How to Improve the Customer Experience With Customized Document Creation and Delivery

Customer experience has emerged as a powerful competitive differentiator for insurance companies, which have made improving the customer experience a top priority. Optimizing and customizing document creation and delivery has become an important part of this effort.

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Leaving Legacy Behind to Close the Customer Communications Gap

By Larry Hogan, Director of Insurance Solutions, Thunderhead (Elstree, U.K.)

A dramatic and rapid change in agent and customer behavior is occurring. The ways people communicate have changed forever. While the adoption of wireless devices is unprecedented, the speed of that adoption has been nothing less than stunning. Consider this: The number of U.S. wireless subscriber connections now exceeds the population of the United States.

Not surprising, the gap between what customers and agents expect and what they get with regard to communications has never been greater. This expectation gap is impacting satisfaction and loyalty as customers and agents compare experiences across all companies with which they have relationships. The gap between what insurers need to meet consumer expectations and what they currently have in place is due largely to legacy system constraints -- technology from the 1990s or earlier. Modernization initiatives require just that -- modern technology. Data, content, business logic and presentation are addressed in a completely different manner with modern, open, services-oriented technologies versus legacy client/server, batch document-oriented solutions.

For example, the Thunderhead NOW multichannel customer communication management platform uses values in the data (such as state codes, coverage codes, effective dates, language preference, channel preference) to automatically drive content selection, assembly and presentation. This eliminates embedded complex, error-prone logic and enables more business user control over content. So not only is business as usual not acceptable, but technology as usual won't cut it, either.

Peggy Bresnick Kendler has been a writer for 30 years. She has worked as an editor, publicist and school district technology coordinator. During the past decade, Bresnick Kendler has worked for UBM TechWeb on special financialservices technology-centered ... View Full Bio

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