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

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.

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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:

Reimagining the Workers’ Compensation Process for Today’s Digital World

Posted on June 20, 2022 by SmartComm

By: Ruth Fisk, VP Insurance Strategy at Smart Communications

Most insurance professionals don’t just happen into the industry—they’re here because they want to give back, be part of something bigger and contribute to the greater good. But in an industry that’s been around for centuries, creating real change can be challenging.

When it comes to the workers’ compensation process, change has been especially difficult. Strict regulations, manual efforts and a “we’ve always done it this way” mentality are all barriers. But with the advances in cloud technology, insurers now have the necessary resources at their fingertips to create fundamental change.

With a purpose-built conversational platform, a digital-first workers’ compensation process puts the injured worker at the center of every stage of claims management and makes a positive impact on the people it serves.

The modern workers’ compensation service model is built around empowerment, person centricity and empathy—and it’s driven by long-overdue digital transformation.

Setting the New Standard in the Workers Compensation Process

Communications are at the heart of the claims management process, from the first report of injury (FROI) through settlement and closure. All involved parties have to communicate and collaborate to ensure a swift recovery and speedy return to work. This includes the injured worker, the employer representative, the insurer’s case manager and medical officer, not to mention physicians, physical therapists and other medical providers. And, key documentation must also be communicated to regulatory bodies.

By streamlining communications and making it easy and convenient for the entire ecosystem to exchange information, insurers can empower injured workers and help them achieve the best possible life outcomes. At the same time, increasing efficiency with intelligent automation and systems integration helps to minimize financial implications for both the employer and the insurer.

A cloud-based conversational platform keeps the lines of communication open, while transforming processes with automation, form pre-population and omnichannel access for consistency. The modern workers’ compensation process is all about reducing the hassle factor for everyone involved—bringing the ease and convenience we expect in other areas of our life into a stressful situation, to everyone’s benefit.

A More Complex World Demands Simpler Solutions

Our world is changing faster than ever, and complexity will continue to rise. As jobs evolve, so do hazards and exposures that increase the risk of injury. In fact, according to the International Labour Organization, 270 million accidents and 160 million work-related diseases are reported around the world annually, with more than two million lives lost from workplace accidents. In addition to the human cost, the financial cost of workplace accident, injury and death exceeds $1.25 trillion worldwide.

The good news is, that helping an injured employee return to the workplace even just one day earlier can reduce costs significantly while also – most importantly – improving life outcomes. This makes adopting a modern service model and digitally transforming the claims management process critical for insurers, who share the burden of these costs with employers.

Change the Conversation in Workers’ Compensation

Smart Communications enables the top workers’ compensation insurers to embrace change and engage SMARTER across the entire claims management lifecycle. With the Conversation Cloud^TM insurers can turn today’s tedious workers’ compensation process into easy, effortless conversations – streamlining and simplifying the experience from start to finish.

Below are how the key capabilities of the Conversation Cloud empower a reimagined workers’ compensation process:

Collect

Accelerate the claims intake process with dynamic digital forms for initial injury reporting, witness statements and material evidence gathering, and add photos easily to enhance the investigation stage. Prepopulating forms with policy information saves time and effort and omnichannel access lets case managers guide stakeholders to the most appropriate channel while maintaining consistency.

Communicate

Automatically generate and share key documentation to maintain compliance with government regulatory bodies. Examples include an FROI acknowledgment letter, occupational safety review reports, accident summary, medical treatment plan, certificate of capacity and return-to-work authorizations. Making communications more dynamic throughout the claims management process helps to keep the injured worker’s recovery on track and optimize outcomes for everyone.

Collaborate

Successful claims resolution requires collaboration between a wide range of individuals. With the Conversation Cloud, insurers can easily connect the case manager to the injured worker, employer, medical officer, physicians and physical therapists, support groups and anyone else with a vested interest in getting the employee back to work quickly.

Coordinate

Easily orchestrate communications between involved parties with a cloud-based platform powering end-to-end claims management workflows. Create a single source of truth to mitigate version control issues, drive faster resolution and support a speedy recovery.

Integration

To further streamline and simplify case manager workloads, the Conversation Cloud integrates seamlessly with core back-end systems such as Guidewire ClaimCenter, Duck Creek Claims and Sapiens ClaimsPro. Automatic updates enable straight-through processing so insurers can easily determine the best next step at any stage.

Intelligence

Engage with all involved parties by infusing intelligence into every conversation. Take advantage of automation to pre-populate forms and ensure compliance. Turn static, one-way interactions into dynamic, two-way experiences. Personalize at scale and maintain the proper tone to help alleviate anxiety and stress.

Transform the Workers’ Compensation Claims Process

Being injured on the job can be stressful on many levels—physically, emotionally and financially. Piling a whole lot of paperwork on top of that certainly doesn’t help. Anything insurers can do to alleviate stress will also help to facilitate recovery, which is the ultimate goal.

With a modern conversational platform at the core of the workers’ compensation service model, insurers can get back to what they care about most: making a difference, giving back and putting people, not process, at the center.

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To learn more about how Smart Communications supports modernizing the workers’ compensation process, check out The Future of Workers’ Compensation.

Modernizing the Workers’ Compensation Claims Process

Posted on May 12, 2022 by SmartComm

By: Ruth Fisk, VP Insurance Strategy at Smart Communications

Our world is rapidly changing. Technology advances across industries and all kinds of interactions have elevated the expectations for convenience, immediacy and ease for businesses and individuals, alike. Unfortunately, the typical workers’ compensation claims process is largely manual when it comes to claims communications. The good news? There is an opportunity for insurance companies to improve efficiencies and return-to-work results by adopting a more digital-first approach.

A Proven Approach Ready for a Refresh

Workers’ compensation was first introduced in the late 19^th century during the second wave of the industrial revolution – a time of rapid changes in the technology and social landscapes. A flurry of innovations reshaped the world — the steam engine, the metal detector, seismograph, telephone and the first working automobile. These innovations and others simplified and sped up work, but they also posed a higher risk of accidents and injuries.

In 1871, wanting to win the loyalty of workers, Chancellor Bismarck of Germany issued the Employers’ Liability Law. It provided limited social protections to workers in certain factories, quarries, railroads and mines. He later expanded on these initial protections by establishing the Workers’ Accident Insurance in 1884, creating the first system of workers’ compensation.

Workers’ compensation guidelines and policies continued to evolve as new technologies and innovations were introduced. Often, these developments were created to address new and evolving risks that workers faced. Fast forward to today: while the widespread adoption of new, digital-first consumer technologies continues, workers’ compensation schemes remain complex and highly manual. There is a clear opportunity to modernize the worker’s compensation claims process.

Improving Life Outcomes with SMARTER Conversations

Since innovations and workers’ compensation policies have long developed in tandem, the opportunity to reimagine the approach is appropriate at this time. For insurers, their clients and injured workers, modernizing workers’ compensation claims communications can improve outcomes across the board.

When an employee gets hurt on the job, it has large-scale impacts on the individual, company productivity and even the broader GDP. For everyone involved, it is an emotional and stressful process. By optimizing orchestration, personalization and timing of communications through a unified customer conversations management platform, everyone benefits.

The primary objective of workers’ compensation is to get people back to work and resume productivity as quickly as possible. The Smart Communications Conversation Cloud^TMprovides a seamless approach from policy inquiry, reporting of First Notice of Injury and managing claims to coordinating care and billing communications. By digitizing the effort, insurers can improve the process for everyone. And most importantly, better, more regular communications have been shown to improve life outcomes for the injured worker.

The Conversation Cloud provides a seamless experience for all. It is fully compatible and can be integrated with common core systems such as Guidewire ClaimCenter, Duck Creek Claims and Sapiens ClaimsPro. It is easy and fast to deploy and can quickly and positively impact the process. Instead of manual, siloed communications, Smart Communications unifies them under one solution.

Creating a Workers’ Compensation Claims Process for the Future

From emails and chatbots, to social media platforms and more—there are endless ways to interact with individuals today. Instead of the traditional one-way communications of the past, now case managers have the opportunity to start conversations with injured workers, company representatives and even care providers. By deepening the level of personalization and improving the immediacy of communications, insurers have a powerful opportunity to meet today’s expectations and advance workers’ compensation approaches for everyone.

When communications are conversational, personalized and SMART, everyone is more willing to engage. Think of it as the latest improvement to what has been a revolutionary approach from its earliest days. By transforming the approach to the workers’ compensation claims process, insurance companies have the opportunity to literally change lives.

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Interested in learning more about how modernizing the workers’ compensation claims process will impact the case manager? Download “The Case Manager of Tomorrow” to learn how a cloud-first approach enables case managers to work SMARTER.

Download the white paper now!

New Research Reveals Which Digital Customer Experience Trends to Watch

Posted on May 3, 2022 by SmartComm

By: Leigh Segall, Chief Strategy Officer at Smart Communications

As customer expectations change faster than ever, it may feel difficult to pin down which key digital customer experience trends should be priorities for businesses. Even in this continuously shifting environment, it’s possible to identify the major forces shaping the customer experience (CX) and establish plans and processes to meet these ever-increasing expectations.

To better understand customers’ changing preferences, Smart Communications recently surveyed business leaders and consumers from around the globe. As we dug into their thinking about communications practices in the financial services, insurance and healthcare industries, interesting patterns began to emerge. In this post, we highlight a few of the key findings, plus how Smart Communications can help enterprises tackle these digital customer experience trends head-on.

Trend #1: Businesses Will Try to Close the Communications Satisfaction Gap

Communications are at the heart of a great digital customer experience. So much so that how enterprises communicate with their customers can determine their level of satisfaction with a business overall. Aside from offering effective products and services, there are few areas of business more essential than customer satisfaction.

The challenge is that across the financial services, insurance and healthcare industries, there’s a disconnect between how well businesses think they communicate versus how customers feel about it. That gap — up to a 20-percentage points difference — represents a big opportunity to rethink customer engagement.

By ensuring communications are timely, personalized and digital-first, businesses can ensure the end-to-end customer experience builds trust and loyalty.

How Smart Communications Can Help

By investing in a technology platform that empowers interactive, two-way conversations, businesses can ensure an exceptional experience across channels and devices. Businesses who operate across geographies and multiple brands can benefit from the Conversation Cloud: the only scalable, pure cloud customer communications management platform. It’s specifically designed to take away the pain of template management while enhancing the ability to collect information, all while making it easy for customers to initiate conversations, regardless of channel.

Trend #2: Businesses Will Take Customer Channel Preferences More Seriously to Avoid Negative Impacts to the Digital Customer Experience

Today, customers are increasingly willing to speak up and share exactly how they want businesses to interact with them. And for enterprises, it’s more important than ever to ensure customers’ preferences are taken into account.

According to our research, 61% of consumers said that information being provided through an inappropriate channel was a major source of frustration. And yet unfortunately, our research suggests that on average, only around half of communications are distributed to customers based on the channel they prefer.

A key digital customer experience trend moving forward will be revamping communications efforts to ensure greater alignment with customer wants and needs. Enterprises must adopt interactive, omnichannel conversations to succeed.

How Smart Communications Can Help

It’s one thing to know how customers want to be communicated with – and quite another to deliver on that – especially as the complexity of communications grows just as new channels continue to proliferate. It’s important to partner with a technology provider with the right solutions and real-world expertise to deliver on the “right channel, right place, right time” promise. Our experience working with the world’s most sophisticated businesses across financial services, insurance and healthcare gives us the necessary resources to provide amazing digital customer experiences via orchestrated, omnichannel interactions at scale.

Trend #3: Businesses Will Continue Migrating to the Cloud

Customer expectations around digital are greater than ever. And while interactions across healthcare, insurance and financial services are very different from impulse buying on Amazon, consumers are comparing every interaction to their last best digital experience.

That’s why it’s more important than ever to have the infrastructure in place, allowing enterprises to compete with companies that deliver incredible digital experiences day-in and day-out. Unfortunately, legacy systems simply aren’t built this way and struggle to keep up with the pace of change.

While not a new trend, leading firms will continue their migration to the cloud. Our research shows that on average, 57% of business’ core systems will be cloud-based within the next 12 months.

How Smart Communications Can Help

We get it – the idea of moving systems that serve as the foundation of your business can be scary but it doesn’t have to be. The benefit of partnering with Smart Communications is that you can quickly go “pure cloud” for your customer conversations – or ease into it over time by starting with our powerful integrations that connect with your legacy systems. The world is moving to cloud – there’s no doubt about that. But, you can control how it happens in your business with tools like Migration Studio. The important thing is to remain focused on the customer – and Smart Communications is the leader in enabling incredible end-to-end customer experiences.

What’s Next?

When change is the only constant, it’s nearly impossible to predict what might come next. But, investing in the customer will always pay dividends. We hope that knowing these digital customer experience trends will help your business achieve greater success today and in the days and months that follow. To learn more about each trend, and how you can prepare for it, download the full report, The State of Customer Conversations.

Investing in Empathy: 4 Ways Financial Services Firms Are Improving Customer Experience

Posted on March 29, 2022 by SmartComm

By: Marc DeCastro, Research Director, Consumer Banking, IDC, Guest Blogger

If you ask most financial services executives if being empathetic is part of their collective DNA, most will surely tell you that is the case. And no doubt they are sincere. However, asking an executive if they run an empathetic organization is akin to asking someone if they are a nice person. Most people feel they are nice but may not fully understand what it really means to be nice.

The same is true with empathy in financial services. Delivering an empathetic financial experience involves keeping the customer at the center while engaging the customer using both available data and technology on their channel of choice. Data is really the key here when trying to deliver empathy in financial services, as data provides the insight required before, during, and even after the engagement has happened.

As consumers shift to digital-first interactions, and in some cases digital-only engagement, with their financial institutions, this empathetic experience must be able to be delivered seamlessly across both digital and physical channels. If your customers find that they have a better experience when dealing with a bank employee on a particular issue or question, they will likely continue to use that channel while avoiding digital options. This is probably not what most institutions want; they want to be able to deliver the best experience possible on the channel of preference and deliver this at scale.

An example of this might be a customer who asks a question about a new product or feature using SMS text messaging. Engaging with that customer across SMS might make sense up to a certain point. However, the customer may eventually need to be directed to a website, mobile app, or bank employee if the conversation becomes too complex.

Delivering this empathetic experience boils down to two main themes. First, provide predictable communications that are personalized and are contextually aware of current and previous engagements. Communication is at the foundation of every interaction and engagement during all steps of the customer’s financial journey. Allow customers the flexibility of choosing their channel, then provide a continual flow of conversations without the need for customers to repeat information. These communications need to be capable of producing results in real time, both during customer acquisition and account servicing.

The second theme is about loyalty and building lifetime value. Achieving this requires the financial institution to focus less on pushing a transaction through from point A to point B and focus more on providing more personalized experiences and advice using contextual guidance provided by the customer and obtained through existing data points. Loyalty is something that is built over time as the institution shows not only that they care about the financial needs of their customer, but that they are able to guide them to either a different service or a resolution to an issue that makes sense and provides real-time actionable advice, like “Click here to accept” or “Select a time for one of our employees to reach out to you.”

Where to Invest in Customer Experience

Improving customer experience is a top priority for financial services executives. In fact, IDC surveyed 116 financial service executives in Feb 2021 and the top three priorities were revenue growth, improving customer experience and satisfaction, and improving operational efficiencies. There are four areas of focus that should drive investment in technology solutions to help improve customer experience. They are:

Customer Intelligence. Investments here need to be able to capture as many points of data as possible, both data generated within the institution as well as third-party data sources. In order to build or provide solutions that can personalize experiences based on the context of the engagement, there must be a foundational layer of intelligence to draw from, otherwise personalization becomes difficult, if not impossible. With the right amount of customer intelligence, it leads itself nicely into the next strategic initiative, product innovation.
Product Innovation. Innovation on traditional bank products and services can often be more about policy, and less about technology. Instant access to deposited checks as opposed to putting legal, but inconvenient holds for customers is simply a decision in policy based on risk of fraud. However, other innovation can leverage modern technology that provides some level of innovation. For example, a small but growing number of institutions have provided their deposit account customers with access to their direct deposit payroll a few days prior to the funds being deposited into the account. Seeing repetitive deposits of a certain amount and cadence can provide a level of comfort that the funds will be there on a specific day, thus minimizing the risk to the institution. The innovation here is in the analytics that identifies the customers that would benefit from such a product and determines when and where this makes sense.
Orchestrating Customer Intelligence and Product Innovation. Now that customer intelligence and data collection have been prioritized and innovation solutions are being developed, it will be important to combine the two into tangible customer improvements. Solutions like virtual agents, next-generation chatbots, and true omnichannel engagement can result from successful implementations of new products built on top of modern architecture. Having an agile environment in place will continue to foster innovation and improve overall efficiencies.
Growing Role of AI. AI solutions in financial services have begun to evolve way beyond robotic process automation and have reached the level of providing true value back to the customer and the financial institution’s employees. AI can be used to monitor text, voice, sentiment, and emotion in a way that can deliver that empathetic experience many individuals are looking for from their institution. AI solutions will not only engage with the customer directly but can identify and reimagine legacy workflows and create improved processes.

Providing a truly hyper-personalized and empathetic banking experience will require that we truly put the customer in the center of everything and view products and services not through the lens of the financial institution, but rather through the lens of the customer. To build trust, we need to think less about providing financial transactions and more about helping customers achieve their financial goals. We also need to provide employees with the same level of modernized solutions and interfaces that we provide to customers, which will create that common and fulfilling experiences.

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Interested in learning more about empathy in financial services? Download this insightful, custom POV to understand how to adjust your technology strategy to meet the changing digital-first expectations of your customers. Or, check out this infographic that explores 4 Keys to Delivering Empathy in Financial Services.

Financial Client Reporting Goes Digital: 5 Key Trends to Watch

Posted on January 27, 2022 by SmartComm

For too long, bespoke financial client reporting has been seen as a necessary burden rather than a strategic communications avenue for wealth management, private banking and other institutions working with high net worth and corporate clients. That’s because these investor client reports have been unengaging, long and static– unforgivable transgressions in the modern, digital era of visually appealing and interactive customer experiences. Moreover, processes around creating compliant custom reports is often tedious, taking firms sometimes days or weeks to produce.

But that’s all changing, and changing fast. Firms are now investing in improving their financial client reporting communications as a crucial customer engagement strategy, taking advantage of the power of new technology to deliver highly personalized, customizable, digital-first experiences at scale, while reducing manual work and accelerating turnaround time.

We take a deep dive into the key trends, challenges, and opportunities facing wealth management and private banking leaders today in our new eBook, 5 Trends Shaping the Next Generation of Client Reporting. Below is a preview of a few key highlights we found in our research into this often-overlooked area of financial services customer communications.

$68 trillion in wealth will change hands between various generations over the next 25 years, according to Accenture and other sources. Some call it the “generational shift in wealth,” others the “Great Wealth Transfer.” The GenX children of Baby Boomers – along with their children – are finding themselves responsible for estate planning and looking for different ways to manage their money, and this shift has only accelerated during the pandemic. Data shows that these younger generations of investors have higher expectations around personalization and digital self-service.Wealth management firms that have been dragging their feet on digital transformation may lose these clients to providers that offer a digital-first financial client reporting experience. Smart firms will implement better client-facing technology now to secure the loyalty of those who will receive that wealth well before they see a penny of it.

61% of very-high-net-worth investors and 80% of millennials are willing to pay more for experience-related features, according to the EY 2021 Global Wealth Research Report. In an era when many incumbent banks and wealth advisory firms face competitive pressure from digital disruptors and challenger banks, this stat is like a breath of fresh air. Though much has changed in the financial services industry, some truths have endured: if clients receive personalized services that are of value to them, they are more likely to stay loyal and even pay more for these services, rather than looking for a DIY approach with robo-advisors.The key is understanding both parts – which “experience-related features” are valuable, and to whom – to ensure the right product / market fit. Financial client reporting is a good example of a client experience that has the potential to either help clients see the value a firm provides, or leave them wondering, “what am I paying for, exactly?”

82% of wealth management businesses plan to increase spending on client-facing technologies in the next two years, and 75% plan to invest in client reporting, according to Gartner’s industry forecast. Improving digital experiences can feel like an arms race, with financial services companies pouring money into IT teams and fintechs. Which firm has the best app? Which firm has the best-looking reports? To stay competitive, wealth management and private banking firms of all sizes need to invest in technologies that improve the client experience. Because if they don’t, their competitors surely will.

70% of households with a net worth of $500,000 or more, headed by a person under 45, have an investing style that is either strongly or mostly self-directed. It’s not just who has the wealth that’s changing – it’s how they invest, too. As outlined in this report from the Wall Street Journal: “Wealthy young investors don’t see much use for the wealth management firms their parents rely on. They would rather pick their own stocks or plow their money into crypto.”That’s why Gartner says wealth firms are investing in technologies that move beyond static reports into interactive, digital experiences, allowing clients and advisors to slice and dice data to build personalized reports that meet their needs and interests.As with any other trend, this stat reveals both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is – if advisors don’t adapt and modernize key areas of their practice, like financial client reporting, the gap will continue to widen. However, if firms provide clients (and advisors) with digital tools that put them more in control of their own destiny (but within the walls of a firm), it may be possible to increase wallet share.

57% of wealth management firms would continue to use paper communications for ultra HNWI segments, Accenture reports. While this stat seems to contradict everything we’ve looked at so far, it’s actually not that surprising. And it underscores an important truth about how financial services is evolving: there is no one-size fits all approach. The key takeaway? It’s important to look at delivering consistent financial client reporting that supports every channel, instead of looking at digital and traditional batch print document output as two separate disconnected channels. It means letting the customer “choose their own adventure” in a personalized way. That’s why companies need to invest in a customer conversations management platform that is not only future-leaning, but also “backwards compatible” with paper and traditional PDFs.

Want to discover more insights on how to get ahead in wealth management and private banking? Download our new eBook today or learn more about Client Reporting from Smart Communications.

Omnichannel Insurance Solutions – the Next-Generation of Greatness

Posted on October 27, 2021 by Mary Featherstone

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

We are living in an always-on world – everything from ordering dinner, to opening a new bank account or filing an insurance claim can be done from a mobile device, in real time and when it suits the customer rather than the business. This is forcing the insurance industry specifically to rethink how they interact with their customers across a variety of channels and puts pressure on them to invest in omnichannel insurance solutions to effectively orchestrate interactive, two-way conversations as opposed to transactional, one-way communications.

The insurance industry has a long history – centuries, in fact – of adapting to change like this. In this post, we dive into how an omnichannel distribution model is helping leading insurers to deliver upon their guiding principles at the same time that customer needs evolve. We also provide a real-world example of an insurer doing this today.

Omnichannel Insurance Solutions for the Future

Times have changed and so too have insurers – yet their principal purposes remain the same, including:

Payments of Losses – ensuring insured individuals are less dependent on public assistance or relatives
Anxiety Mitigation – lets people know they are covered if a loss occurs
Support for Credit – aids in obtaining loans if insured
Accident Prevention – lives and property are saved

While insurers continue to focus on delivering these same important benefits to society, today’s modern insurer depends on new technologies and strategies – including advanced omnichannel insurance solutions – to meet the changing needs and expectations of their policyholders.

It’s no secret that the industry has seen more rapid change in the last 10 to 15 years than in the combined 350 years before, with today’s most meaningful contrast tied to how insurers deliver their products and services.

Today, insurers must effectively manage – or orchestrate – customer interactions to make them part of a continuous conversation rather than isolated, disjointed transactions. An effective omnichannel distribution model enables insurers to add digital channels to their print efforts, automate common customer interactions, effectively promote two-way conversations and more. This ensures that approved, compliant communications are delivered in real time and initiated when the customer demands it.

Wawanesa Insurance and the Power of a SMART Integration with Guidewire

This rapid evolution in the last few years has prompted industry leaders to build an ecosystem that brings together the best of breed solutions with pre-built code, accelerating the delivery of this combined functionality for today’s modern insurer. Leading insurers like Wawanesa Insurance want to focus on delivering value to their customers, not on the intricacies of integrating platforms. They rely on SMART partners to make this as seamless – and effective – as possible for their teams and their policyholders.

To address this, Guidewire, a leading technology platform provider for property and casualty insurance carriers, created their Ready for Guidewire accelerators. Smart Communications has worked closely with Guidewire to develop more than a dozen of connectors available to InsuranceSuite on the Guidewire Marketplace.

Smart Communications is proud to provide the #1 Customer Conversations Platform that Guidewire customers count on to uniquely deliver personalized, omnichannel conversations – empowering them to succeed in today’s digital-focused, customer driven world.

Wawanesa leverages Smart Communications pure-cloud communications platform to deliver hyper-personalized, omnichannel experiences that reinforce the organization’s commitment to member centricity. Through this work, the organization has streamlined communications, enabled greater consistency and improved the customer experience to:

Provide a fast and simple way to share information with policyholders
Boost productivity
Reduce reliance on IT to perform all CCM related work

By investing in cloud-based solutions like the Smart Communications Conversation Cloud^TM, Wawanesa has lowered operational costs and improved the user experience, so they’re always ready to deliver leading-edge service.

“The Smart Communications claims release is a game changer by automating a time-consuming process and rationalizing an inventory of more than a thousand documents to ensure that we provide consistent, professional and accurate customer communications. Wawanesa is committed to continuing to invest, listen, and more importantly, focus on being a trusted partner.” – Wawanesa Insurance

At Smart Communications, we are proud of the innovation we’re seeing across the insurance industry, both with leaders at insurance companies around the world and with our technology partners like Guidewire. Together, we’ll continue to chart a path toward excellence, driven by efficiency inside the organization and a top-notch experience for the policyholders that together, we support.

As we look forward to next month’s Guidewire Connections event in Las Vegas, we are ready to convince you to add more power to your Guidewire investments – and improve your customer communications strategy. More than 100 Guidewire customers across the globe trust Smart Communications to deliver SMARTER conversations across the complete customer lifecycle. We’re ready to tell you why live! See you at the Smart Communications booth (P2) at #GuidewireConnections!

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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

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Why is Cloud CCM a Necessity for Highly Regulated Industries?

How Cloud-based CCM Solutions Enhance Business Efficiency

Customer Communications Management Benefits for Healthcare

Customer Communications Management Benefits for Insurance Providers

Customer Communications Management Benefits for Financial Services Institutions

Why Smart Communications

A Dynamic CCM-CXM Assessment Tool that Delivers Deep Insight

Follow These Steps to Get Started

Step 1: Do Your Homework

What to Look for in an Enterprise CCM Solution

Step 2: Create Your Aspire profile

Step 3: Choose Your Own Adventure

Step 4: Customize. Prioritize. Assess. Repeat.

The Power of Dynamic, Specialized Insights for Informed Decisions

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

What Enterprises Should Look for in a CCM Solution

Smart Communications is a Leader in Cloud-based CCM

Setting the New Standard in the Workers Compensation Process

A More Complex World Demands Simpler Solutions

Change the Conversation in Workers’ Compensation

Transform the Workers’ Compensation Claims Process

A Proven Approach Ready for a Refresh

Improving Life Outcomes with SMARTER Conversations

Creating a Workers’ Compensation Claims Process for the Future

Trend #1: Businesses Will Try to Close the Communications Satisfaction Gap

How Smart Communications Can Help

Trend #2: Businesses Will Take Customer Channel Preferences More Seriously to Avoid Negative Impacts to the Digital Customer Experience

How Smart Communications Can Help

Trend #3: Businesses Will Continue Migrating to the Cloud

How Smart Communications Can Help

What’s Next?

The Conversation Cloud^TM for Health Insurers