar tools can be cold and off-putting, therefore becoming a barrier to good data collection. To state it bluntly: customers just won’t fill them out.

Solution

The Conversation Cloud allows health insurers to seamlessly collect customer information by transforming static forms-based processes into intelligent, conversational user experiences. SmartIQ^TM powers:

Adaptive interviews
Experience-driven interactions
Omni-device availability
Real-time data validation

How can insurers use forms automation to enhance the healthcare customer experience?

Submit/appeal a claim
Disclosure and consent forms
Prior authorization requests
Personal representative appointment

Interested in learning more? Check out four ways forms automation can enhance the healthcare member experience.

Communicate: Increase Engagement with Tailored, Omnichannel Content

Personalization is a prevailing tactic for healthcare’s move toward digital excellence, and it’s easy to see why: When consumers receive relevant (customized) content on the right channel at the right time, they’re more likely to act and respond.

The two most frequently used digital communications tactics in insurance and health organizations are personalized messaging and multiple format options to support delivery across channels.

Supporting omnichannel engagement can also help organizations make the transition to a self-service model. Customers overwhelmingly prefer a digital-first approach including apps or online portals that give them more autonomy.

RELATED READING: How enterprises can orchestrate effective omnichannel conversations, creating consistent, customer-driven experiences across channels.

As a result, healthcare members want options: mobile phones, tablets and wearables have created an “always-on” environment where they can get things done with a click of a button. Access to multiple channels—plus ever-increasing expectations—puts more pressure on customer communications.

Successful conversations require content that is readable and easy for the user to comprehend. To keep customers engaged throughout the process, communications must be tailored as much as possible to the individual reader. These all must happen in real-time and must be able to reference context from previous interactions.

Getting these conversations done correctly and with ease is crucial for successful interactions. As insurers are looking to align their business priorities with member expectations, it’s important to keep in mind that 60% of healthcare consumers recently surveyed indicated that improving relevance and personalization is a top priority.

Challenge

Though these interactions are often mission critical, delivering personalized, real-time, contextual communications usually requires the creation and management of complex IT processes.

Solution

The Conversation Cloud empowers health insurers to create and deliver personalized, contextual and compliant communications across preferred channels to improve healthcare customer experience and deepen loyalty with:

Omnichannel approach for customer-preferred devices
Templates and reusable objects for consistency and compliance
Integrations with systems of record to pull in data for personalization
AI to improve readability and provide engagement insights

Ultimately health insurers can leverage these Communicate features across use cases, including:

Enrollment (ANOC, EOC, SBC, etc.)
Onboarding (ID card, provider/pharmacy directories, etc.)
Utilization (notifications/reminders, care management plans, etc.)
Claims (EOB, EOP, letters, etc.)

RELATED READING | Exploring CCM solutions? The Ultimate Guide to CCM Software provides a high-level overview of CCM software, poses questions to ask when selecting a vendor and more.

Collaborate: Change Stakeholder Engagement

Customer conversations sometimes require interacting with multiple stakeholders in a nonlinear process. Often, interactions occur outside the company altogether, e.g., with partners or regulators. Unfortunately, many businesses do not have a way for stakeholders to collaborate on business processes, which leads to a disjointed, frustrating customer or employee experience.

As a result, many fail to provide a holistic view of who made changes to critical documents, including what and when these changes were made. Requesting signatures or additional information from relevant parties can be difficult and these outdated processes can make sharing confidential information a security concern as well.

Challenge

When multiple stakeholders are involved in a process, there is increased risk of error – or worse – compliance issues. Siloed systems and inefficient processes are also time consuming, open up room for version control issues and create poor member and employee experiences.

Solution

Not only can the Conversation Cloud help speed things up, but it can also make these multi-step processes easy and simple, which results in a more efficient and effective interaction for all parties involved.

Working in a secure, online environment eliminates version control issues and also helps ensure compliance standards are met. With the Conversation Cloud, health payers can negotiate and execute processes by negotiating and providing business-critical agreements across internal and external stakeholders using experience-driven workflow including:

Developing Plan Documents
Coordinating Plan Selection for Group Enrollment
Internal Review and Approval of Content or Communications
Regulator Review of Plan Documents
Negotiating Provider or Supplier Contracts

RELATED READING | Healthcare member communications are ripe for transformation – are you prepared?

Coordinate: Reimagine the End-to-End Healthcare Customer Experience

Health insurers must focus on orchestrated, omnichannel interactions that guide customers through critical processes and provide richer, deeper and more engaging experiences. By interacting with customers via their preferred channels, health payers can improve their overall experience and increase brand loyalty.

Smart Communications partnered with Forrester Research to examine the current state of customer experience in healthcare. This research found that although 63% of consumers want better-connected journey touchpoints to improve the member experience, 57% of health insurers are struggling with the ability to provide a seamless digital experience throughout a given customer journey. The research also found that payers provide poor personalization and that journeys involving forms are as troublesome for insurers as they are for members and partners:

By creating self-service workflows and connecting across organizational silos, insurers can help their customers get easy questions answered, or simple steps completed—such as benefit or claim inquiries—in as few (or preferably single) interactions as possible. Although this compression of customer journeys can cut out unnecessary steps or to remove delays, the underlying and greater emphasis is on removing friction that leads to a lowering of effort on the member’s part (i.e., the ease and effectiveness factors most favorably into the overall customer experience).

Members focus on moments that matter—the interactions and processes which are valuable or necessary to achieving a goal. As insurers are looking to make the healthcare customer experience more omnichannel, some key questions they should ask themselves include:

Are the required steps to achieve common goals clear?
Are we maximizing integrations to minimize customer effort?
Are there steps in critical customer journeys where customers are falling off or feeling frustrated?

Challenge

The business (and the customer experience) can be negatively impacted when processes break down or a deadline passes.

Solution

Orchestrate interactions to optimize the customer experience across devices and channels with:

Facilitated two-way conversations
Failover from preferred to fallback channels
Analytics and insight into member engagement

Enterprises should invest in and prioritize technology solutions that evolve and scale as customer expectations change over time, delivering interactive, two-way conversations that encourage engagement and brand loyalty.

Conclusion

Changing the Conversation in Healthcare

Health insurers can improve customer experience by removing friction and delivering personalized communications in real-time, via any channel, and at scale that are:

Customer-driven
Digital-first
Two-way
Relevant and contextual
Cloud-centric
Highly scalable
Omnichannel

At Smart Communications, we have the products, professional services and partner network to help insurers improve the healthcare customer experience, whether it’s to coordinate an entire member journey or to improve how customer information is collected. Contact us today to discuss where to begin.

Smart Communications for Healthcare

Certifications

The Conversation Cloud is the only secure customer conversation management platform to have achieved an independent third-party validation of HIPAA, PCI-DSS, ISO and SOC compliance.

Customers

Our healthcare customers choose Smart Communications because they want to improve their customer experience, or they want to improve their operational efficiency. As a result, SMART customers see CX improvements reflected in higher NPS, CSAT and CX Index scores.

Additionally, SMART customers are seeing operational improvements driven by hard and soft cost savings by moving to a centralized cloud-native platform.

Partners

Smart Communications Gets Active: How Corporate Culture Plays a Role in Employee Wellbeing

Posted on September 8, 2022 by SmartComm

By: Jo Sweet, Global HR Director at Smart Communications

Over the last few years, business leaders and HR teams have become more curious and conscious about the many factors that contribute to a positive employee experience. In seeking out how to create better employee engagement and retention programs, leaders have recognized just how important these two factors are to the company’s overall success. What’s more is that research shows that retention and engagement can both be strengthened by fostering a workplace culture that allows for flexibility, wellbeing (both mental and physical) and work/life balance.

At Smart Communications, we believe it’s important to foster a culture that encourages employee wellbeing. We love that so many of our employees around the globe prioritize their health and wellness, and are happy to highlight five individuals who embody these attributes in this post.

Three Peaks Challenge: Andreas Neocleous, Corporate Project Manager

1. What is the Three Peaks Challenge?

The UK National Three Peaks Challenge involves climbing the three highest peaks of Scotland, England and Wales. Although achievable within 24 hours, realistically, it’s very rarely accomplished due to the distances between the mountains and the necessary driving involved. People normally attempt this challenge for personal achievement and to raise much-needed funds for charities. It is also a great event to catch up with friends and colleagues or to meet new people. I was also joined by our CEO, James Brown, as well as many other members of the Smart Communications family, including: Abbi Pollock, Amir Shurrab, Charlie Kassel, Chris Childs, Carlos Mendez, Graeme Wright, Richard Ward, Waseem Malik, Zaahid Bharmal, Yuri Kogun, and Byron Harper.

2. What motivated you to take part in it?

I first heard about the National Three Peaks Challenge more than 30 years ago when I was participating in a different challenge, the Three Peaks of Yorkshire. Though competing in the national challenge has been on my bucket list ever since, I didn’t have an opportunity to attempt it until 2009. This event helped us raise funds for Hospitallers, a relief organization that provides aid to Ukrainian paramedics.

3. How has working at Smart Communications impacted your work/life balance?

When I joined Smart Communications in Oct. 2006, I was able to cycle to the office every day. The on-site shower facilities allowed me to have a workout on the way to the office, and then again on the way back home. I found cycling a much better way to exercise than going to the gym. Since the pandemic, I’ve rediscovered running, so I’ve replaced the commuting time with running instead of cycling.

Bike Ride for Breast Cancer Research: Mel Burns, Senior Director of Global Demand Generation

1. What was this event and what motivated you to take part in it?

Women V Cancer, Ride the Night London is a charity ride to raise vital funds for three important charities at a time when they need it most; Breast Cancer Now, Ovarian Cancer Action and Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust. Riders began at 10:30 pm and needed to complete the 100-kilometer (6 miles) route by 7:00 am the next morning. The route followed a ‘palace to palace’ circular ride, starting at Windsor, riding through London (passing Buckingham Palace) and returning to Windsor. If you fancy the route for yourself, you can view it here.

So many people have been touched or impacted by these devastating diseases, and personally losing my maternal grandmother to breast cancer drove me to this challenge. This event really resonated due to the potential impact and funds we could raise. I’ve also really enjoyed cycling and have been taking it more seriously at club level since lockdown.

2. How has working at Smart Communications impacted your work/life balance?

Since my role has a global scope across a vast number of time zones, I enjoy the flexibility of being able to connect with colleagues with the occasional late or early morning call. In turn, I give myself time once a week to get a ride in, or to engage in my other passion, Pilates. Having this flexibility works well for me since I ensure I carve out time to balance the needs of my role (being flexible and accommodating to time-zone differences) with the importance of personal time.

3. As a leader in the business, how do you/will you encourage your team to engage in healthy habits?

To me, having a healthy work/life balance and adopting healthy habits are imperative for success, performance and a person’s mind and wellbeing. I try to lead by example, encouraging and supporting my team to enjoy their own activities. We also have a rule that when you’re on vacation or taking PTO, it’s a digital detox from work. We do this because we believe that a healthy mind is more motivated and recharged to succeed professionally. This is something I feel we’ve all benefited from learning during the pandemic.

Peloton Club: Mary Featherstone, Director of Global Campaigns and Content

1. Tell me about the Peloton Club

The Peloton Club at Smart Communications started about two years ago and consists of team members from around the globe, from nearly every department, including marketing, sales, product, customer success and more.

We meet every Monday at 9 a.m. PT/noon ET/ 5 p.m. BST in a pre-determined class to compete, have fun and get in a little workout

We have an internal Teams channel where we decide on upcoming rides and share fun workouts we’ve done on our own, thoughts on Peloton news and more. Our tag is #CCMInnovators and we welcome anyone to join us!

2. What about Peloton motivates you to exercise/challenge yourself to meet new exercise goals?

I was fortunate enough to have purchased my Peloton in Dec. 2019 – just a few months before exercising from home would be the norm! It’s probably one of the best purchase decisions I’ve ever made.

Two of my favorite things about Peloton:

They focus on being strong and feeling good instead of anything appearance related.
The content is always new and fresh! It’s impossible to get bored.

For me, it’s fun to compete against myself and always push myself to achieve something new and I am able to do that with Peloton.

3. How has working at Smart Communications impacted your work/life balance?

One of my favorite parts about working at Smart Communications is the room we have to prioritize health, family and more. I joined the company in July 2020 when most of the world was still locked down, so Peloton Club became a way for me to “meet” and connect with colleagues from other areas of the business. I recently celebrated my 600th ride and several colleagues joined me for the milestone class – I love the camaraderie and support!

Whether it’s Peloton Club or another athletic endeavor, prioritizing healthy lifestyles is encouraged at Smart Communications – and that’s a sentiment that starts at the top. There have been many days where I step away from my desk to either get in a Peloton workout or take a walk outside and come back feeling more creative and inspired to work.

7-Day Bike Tour Through Italy: Karen Oakland, VP Financial Services Marketing

1. What brought you to Italy for this bike ride?

I originally got into distance cycling by training for some charity rides and have completed sponsored rides for local MS, breast cancer and AIDS organizations. However, this one was purely for fun. I find bike trips to be a great way to tour a new place.

Northern Italy and the lake district have always been on my bucket list. I started looking at possible group bike tours and found this 7-day trip hosted by Vermont Bicycle Tours (VBT). We rode about 25-35 miles per day – fueled by a lot of amazing Italian food and wine!

2. How did this trip impact you as a person and in your role at Smart Communications?

First, I was grateful for the opportunity to add a holiday onto a business trip to support some key Smart Communications events in London, and happy to have the chance to travel internationally again after the past few years.

Second, it’s always amazing to experience a different culture firsthand and get out of one’s bubble.

Third, it’s been an incredibly busy year at work, especially with events coming back, so it was just nice to get away and have a rest and be offline.

3. How has working at Smart Communications impacted your work/life balance?

Working from home enables that balance. Some days, I’m on phone calls at 7 am or before, so morning workouts are often difficult. But I enjoy the flexibility of being able to take a break when needed in the afternoon. I also appreciate that I’m able to adapt my schedule to both personal and company needs, without a lot of challenges.

Corporate Step Challenge: Jo Sweet, Global HR Director

1. What is the corporate step challenge?

We launched a mileage challenge to kickstart the year with our first global wellbeing initiative. The goal was for us to collectively walk, cycle, run or swim around the world (24,901 miles!). We used an app that could sync with employees’ fitness devices or phones, highlighting the top contributors for those who are competitive. It was also to encourage employees to step away from their laptops each day and focus on fitness, health and/or mindfulness.

2. When thinking of employee culture/wellness, what are the three priorities for your HR team in 2023?

Work/Life Balance. We will continue to focus on work/life balance as we evolve our hybrid approach to working, which allows employees the flexibility to work from home and encourages those employees near an office to make the most of their in-person interactions using the offices as a hub for creativity, collaboration and socializing.
Communication. Better communication leads to better employee wellbeing. We need to ensure business leaders can identify what their employees need/want and have regular check-ins to see how their team members are feeling and that employees are able to raise any concerns they are facing inside and outside of the workplace. Ensuring employees are communicated with, listened to and appropriate action taken is critical to business success.
Wellbeing. We will continue to add more of the health and wellbeing events we have highlighted in this article for employees to be able to participate to encourage time to focus on their health and wellbeing. But of course, it’s not just about exercise; we also provide all employees with access to an Employee Assistance Program to ensure they can reach out to professional counsellors to support any issues they may be facing and allows for some free face to face counseling sessions throughout the year.

Smart Communications Encourages a Work/Life Balance

We believe that people are most productive and do their best work when they feel renewed, both in mind and body. For some, that begins with exercise, time out of the “office” and/or having the time to make charitable contributions to causes that are close to their hearts. According to one source, having a healthy work/life balance has been shown to:

Improve motivation, focus and concentration
Create better teamwork and communication
Reduce stress levels and improve overall health

When it comes to exercise and mental wellbeing, having time to step away and disconnect from work is imperative. Whether an individual is working from home, in an office or a combination of both, companies that allow their employees to make time for healthy habits will elicit the above benefits and so much more.

Like what you read about the work/life balance and overall corporate culture at Smart Communications? Check out our open roles and consider joining the team!

How to Create Digital-First Patient Intake Forms

Posted on August 29, 2022 by SmartComm

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

Whether visiting a primary care physician, clinic or specialist, patients will need to complete a patient intake form to help provide staff with the valuable information they need to see patients as individuals. Over time, it’s obvious that these forms are substantially the same for every provider, even those in the same practice or system. And, it’s not typically a single form; depending on the practitioner and the reason for making an appointment, there are usually multiple forms to fill out, especially for new patients.

What’s worse is that patients are often required to fill out generic, paper forms full of fields asking for information that the provider or practice may already have access to, even if the patient had already completed substantially the same forms online (e.g., when prompted to do so via an appointment confirmation or reminder email). Many of the questions often do not apply to an individual patient’s unique medical situation, creating confusion and frustration for patients. This provides a terrible patient experience and can set the provider-patient relationship off on the wrong foot.

In this post, we show providers that there’s a better way—a modern, digital-first alternative to the manual patient intake forms provided by legacy systems. One that leverages the power of the cloud and can save providers money while saving both patients and practitioners time. Let’s get started by identifying a few common forms in the healthcare industry:

Medical History Forms

This form requires patients to document all prior diagnoses, treatments and surgeries, any medications they are currently prescribed or taking, current condition and symptoms as well as family medical history. This is all considered protected health information (PHI). The form also asks for personally identifiable information (PII), including the patient’s name, date of birth and contact information. All this information must be protected once collected. Collecting this information on a paper-based patient intake form can open the door for data to be compromised.

Patient Authorization Forms

Governments and other regulatory bodies often dictate that practitioners obtain a patient’s explicit permission regarding how their medical information will be handled. This often includes:

Consent to release medical records (including any prior films, scans and other medical records).
Patient consent to bill an insurance carrier and authorization to send the patient, providers and attorney and/or personal representative information electronically. At the very least, a patient must sign an acknowledgment that they have received a copy of the provider’s privacy notice.

Consent to Treatment Forms

Many practices, especially hospitals and clinics, will require patients to complete a form acknowledging that they consent to be treated and informing them of their rights to discuss or refuse any procedure or treatment. If the patient is a minor or vulnerable adult, the form must be signed by the parent or guardian and may also need to be witnessed by another person.

Patient Responsibility Forms

This form requests acknowledgment that the patient is ultimately responsible for the payment for any services rendered or products provided during a visit, including any co-pays, co-insurance, deductibles and more. The form usually informs a patient when payment is due and the acceptable methods of payment.

Designing a Secure, Digital Forms Experience

As highlighted above, the number and types of forms involved in healthcare can be major points of friction for patients. The old, manual way of managing patient intake forms is singularly focused on data collection rather than the necessary holistic approach to managing a patient-first digital forms experience.

A truly secure, digital solution for patient intake forms should be able to consolidate all the above forms into a single interview that can be started, paused, resumed and completed on any device, including a mobile phone or tablet. The right digital solution should be able to reach into a provider’s electronic medical record system (e.g., athenahealth, Cerner or EPIC) and pull in a patient’s PII or PHI for them to review and revise rather than rekey. It should also be capable of personalizing and tailoring patient intake form questions to an individual’s unique medical situation. And, the ability to integrate with digital signature solutions to eliminates the need to print, sign, shuttle and hand in, mail or fax these forms.

Given the increased focus on privacy and security due to all-too-frequent reports of compromised systems, as well patients’ increased appetite for digital engagement, it’s more important than ever for healthcare providers to invest in products and platforms that safeguard their customers’ PHI and PII. Solutions that are HIPAA-, ISO- and SOC-certified by independent third parties are proven capable of safeguarding patient data from hacks and data breaches.

KEEP READING | ‘The Powerful Combination of E-signature and Digital Forms Takes Customer Experience to a New Level’

A Trusted Solution to Help Streamline Patient Intake Forms

Providers, especially hospital systems, often need to support multiple brands. Modern digital forms solutions like SmartIQ from Smart Communications employ a layered model that separates form elements from styling and branding. It maximizes the use of reusable form fragments, allowing for the same form elements to be created once and then used across multiple forms. This also simplifies translation efforts and minimizes the effort to comply with accessibility standards.

Forms frequently need to go through multiple levels of internal reviews. Modern forms solutions incorporate workflow functionality that can bring stakeholders together to review and quickly revise forms to get them into production quickly.

Smart Communications has helped reinvent all manner of forms for healthcare providers that rely on its ISO-certified and HIPAA-compliant Conversation Cloud platform. We have helped increase their efficiency by as much as 80% and to improve the patient experience in the process.

Our products, professional services and partners have already helped dozens of healthcare providers simplify the task of creating and maintaining patient intake and other forms.

Ready to streamline the process for patient intake forms? Contact us to request a demo to learn how.

The New Rules of Digital Loan Origination: Fast, Easy and Scalable

Posted on August 23, 2022 by SmartComm

Loan origination is a competitive battleground, where only the swift and digitally strong survive. From auto, home and student loans to business financing, lenders have worked for years to automate and optimize as many aspects of origination as possible on the journey to the “straight through processing” promised land. And while much progress has been made for consumer loans, the pandemic has put a harsh spotlight on places where paper or manual processes still remain. Add to that the need for banks to quickly support special government loan programs like the U.S. Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), or U.K. Recovery Loan Scheme, and the digital gaps became even clearer.

Digital Gaps Cause Challenges for Complex Loans

To be sure, the complexity and custom nature of business loans makes them more challenging than consumer loans to digitize. Like investment advisors, commercial loan officers often build client relationships that last decades. When it comes to financing multifaceted business deals, customers often want the high-touch reassurance that their loan is being personally handled by a trusted advisor.

So how do lenders maintain these relationships now in a digital-first world? And how do they take advantage of digital innovations, so advisors can spend less time on paperwork, and the business can scale to manage a higher volume of loans?

In a recent article on why commercial banks struggle to digitize account opening, the author cites a telling statistic: “[56%] of commercial banking executives say digital account opening is the No. 1 technology issue for business customers over the next five years, according to a recent study by Phoenix-based Catalyst Consulting Group.” To overcome these challenges, leading lenders have uncovered ways to digitize the creation of complex loan agreements and streamline e-signature from multiple parties. These digital upgrades have made the difference between growth and stagnation in a volatile macroeconomic environment.

The New Rules of Digital Loan Origination

Today, lending is all about being fast, easy and scalable to manage changing market conditions. If your digital lending operations follow these rules, you’ll have all you need to win. Easier said than done, right? Let’s break each rule down a bit further.

Fast: Before the pandemic, it was acceptable that lending of all kinds took a certain amount of time. Now, the expectations are that all loan types are processed at lightning speed. Lenders who get this are handily beating those who do not. Shifting digital loan origination is the path to victory here.
Easy: Going hand-in-hand with speed is simplicity. People no longer have the patience for complex, paper applications or in-person signing sessions. They know that there are easier ways to get things done now – putting the pressure on lenders to align with those new expectations, regardless of loan type and complexity.
Scalable: It’s not great processing one loan manually, rekeying information and mailing signed copies back and forth. But doing it hundreds or thousands of times threatens to overwhelm operations and grind everything to a halt. By automating as much of the digital lending journey as possible, lenders can free up internal resources while providing much better customer experiences.

RELATED READING | Discover 6 Ways to Change the Conversation in Lending to improve borrower engagement and decrease risk.

A Digital Lending Masterclass: The Bancorp

One great example of a leader in this space is The Bancorp, a specialized lender and asset manager. Jeffrey Hazelwood, Managing Director of Institutional Banking, believed that reimagining loan origination was a critical part of creating a differentiated client experience. Hazelwood recently explained why they chose Smart Communications to help them do just that, leveraging SmartIQ^TMand our partnership with DocuSign to support an entirely new digital loan documentation system. At every level, the business focused on creating a solution that was fast, easy and scalable — and the results are pretty incredible.

The company now has around 100 documentary artifacts that can be arranged in up to 350 combinations, to assemble personalized loan document packages automatically in minutes. And because it’s all done digitally, that means no more series of in-person meetings to physically sign multiple packages of documents. Loan parties can review and digitally sign in just a few minutes in one meeting. This also means no more waiting for documents to travel through the mail – they’re available to everyone instantly.

This new solution is fast – really fast. It only takes clients 5 to 7 minutes to complete the application. And that includes identity verification through documentation upload and e-signing. Not only has this resulted in great speed for The Bancorp, but also much greater accuracy: Not In Good Order (NIGO) error rates have dropped to almost zero.

Improved operations? Check. Improved customer experience? Check. But how do these great things translate into business results? Well, nothing short of amazing. As a result of their improved digital loan origination processes, for this business line, The Bancorp is ahead of plans to double market share, quadruple assets and revenue and increase profit tenfold.

Want to learn more about how The Bancorp achieved this wild success through a partnership with Smart Communications? Watch the video below featuring Jeff Hazelwood, Managing Director of Institutional Banking Solution Manager at The Bancorp.

Optimizing the Patient Experience with a No-Code Patient Appointment System

Posted on August 19, 2022 by SmartComm

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

While the healthcare industry is known for keeping one foot in the past where systems and workflows are concerned, many healthcare providers have begun the process of digitizing processes to enhance the patient experience. This often starts by considering the current way they’re interacting with patients and identifying ways to reimagine the end-to-end patient experience.

In addition to increasingly high patient expectations, this change is also being driven by payment stipulations. Payment often depends on the level of patient satisfaction, especially as the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) implement “value-based” programs that reward health care providers with incentive payments for the quality of care they give to people with Medicare.

So, as healthcare providers are consistently looking for ways to improve the patient experience, one way to make a quick improvement is to focus on the ways a patient schedules an appointment, which is why a digital-first, no-code patient appointment system should be one of the top priorities for healthcare providers right now. Not only can it enhance the inner workings of a practice, a sophisticated, modern solution can quickly and significantly enhance the overall patient experience. It can also help with:

Allowing patients to book appointments on their own, without being bound to a provider’s office hours
Automatically sending appointment reminders
Patient flow tracking and reporting, as well as billing integration
Improving key areas of the patient experience like intake, care management or discharge

In this post, we’ll look at the available options and provide tips on how to choose the best patient appointment system for a single practice or an entire system.

Available Patient Appointment Systems on the Market

Below are the most widely used patient appointment systems. We outline the pros and cons of each, and detail why a no-code approach is the best long-term strategy for healthcare providers.

Scheduling modules included with EHR/EMR systems

Athenahealth, Cerner, Epic and other systems offer patient scheduling modules. Resources such as EHR in Practice do a good job of comparing these systems. While each has its strong points, the biggest challenge is that the modules all look and operate differently. In some cases, the modules work differently on a desktop than on a mobile device.

Consistency is an important aspect of a great patient experience. For providers that have two or more EHR/EMR systems, the appointment setting experience will be different with each; thus, lacking the consistent experience needed. This means it isn’t a user-friendly approach for the practice nor the patient. A truly responsive patient appointment system should look and operate the same across any platform.

Dedicated patient appointment systems

There are several options when it comes to choosing a dedicated scheduling system—resources like Captera and SelectHub can provide insights into each. The biggest benefit of using a dedicated system is that the experience will be consistent across providers and practitioners, as these systems integrate with the major EHR/EMR systems. The largest limitation is that most of these systems only solve for scheduling and cannot be used to address other forms-based use cases such as intake, care management or discharge. That means that at least one other system will need to be procured, defeating the goal of simplifying the technology architecture. It also means more of an IT and financial investment will be necessary to implement, deploy and maintain the system.

Open-source patient appointment projects

There’s a plethora of PHP- and Java-based open-source scheduling projects available. Providers with a large enough IT staff may be tempted to implement one of these options. But, there are two pitfalls with going this route. First, it may be difficult to overcome privacy and compliance concerns raised by InfoSec, Legal and Compliance departments. Second, these projects instantly become maintenance burdens. In addition to testing new releases, IT staff will need to regularly redeploy and reintegrate these packages, making what may have started out as ‘freeware’ turn into costly projects that are difficult to budget for in the future.

As each one of these options has significant drawbacks and limitations, none qualify as the best patient appointment system. Luckily, there’s another solution that leverages no-code technology in order to offer flexibility and ease of use.

No-Code Patient Appointment System Enhances the Healthcare Patient Experience

A low-code/no-code solution like SmartIQ^TMoffers the most benefits to healthcare providers when it comes to appointment scheduling – and all of the patient interactions thereafter. Leading healthcare providers like Sonic agree as they partnered with Smart Communications to develop their appointment-setting solution to schedule COVID-19 immunizations.

While our patient appointment system solves many challenges for healthcare providers, some of the main benefits include:

No coding required. Response-based forms require zero coding for most use cases, and low-code support for more complex use cases. Business users—not IT—are able to quickly develop and deploy solutions.
Integration with patient portals and EHR/EMR systems. SmartIQ uses RESTful services for direct integrations and is available on the MuleSoft Anypoint Exchange, providing integration with leading EHR, EMR and other systems.
Always available on any device. Responsive healthcare communications software allows patients to self-serve, making appointments anywhere, at any time, on any device. Patients can even start on one device and finish on another without losing their place in line or any information they’ve already entered.
Can be used to address other use cases. Low-code forms solutions like SmartIQ are flexible and can be used for more than just appointment setting. Providers have used our solutions to streamline health assessments, care visits and other processes.

An automated, low-code forms management solution is ideal for providers looking to simplify their technology stack and standardize a single platform that is flexible, easy to implement, integrate and simple for patients to use. For the patient, this removes the burden of filling out endless paperwork. On the business side, it allows staff in the contact centers to focus on assisting patients with other things that may increase trust and patient satisfaction—two necessary factors in creating patient trust and comfort.

Conclusion

Smart Communications has helped providers that rely on its ISO-certified and HIPAA-compliant Conversation Cloud platform to provide appointment setting solutions and solve for other form-based use cases. We’ve helped to increase their efficiency as much as 80% and meaningfully improve NPS and other customer experience metrics.

Contact us to request a free live demo to see how you can implement a secure and simple patient appointment system that enhances the patient experience, eliminates friction and creates better patient workflows.

Enterprises That Benefit Most From Customer Communications Management Software

Posted on August 12, 2022 by SmartComm

By: Chris Murphy, VP of Product Marketing, Smart Communications

Enterprises around the world are navigating a digital landscape and customer expectations that are changing faster than ever, leading many organizations to rethink how they interact with customers—especially companies within highly regulated industries like financial services, healthcare and insurance, as well as the public sector. As these enterprises engage with customers at critical moments in their lives, it’s imperative that one-way, transactional communications be replaced with two-way, interactive conversations that offer a seamless customer experience. This is where cloud-native customer communications management (CCM) software can help.

An unfortunate truth is that outdated, legacy CCM systems do not provide the necessary agility to meet customers’ growing expectations. Companies that implement pure cloud CCM will be more capable of achieving the unmatched levels of innovation, agility and scalability that today’s customers require.

In this post, we’ll explore how making the shift from legacy, manual systems to a cloud-based CCM solution can help enterprises remain agile, competitive and compliant, as well as some of the main challenges that can be solved with CCM.

Why is Cloud CCM a Necessity for Highly Regulated Industries?

Early adopters of cloud-based CCM are already noticing the benefits of making an investment in sophisticated cloud software. In fact, the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Customer Communications Management Applications 2022 stated that organizations cited a 26% improvement in customer satisfaction as a result of embracing digital transformation. Enterprises need the right systems to help them decrease friction while still gathering the details and information required to help customers achieve their goals and remain satisfied.

As noted earlier in the post, highly regulated industries often interact with people at their most vulnerable or critical moments: a car accident, a first-time home buying experience or claims appeal after a major health issue. Navigating these life milestones is difficult enough, for both the customer and the company’s employees. With less time spent on paper heavy, manual tasks, employees have more room to be empathetic and focus on providing an exceptional customer experience.

When every customer interaction is high-stakes, enterprises within the insurance, financial services and healthcare industries require solutions that provide deeper visibility into every customer touch point, increased efficiency and the ability to deliver omnichannel communications – all of which is only achievable with a cloud-first approach.

How Cloud-based CCM Solutions Enhance Business Efficiency

In our fast-paced world, efficiency continues to be a main driver for businesses. The way we work and live has shifted exponentially over the last several years, making the customers of today more digitally savvy than ever. People have become accustomed to working out of their homes with systems and tools they once never used. Now, businesses are playing catch up and they need future-ready ways to help them remain efficient at scale. Rather than taking a reactive approach to these changes, proactive enterprises understand the cost savings and agility that come from cloud-based CCM solutions. Some of those include:

Greater Visibility into Delivering Compliant Communications. When considering the need for compliance and the ever-changing regulations, visibility into the language being used across forms and other external communications can make or break a brand, like manually searching for and replacing dozens of instances where language may be outdated or replaced for any number of reasons. This could be due to compliance regulations that dictate the way a contract is formatted. However, a sophisticated CCM solution that leverages the power of the cloud can search an entire library of communications for fragments (including sentences, logos or pre-made E-signatures) and replace it with the correct content. Minute details, like font sizing or color, can also be updated easily as per regulatory standards, such as a Terms and Conditions section in a document.
Reducing Administrative Burden on the IT Department. Another big benefit of utilizing cloud technology is for IT departments. Unlike legacy, on-premise tools, a cloud-based customer communications management solution reduces the burden on IT and frees up resources/budget that allows for more innovative initiatives. Without the added weight of managing or updating software and systems, IT teams can spend more time taking a strategic approach to the products or services a company offers.
Increased Control and Ownership for Business Users. The business user has more control and ownership of the software and can enjoy seamless updates (managed by the vendor) and flexibility that isn’t possible with on-premise tools. This is especially important when considering the hybrid or fully remote working situations across large workforces. With cloud software, customer service representatives have the needed flexibility to provide a great customer experience from anywhere in the world—without sacrificing customer safety or risking non-compliance.

The above benefits certainly extend to highly regulated industries like financial services, insurance and healthcare. In the rest of this post, we’ll examine some additional benefits of CCM for each of those industries.

Customer Communications Management Benefits for Healthcare

The healthcare industry, for good reason, has some of the toughest regulations and compliance-related expectations. To remain compliant and agile, while also focusing on patient satisfaction, requires health insurers to rethink the systems and solutions they use to manage the end-to-end customer experience. In addition to those top priorities, key findings from a recent Forrester report highlighted these main challenges facing health insurers:

Health insurance members prefer offline channels for customer service due to unsatisfactory digital experiences
51% of customers are dissatisfied with phone interactions
Insurers find it challenging to provide a seamless, personalized digital experience
Insurers’ top priorities indicate a focus on acquisition rather than improving current members’ experience

The above challenges can be solved by investing in a customer communications management solution that leverages the power of the cloud and provides health insurers with a strategic approach to improving customer experience—from acquisition through servicing—and ultimately improving retention. Consolidating CCM use cases onto a single enterprise-wide platform also improves operating efficiency and increases speed to market.

Helping members be seen and known as individuals will take a concerted effort to do away with manual processes and tools that only offer a one-way transaction. Health insurers need to reimagine how they engage with members and adopt digital solutions that enable interactive, two-way conversations.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE | ‘Connecting the Healthcare Claims Experience’

Customer Communications Management Benefits for Insurance Providers

Not only are customer needs very similar in both the healthcare and insurance industries, the compliance and regulatory requirements are, too. Protecting customer data and reducing errors is critical when thinking of the total customer journey. In addition to these drivers, the following are also top priorities for companies in the insurance industry:

Reducing cycle time and NIGO rates for claims to increase customer satisfaction and associated renewals
Reducing dependency on IT to create new reports, reduce template maintenance and number of templates
Eliminating disparate systems to provide for a more cohesive approach to managing customer conversations

Unfortunately, insurance companies that are hanging onto legacy technology might also be hindering speed-to-market innovation, limiting digital-first strategies and inhibiting the ability to respond to rapidly evolving product and customer preferences. To overcome these challenges and meet strategic priorities across the industry, insurers must invest in CCM solutions that help them foster two-way, interactive customer communications with agility and efficiency.

Manual, analog systems might be the expectation for insurers, but their customers are digitally savvy and have adjusted their expectations based on how they do business with companies that have already digitized and automated core business functions. To become a truly customer-centric organization while also remaining competitive, insurers must accelerate their innovation by adopting pure cloud, digital platforms that work seamlessly with policy, claims, billing systems and other enterprise software tools. This approach will allow for personalization and omnichannel delivery across the entire insurance lifecycle.

KEEP READING | ‘Becoming a Digital First Claims Organization’

Customer Communications Management Benefits for Financial Services Institutions

Banks and financial institutions have always competed for loyalty and wallet share based on delivering the best customer experience (CX), which has only become more difficult as new digital channels of engagement pop up every day. According to a March 2022 report from Celent, 58% of banks say “it is more challenging to win and retain customers than 12 months ago.” Competition from fintechs and non-bank lenders means banks need to step up their digital game.

CCM software solutions enable banks to engage customers with personalized, relevant communications in real time across a growing number of channels and engagement points, from getting a loan to onboarding investments to statements and customer service transactions. CCM platforms built for enterprise scalability enable banks to manage and deliver millions of documents or digital messages every day, including marketing offers, product information, compliance disclosures, renewal notifications, delinquency notices, just to name a few.

Meeting customers where they are while delivering the right messaging across all channels is just one way banks and other financial institutions can not only cut down on customer frustration, but also reduce compliance risks by managing communication templates. Banks can achieve massive cost savings by reducing paper and postage costs for ongoing communications. According to Forrester, one bank saved $16.7 million in overall costs by modernizing its CCM platform and shifting to digital communications.

Solving these challenges is at the forefront of the mind for many leaders in the financial services industry, as well as how to:

Support digital-first, two-way conversations that encompass the entire customer lifecycle, beyond sales
Provide customers with seamless transitions between in-person and virtual communications without friction
Remain compliant and protective of customer data while still providing flexibility throughout the various touchpoints

Financial institutions and banks are beginning to operate with a new customer experience paradigm. The old standard of reactive, one-way interactions is no longer accepted by a digitally equipped consumer base. Instead, banks and financial institutions have begun the process of adopting systems that can meet these increasing customer demands and allow remote or hybrid workers to account for gaps, no matter where they’re working from.

This digitalization goes beyond delivering documents or signing contracts; two historic use cases of early CCM tools. Customers can now be empowered to create their own journey, so to speak, when provided with digital-first, interactive conversations across the various engagement mechanisms that exist (e.g. website, chatbots, apps, in-person, phone). These capabilities support a customer-centric approach that is enabling financial services institutions to win customers and grow deposits.

READ THE REPORT | ‘IDC Industry Spotlight: Empathy at Scale at the Pace of Digital in Financial Services’

Why Smart Communications

Interactions across the insurance, financial services and healthcare industries are often stressful and/or high-stakes. This means it’s even more important than ever to deliver a customer experience that accounts for these factors. In fact, recent benchmark data from Smart Communications revealed that communications are important to 81% of consumers’ overall experience with a company—a high percentage when considering the various factors included in the end-to-end customer experience.

As one of the only CCM providers in the space that is fully committed to a cloud-first approach, Smart Communications has enabled many enterprises with the ability to shift from one-way, transactional communications to two-way, interactive conversations. This is one reason why we’ve been recently recognized on the Aspire Leaderboard for the strength of our solutions, strategic vision and global reach. In addition, Aragon, IDC, Gartner and other analysts have named us as a leader in our industry.

When considering the unique and specific needs in highly regulated industries, Smart Communications takes compliance and data safety seriously. We’re certified compliant by an independent third party and maintain HIPAA, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, SOC 1 and SOC 2 certifications. This makes it possible for enterprises to provide contextual, compliant communications across the various channels their customers prefer.

Smart Communications is uniquely positioned to help enterprises in highly regulated industries realize a better way to manage customer communications. To learn more about how our pure cloud-native CCM software helps enterprises better serve their customers and remain strategic, check out the Aspire Leaderboard for Customer Communications Management.

How to Access and Use the 2022 Aspire CCM-CXM Leaderboard

Posted on July 29, 2022 by SmartComm

By: Chris Murphy, VP of Product Marketing, Smart Communications

Analysts agree that there’s been a major shift to the cloud in the customer communications management (CCM) space – driven by customers’ increasing preference for digital, plus unprecedented levels of innovation in the technology space. As the first CCM provider to fully embrace and harness the benefits of cloud technology, we’re pretty excited (not to mention proud) that the market is following our lead. But this strategic sea-change makes it all the more critical for companies looking to invest in new technology to find resources they can trust to help them make an informed decision. And when it comes to trusted resources in the CCM marketplace, the Aspire CCM-CXM Leaderboard provides in-depth analysis and advice for leading enterprises to make the most informed decisions about their technology investments.

Customer experience (CX) expert, Kaspar Roos, and his global team of market research analysts are highly respected in the CCM and CX industries. Since 2015, the firm has been providing highly specialized independent insights, evaluation and advice to empower enterprises, software providers and business advisories to better understand this evolving market. In fact, Aspire established the Leaderboard to help capture this evolution—and to help businesses understand how various CCM-CXM providers compare on a range of capabilities and strategic direction.

A Dynamic CCM-CXM Assessment Tool that Delivers Deep Insight

The Leaderboard’s interactive capabilities make it easy to visualize where various CCM vendors rank in the market. Users have the added ability to customize that ranking based on a range of factors including business model, CCM maturity, strategic focus, cloud maturity and more. Results can be further filtered based on specific categories and use cases, such as industry, target market and company size, for fine-tuned analysis.

The 2022 Leaderboard has been updated to reflect the changing market. Whereas previous Leaderboards ranked vendors on a single grid, this year’s tool allows users to select from several different grids depending on their organizational needs. In this post, we’ll focus on two of the grids where CCM is the primary focus: AnyPrem and Vendor-hosted SaaS.

At Smart Communications, we believe there is no one-size fits all approach. However, we’ve helped countless customers over the years to evolve from a more traditional, on-premise or hosted model to fully realize and harness the myriad of benefits of a vendor-hosted SaaS CCM solution.

“Cloud is a strong differentiator for Smart Communications. The company was one of the first in the industry to move toward SaaS and it has embraced a cloud-native, DevOps way of working since the mid-2010s” – Aspire Leaderboard 2022

Follow These Steps to Get Started

While the 2022 Aspire CCM-CXM Leaderboard is designed to remove complexity and provide clear analysis to support CCM-CXM decision-making, it does require a few more steps to access than your average static analyst report. Here are some tips to help you navigate the updated Leaderboard and find the optimal CCM solution for your organization.

Step 1: Do Your Homework

The ability to customize this tool is what really sets it apart, so start by getting very clear about what you need. Review any information you’ve already collected in a request for information (RFI). Evaluate all the possible criteria, prioritize feature sets and make sure you have a clear strategic vision so you can look for vendors whose trajectory aligns.

If you’re not sure where to start, ask yourself:

What are our key use cases?
Which departments will benefit from this investment?
What technology will help us focus on what we do best?
What does our existing tech ecosystem look like?
What core systems are we looking to extend the value of?

With customer expectations changing daily and the digital landscape continuing to expand, cloud is decidedly the way of the future. By adopting a pure cloud solution, companies can deliver seamless customer experiences with dynamic, two-way conversations—at unmatched speed and scale.

What to Look for in an Enterprise CCM Solution

Every organization has unique challenges and goals, and the best solution will align most closely to those needs. However, the things we know are important to end customers today when it comes to communications are often only achievable with cloud—including channel preference, relevance, frequency and timing. A pure cloud CCM solution provides the ability to manage the complexity of omnichannel communications, a holistic view of the customer, rapid response times and seamless integration with core systems, among other capabilities.

Security is always top of mind, particularly for highly-regulated industries such as insurance, financial services and healthcare. Look for a solution with enterprise-grade security and privacy standards such as role-based access, granular permissions and standard certifications. If you’re replacing a home-grown or legacy communications application, it’s also important to choose a vendor that offers migration support to maintain both communications and brand continuity.

The Aspire Leaderboard (and our very own Cloud Buyer’s Guide) include questions you should ask potential vendors. The bottom line is this: legacy on-premise CCM solutions simply cannot meet the moment for enterprises or their customers.

Step 2: Create Your Aspire profile

Now that you know what you’re looking for, you can set up your Aspire profile using our complimentary link. Start by registering to gain access to the Aspire Portal by entering some basic information and choosing a password.

Next, you’ll get an email from Aspire to activate your registration. From there, you can login to the portal and set up your profile. Simply follow the on-screen steps and fill in the requested information about your organization and role. While this takes a couple of minutes, it helps to personalize the experience so you can get the insights you need to make the best investment for your company.

Step 3: Choose Your Own Adventure

Now comes the fun part. Once you’ve completed your profile, you can access the Leaderboard and customize your view. Look for the Segmentation Grid drop-down menu in the top right corner.

For example, if your organization is focused on a cloud-first, SaaS approach, start by selecting Vendor-hosted SaaS CCM from the drop-down menu. This evaluation looks at vendors, like Smart Communications, who have developed cloud-native software offered “as a service,” either using their own data center or by relying on public infrastructure such as Azure or AWS.

One advantage of choosing a SaaS vendor is that they’re responsible for data security, making things like certification, regulatory compliance and privacy-by-design even more essential. In addition, SaaS solutions typically support continuous deployment, also known as evergreen IT, and use agile or DevOps software development methodologies. This makes it easier for companies to spend more time focused on what really matters—engaging meaningfully with customers—and less time on software (and hardware) maintenance.

For organizations looking to deploy a CCM solution that’s either on-premise or in a hosted, public, virtual private or hybrid cloud configuration due to security requirements, choose AnyPrem CCM Software assessment from the drop-down menu.

Many of the vendors in this grid “have reworked and repackaged their legacy CCM solutions for containerized, serverless environments.” Smart Communications appears in this grid, however, because we have adapted our cloud solution to work in a hybrid fashion – keeping all customer data within an organization’s domain – while still being able to benefit from all that a cloud solution offers. We recognize that customers are all on a cloud journey—and we have multiple options depending on where you are on that journey, and a pathway to get you to the next phase when you’re ready.

“All in all, Smart Communications has had a very good 2021 and continues to align its development with the direction of the market.” – Aspire Leaderboard 2022

As an established thought leader in customer communications, Aspire has identified an additional emerging category that they’re calling Communications Experience Management or Communications Experience Platforms (CXM/CXP). This is another assessment to consider.

According to Aspire, these vendors have combined CCM software with other CX systems—for example, business intelligence dashboards, customer data platforms, marketing automation, journey visualization and orchestration, and multi-variate testing. The CXP grid assesses both technology vendors and service providers who offer these capabilities as part of a single cloud (SaaS or AnyPrem) or hosted managed services platform.

Step 4: Customize. Prioritize. Assess. Repeat.

The best approach for your organization depends entirely on your unique requirements, strategic priorities and cloud maturity. While we’re proud to have paved the way for the shift to cloud in CCM—and that Aspire is recognizing this evolution—the beauty of the Leaderboard is that it dynamically responds to what matters to you.

As a trusted industry advisor, Aspire has analyzed and segmented the capabilities, strategy and market presence of multiple vendors to help you make the best possible decision. You can keep fine-tuning the assessment based on different use cases, priorities and strategies, and then save your filtered view for each grid you create. You can even create customized URLs to share with colleagues and reference as you continue to research technology options. The Leaderboard also includes customer quotes and vendor content, so be sure to check out the vendor profiles as well.

The Power of Dynamic, Specialized Insights for Informed Decisions

Investing in a new technology solution or platform is a big decision—and a challenging one. That’s why we’re excited to share this dynamic tool with organizations at any stage of the CCM journey to help you make an informed decision and achieve your strategic goals.

At Smart Communications, we pride ourselves on delivering business value and innovation to enterprise organizations across industries and borders, so you can have SMARTER two-way conversations with your customers. As the only company enabling enterprises to deliver personalized, omnichannel conversations across the entire customer experience, we believe we are uniquely positioned to help you engage more meaningfully, embrace the digital-first world and achieve your strategic goals. And, we’re thrilled that the most trusted advisor in our industry agrees.

“Smart Communications is an excellent fit for enterprises in the market for a modern and high-quality cloud-based CCM solution, especially for complex interactive use cases in addition to batch.”– Aspire Leaderboard 2022

Ready to Start Assessing?

What’s New in Customer Communications Management (CCM)

Posted on July 26, 2022 by SmartComm

By: Chris Murphy, VP of Product Marketing, Smart Communications

An ever-changing digital landscape, increasingly high customer expectations and more are forcing enterprises around the world to rethink how they interact with customers. In highly regulated industries like insurance, financial services and healthcare – where customer interactions can be stressful and/or high-stakes – the experience enterprises deliver at every touch point is more important than ever. In fact, recent benchmark data from Smart Communications revealed that communications are important to 81% of consumers’ overall experience with a company.

So, what does all of this mean for businesses?

It means that as the market has changed and evolved, so too have the requirements and capabilities that business leaders are seeking in their customer communications technology solutions. And, with an increased focus on the end-to-end customer experience, the strategic importance of communications strategy is rising. As a result, enterprises are seeking modern, cloud-based CCM solutions that provide flexibility while increasing productivity, speed, scale and efficiency.

Recent analysis from IDC and Aspire reflect these changing market conditions – outlining where the customer communications landscape is now, and more importantly, where it’s heading. In this post, we dive into our biggest takeaways from these new reports, highlighting:

How (and why) the CCM vendor landscape is evolving
What enterprises should look for in a modern CCM solution
Why Smart Communications is a CCM leader

RELATED READING | Enjoy complimentary access to the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Cloud Customer Communications Management Applications 2022 and the Aspire Leaderboard for Customer Communications Management.

The CCM Marketplace is Evolving to a CX-centric Approach … and It’s Supported by Cloud

Marci Maddox, Research Vice President, Digital Experience Strategies at IDC, shared “In 2020, the focus was on establishing remote work, setting up systems in the cloud, and retaining customers. As companies moved into a more stable environment in 2021, the focus on the customer experience began to take hold and customer satisfaction was the most frequently cited top priority driving customer experience initiatives.”

So, with an increasing number of enterprises prioritizing customer experience as a strategic priority, taking a digital-first, cloud-based approach is the only way to meet customer demands both today and in the future. Cloud-based CCM solutions allow for:

Integrations
A complete view of the customer
Speed and efficiency
Omnichannel communications
Business user control
Optimized customer experiences

What’s more, early adopters of digital transformation are already seeing the benefits. The latest IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Customer Communications Management indicated that “organizations cited a 26% improvement in customer satisfaction as a result of embracing digital transformation.”

“Cloud is a strong differentiator for Smart Communications. The company was one of the first in the industry to move toward SaaS and it has embraced a cloud-native, DevOps way of working since the mid-2010s” – Aspire Leaderboard 2022

What Enterprises Should Look for in a CCM Solution

Just like with any technology investment, the best CCM solution depends on an enterprise’s unique challenges and goals. However, we know what is important to customers – and what frustrates them – when they are interacting with a business. For example, recent research revealed customers’ biggest sources of frustration with communications:

Information being provided through the inappropriate channel (61%)
Irrelevant messages (58%)
Frequency of contact being too high (54%)
Poor timing (48%)
Lack of personalization (41%)
Frequency of contact being too low (36%)

Channel preference, message relevancy, frequency and timing are only achievable with cloud-based technology. Simply put, legacy, on-premise tools cannot meet the demands of today’s customers.

It’s key for enterprises to keep in mind that customers are comparing every interaction they have with a brand to their last best digital experience. Whether that’s with their bank or an Uber Eats delivery, the businesses that choose to take an outdated approach to customer communications will unfortunately be left behind.

INTERACTIVE GUIDE: Looking for a checklist for must-have CCM Software Features & Capabilities? Check out The Ultimate Guide to CCM Software.

Smart Communications is a Leader in Cloud-based CCM

Unlike other providers in the space, Smart Communications has been fully committed to a cloud-first CCM approach for years. We have enabled countless enterprises to shift from delivering one-way, transactional communications, to two-way, interactive conversations. Mature cloud offerings like the Conversation Cloud^TM offer innovative technology solutions and facilitate personalized, omnichannel interactions.

For these reasons and more, Smart Communications has been named a leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Cloud Customer Communications Management Applications 2022 and Aspire’s SaaS Cloud Customer Communications Management Leaderboard.

It’s clear that the future is cloud-based technology, and we are thrilled to once again be named a market leader best equipped to enable enterprises to meet their customer experience goals via a sophisticated CCM solution. In the Aspire leaderboard in particular, vendor-hosted SaaS is viewed as a pivotal strategy due to the benefits that it provides relative to other types of deployment (i.e., scalability, security, agility, business continuity and more).

Additional benefits of Smart Communications, according to the analysts, include:

Cloud leadership
Fast time-to-value
Robust partner ecosystem
Increasing focus on AI and Machine Learning
Emphasis on the customer experience

As business leaders are challenged with creating exceptional, end-to-end customer experiences having the right CCM solution in place enables businesses to meet the customer needs of today while also laying the foundation for a successful future.

SmartCOMM^TM, part of the Smart Communications Conversation Cloud, is a cloud-based CCM solution that enables enterprises to deliver personalized interactions throughout the entire customer experience – enabling enterprises to create and deliver personalized, contextual and compliant communications across customers’ preferred channels and at scale. Businesses who partner with Smart Communications for CCM realize tremendous benefits, including improved business user efficiency, enhanced customer experiences, reduced costs and more.

—

To view the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Cloud Customer Communications Management Applications 2022, click here.

To view the Aspire Leaderboard for Customer Communications Management, click here.

More resources include:

The Powerful Combination of eSignature and Digital Forms Takes Customer Experience to a New Level

Posted on July 15, 2022 by SmartComm

Guest Contributor: Dilani Silva, Product Marketing Manager at OneSpan

The time for companies to prioritize end-to-end digital transformation is upon us. From personalizing every interaction a customer has with a company to creating rich, interactive conversations, enterprises must take the necessary steps to make this a reality. The overall goal should be to enhance the existing customer experience through the use of data, analytics and systems that make it possible to use the information gathered to tailor experiences fit for each individual.

That’s because over the last few years, consumers have become accustomed to the ease of use and convenience of digital CX superpowers like Amazon, Uber, Netflix and more. What’s more is customers have more control than ever and are taking charge of how they interact with companies. Customers expect tailored experiences from every company they do business with, creating a huge opportunity for enterprises across insurance, financial services and healthcare to optimize their processes.

One area that is ripe for transformation is the e-signature experience. Many businesses believe e-signature alone is creating an amazing CX (although it is much more efficient than wet signatures, direct mail and/or faxes!), but there is room for improvement. Through forms automation and integrating the data collected via response-based interviews with e-signature solutions, the e-signing process becomes much more personalized – and fast.

In this post, we dive into how digital, interview-style forms combined with sophisticated e-signature solutions are a powerful combination and why together, they take the customer experience to a new level.

RELATED READING | ‘5 End-to-End Customer Experience Trends’

Personalize Customer Conversations with Data and Automation

The opportunity is here for companies to leverage cloud-based technology to successfully deliver highly personalized and consistent conversations. This means that interactions must be two-way and well-coordinated across channels, devices and lifecycle stages. Working proactively is also important as enterprises prepare for new channels and challenges still to come. However, it requires an approach that reduces or removes the need for PDFs and static, paper-based forms. It requires a total transformation that helps companies digitize their forms-based processes across the business.

One of the ways companies can start this transformation and put a proactive approach into practice is by using systems and software solutions that enhance the end-to-end customer experience and continuously scale to meet customers’ increasing needs. This includes leveraging software solutions—like e-signature and forms automation solutions—to facilitate valuable, two-way customer conversations, versus the outdated method of transactional, one-way communications.

Put into practice, combining modern e-signature solutions with intuitive, interview-style forms optimizes agreement signing processes and workflows for customers in the insurance, financial services and healthcare industries. For example:

Using the available customer data to further customize conversations and experiences with the customer is a big driver in increasing brand loyalty and trust. The e-signature integration (offered through the partnership between OneSpan and Smart Communications) gives companies the ability to help fill in gaps by adding onto other core systems that may not have the same functionality or capabilities.

A few ways this enhances the end-to-end customer experience:

It pulls in data from core systems, allowing records to be pre-filled by the customer, further personalizing data for the company and using it to enhance the customer experience
It allows internal and external contributors to add, review and approve information, which increases efficiency
It removes the need for paper signing with integrated e-signature tools, accelerating agreement completion time and eliminating manual data entry/scanning

Automating some of the more tedious, manual tasks that are necessary day-to-day will save time, money and most importantly will allow employees to focus on providing a next-level customer experience.

The Power of Partnerships: Bringing E-Signature and Interactive Forms Together

On their own, the SmartIQ solution and OneSpan Sign electronic signature software are powerful systems. SmartIQ helps digitize manual processes as well as connect legacy and modern software systems to automate the communication between them.

OneSpan Sign brings automation to workflows with electronic signatures in an effort to improve customer experience, strengthen compliance and eliminate costs related to paper-based processes. With very similar goals, it made great sense to integrate these two systems, bringing immense benefit to the companies we both serve. Some of those benefits can help:

Drive up completion rates when creating a unique customer experience with mobile-ready forms and white-labeling capabilities
Increase productivity and efficiency by eliminating manual data entry and processing errors
Build secure and compliant customer digital journeys that meet industry-standard security requirements and ensure that data is safe at all times

The integration also transforms content-centric workflows in order to achieve notable ROI, including:

Frictionless digital experiences that improve CX and lead to higher application completions
Decreased errors, NIGO rates and spend by reducing paper, printing and mailing costs
Strongest audit trail in the industry to help demonstrate compliance

Ultimately, the partnership helps enterprise organizations optimize agreement signing processes, with security and compliance in mind. This is particularly important for regulated industries such as insurance, financial services and healthcare.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE | ‘Smart Communications and OneSpan Partner to Expand Value of Customer Conversations with Electronic Signature Integration‘

Learn more about the partnership with OneSpan and how the e-signature integration allows Smart Communications to expand the value of customer conversations and enhance the customer experience across multiple industries.

SmartCOMM

SmartIQ

SmartHUB

SmartPath

SmartDX

Insurance

Financial Services

Healthcare Payers

Healthcare Providers

Government

Utility

Resource Center

Customer Resources

Events

News

About us

Partners

Analysts

SmartCOMM

SmartIQ

SmartHUB

SmartPath

SmartDX

Insurance

Financial Services

Healthcare Payers

Healthcare Providers

Government

Utility

Resource Center

Customer Resources

Events

News

About us

Partners

Analysts

1. Use Pure-Cloud Solutions to Power Core Operations

2. Cater to a Digitally-Savvy Customer Base

3. Prepare to Remain Agile

Conclusion

Visit the main Guidewire Connections 2022 page to learn more about the event or to get registered to join us in Las Vegas from October 23-26.

Provide the Ultimate Healthcare Customer Experience: The Guide to Member Engagement Strategies

Changing Customer Expectations and Regulations Drive Trends in Healthcare

Customer Experience Trends in Healthcare

Convert One-way Customer Communications to Two-way Conversations

The Conversation CloudTM for Health Insurers

Collect: Improve Data Gathering

The Impact of Forms Automation on the Healthcare Customer Experience

Communicate: Increase Engagement with Tailored, Omnichannel Content

Collaborate: Change Stakeholder Engagement

Coordinate: Reimagine the End-to-End Healthcare Customer Experience

Conclusion

Changing the Conversation in Healthcare

Smart Communications for Healthcare

Certifications

Customers

Partners

Three Peaks Challenge: Andreas Neocleous, Corporate Project Manager

Bike Ride for Breast Cancer Research: Mel Burns, Senior Director of Global Demand Generation

Peloton Club: Mary Featherstone, Director of Global Campaigns and Content

7-Day Bike Tour Through Italy: Karen Oakland, VP Financial Services Marketing

Corporate Step Challenge: Jo Sweet, Global HR Director

Smart Communications Encourages a Work/Life Balance

Like what you read about the work/life balance and overall corporate culture at Smart Communications? Check out our open roles and consider joining the team!

Medical History Forms

Patient Authorization Forms

Consent to Treatment Forms

Patient Responsibility Forms

Designing a Secure, Digital Forms Experience

A Trusted Solution to Help Streamline Patient Intake Forms

Ready to streamline the process for patient intake forms? Contact us to request a demo to learn how.

Digital Gaps Cause Challenges for Complex Loans

The New Rules of Digital Loan Origination

A Digital Lending Masterclass: The Bancorp

Available Patient Appointment Systems on the Market

Scheduling modules included with EHR/EMR systems

Dedicated patient appointment systems

Open-source patient appointment projects

No-Code Patient Appointment System Enhances the Healthcare Patient Experience

Conclusion

The Conversation Cloud^TM for Health Insurers