The Content, Not the Technology, Determines the Success of Transformational CX Projects

Originally published in Carrier Management

News about ever-increasing dollars of InsurTech funding can’t help but drive property/casualty insurers to seriously consider tech modernization projects to drive growth and efficiency in 2018. That includes projects that recognize the need to improve Customer Communications Management strategies (CCM) and, ultimately, the customer experience (CX).

In evaluating transformational CX projects, however, companies often begin the initiative with a focus on choosing the right CCM technologies to format communications and reach customers through multiple channels. While choosing the right technology for your company is important, having even the latest technologies in place won’t improve the CX unless your customer-facing staff is able to do two fundamental things:

1. Access the right content (i.e., the most easily understood, relevant, impactful and compliant messaging) to deliver the CX your organization is trying to achieve.
2. Manage that content to ensure consistency in message and tone when your organization’s business users engage with the customer.

Getting organized around a cohesive content strategy is not an easy task for many insurers, because relevant content is locked up in a maze of disparate systems. If your organization is like most, multiple systems are in place in various departments for different aspects of customer communications. A point system used by one department or functional area for producing specific customer communications, such as billing statements, is often planned for and implemented independently from similar systems in other departments. Further, even in the same department, different systems with separate content repositories are often used for each channel with silos for print, email, web and mobile.

Without a mandate for collaboration, consistency of messaging can go beyond difficult to practically impossible.

Strengthening your organization’s customer and client engagement programs across all channels is recognized as the clear path to enhanced CX. However, achieving and maintaining the desired CX will require leveraging each customer touchpoint, such as a statement or policy transmittal letter, with targeted messaging created from approved, consistent content. If that is accomplished, the desired customer experience is sure to follow.

When considering the need to initiate transformational CCM projects, it is helpful to ask several critical questions, including:

• Is our organization putting content in the hands of the business users who are closest to our customers, and do they understand how to create and deliver the right messages for our organization?
• Is our investment in content management tools on par with our investment in data gathering and analytics technologies, so that we can easily incorporate customer data, including demographics and transactional history, in the narratives and messages our business users create?
• Are we able to make changes to messaging content at the speed that today’s customer engagement demands and tailor our content appropriately for different audiences, such as millennials versus seniors or English versus Spanish speakers?
• Are we able to share common content between business units, communications and channels?
• Are streamlined rules as well as approval and production workflows in place to ensure brand and regulatory compliance and quick time-to-market with relevant content?
• Do we have the capability to organize and simplify all legacy content to speak with one voice to our customers?

A management team that collaborates to reach an answer of “yes” to each of these questions will set an organization on the path to the desired CX. It is important to remember that achieving an excellent CX will require more than an investment in a set of CCM tools. You will also need an effective strategy for getting relevant, consistent content to your customers at every touchpoint—because it’s the content itself that will have the greatest impact when it comes to their experience with your company.