Best practices for moving insurance customer communications into the digital-first era

Picture this: A customer seamlessly signs up for your insurance policy through your sleek mobile app in under ten minutes. They’re impressed. Fast forward a few months and they receive a dense, ten-page policy update letter in the mail, written in impenetrable legal jargon, with no explanation of what actually changed or why it matters to them. That same customer who once praised your digital experience now questions whether they’re with the right insurer.

These experiences are common across the insurance industry. Many organizations, particularly with large traditional insurers, have invested heavily in modernizing their acquisition and onboarding experience, while the customer servicing side of the customer journey has been largely neglected.

The reality is, most insurance customers rarely interact with their carrier or agent after the initial purchase. In P&C, only 5.5% of policyholders file claims annually. Life insurance claims typically occur decades after purchase, if at all. Written communications – policy updates, billing notices, annual statements – are often the only touchpoints customers receive for years at a time.

Yet these critical communications are often treated as compliance afterthoughts rather than strategic customer experience opportunities. The majority are still mailed despite only 26% of policyholders preferring print. When they are sent digitally, they’re typically static PDFs buried in customer portals, creating mobile experiences that require constant pinching, zooming, and scrolling.

These confusing, even frustrating, communications can erode customer trust, reducing the likelihood that policyholders will renew, buy other products, or recommend their insurer to others. They’re also a missed opportunity to reinforce the brand’s value proposition and surface offers that drive cross-sell conversions.

One of the key barriers to improving these experiences is the systems and processes used to manage customer communications today. In this article, we will outline five pillars for modernizing communications and management processes to help insurers take advantage of the opportunity

Five Strategic Pillars for Insurance Communications Modernization

1. Make communications relevant and highly personalized

Customers assume you know their history, preferences, and context. When your communications don’t reflect that, it signals a lack of care and disorganization behind the scenes.

Consider a customer who just missed their first payment after 15 years. Instead of sending a generic “payment overdue” notice, send one which acknowledges their track record and proactively offers flexible payment options. Now imagine a customer who just paid off their car loan. Including an ad for bundling home and auto insurance which includes a personalized quote is going to be far more enticing.

Insurers already have the data to drive meaningful personalization: policy details, claims history, communication preferences, and life stage indicators are all stored in your systems. The challenge is leveraging this information at scale without drowning in complexity.

Creating separate templates for each customer segment and scenario quickly becomes unmanageable at scale. Instead, successful insurers are adopting intelligent content management systems where communications are not managed as whole documents but assembled from a series of content components. These components can have unique targeting rules which dynamically adjust the message depending on a customer’s information.  The end result is the delivery of more personalized and targeted communications, that doesn’t require an army of marketers to maintain hundreds of template variations.

2. Make communications clear and easy to understand using AI

When communications are easy to read and understand, customers are more likely to follow instructions, make informed decisions, and less likely to reach out to the call center in frustration.

But in insurance, most communications are authored by experts for whom complex insurance terminology is second nature. That makes it difficult, if not impossible, for them to adopt the perspective of the average, uninitiated person when writing.

AI can help insurers solve this issue. AI algorithms can analyze an insurer’s entire library of communications against established benchmarks like Flesch-Kincaid readability scores to identify content that’s too complex. Generative AI can easily produce rewritten alternatives which align the content to meet a target reading level or apply plain language principles, such as shifting to active voice, reordering content for clarity, and breaking dense information into digestible sections.

AI-based translation tools can also help insurers cater to first language preferences in their communications. They can translate content more than 20x faster than traditional human-led processes, while automatically validating semantic accuracy, preserving formatting, and ensuring consistent terminology. Human review is still essential when using AI, but with this approach they only need to focus on reviewing exceptions, not every line.

3. Cater to your customers’ channel preferences

Customers increasingly want digital or mobile-first experiences, but a non-trivial amount still prefer email or print. The right approach is to cater to these diverse preferences, not pushing everyone to paperless. The barrier for most insurers is that communications are managed in separate, siloed systems for each channel. Delivering communications across a wide variety of channels requires managing content independently from channel-specific templates and layouts—known as the “presentation layer.” This approach eliminates the need to manage content in disparate systems for each delivery channel and provides the flexibility to repurpose content to support new channels and experiences as business needs evolve.

4. Tailor the experience to the channel

Information shouldn’t just be delivered on the right channel, it should be optimized for how customers engage with that channel. Every channel comes with its own constraints and opportunities, and insurers need to design communications that reflect that. It starts with responsive design, so content automatically adjusts to different screen sizes, avoiding the pinch, zoom, and scroll that comes when viewing PDFs on a mobile device. Just as important is leveraging the channel’s native capabilities. A mobile statement, for instance, might use expandable sections or navigation anchors to help customers quickly access what matters most.

Speed is critical, too. Digital channels—especially mobile apps and websites—require communications to be delivered instantly. To support these dynamic experiences, insurers need systems that support content delivery via high-speed APIs, enabling content to be retrieved, assembled, and displayed in sub-second response times.

5. Centralize control of communications to drive consistency

It only takes one or two poor experiences to lose a customer’s trust, yet many insurers still deliver experiences that feel disjointed, varying widely by channel, business line, or stage in the customer journey. A customer shouldn’t feel like they’re dealing with a different company when they move from onboarding to servicing, or from email to print.

Achieving consistency across the entire customer journey takes more than style guides and standardized templates, it demands a centralized content hub to manage communications across all channels, products, and teams With a content hub in place, common content objects like product descriptions, disclosures, and contact info can shared and reused across multiple communications and channels while being centrally managed from a single point of change. When these shared content objects are updated, the change is instantly applied everywhere, ensuring greater consistency with far less effort.

In addition, with all teams working within a common environment, using the same platform to manage communications, it becomes far easier to enforce common brand standards across the organization. When everyone can leverage the same capabilities, data sources, and content, it’s easier to make the resulting communications feel cohesive—even when they come from different departments or lines of business. That shared foundation also gives organizations better visibility into what’s being sent, to whom, and when, making it easier to coordinate touchpoints and shape journeys that feel purposeful and connected.

The Technology Reality Check

Eventually, insurers will need to modernize the legacy systems they currently use to manage communications. These aging platforms are a major source of technical debt and operational inefficiency, and simply lack the capabilities required to support a digital-first communications strategy. CCM technology has advanced significantly since many of these systems were put in place. Today’s modern, AI-powered CCM platforms, with no-code interfaces and integrated AI capabilities, can dramatically reduce the time and expertise required to create clear, engaging, and highly personalized communications and deliver them across all channels.

Originally published on Insurance Innovation Reporter