Customer Communications Management for Insurance

In Insurance

EY services help deliver a next-generation strategy for how insurers interact with customers, through simplified and more impactful communications via their preferred channel, combined with the architecture to make it happen. The results: greater satisfaction and engagement with increased efficiencies and better management of costs.

Traditionally, insurance customer communications have predominantly been through mailed papers or electric images of those same documents — an increasingly antiquated and costly approach amid the accelerated switch to digital triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many insurers recognize the need to meet a range of customers on their terms, but solutions require back-end integration while IT budgets are shrinking.

As a result, many of the most important interactions rely on manual, paper-based processes that prove both frustrating to customers and expensive for insurers. But EY Customer Communications Management (CCM) helps deliver a transformative omnichannel approach by uniting strategic consulting on the communications themselves, specific insurance sector skills, technology roadmaps for underlying processes and capabilities, and managed services where needed.

Through CCM, insurers have seen 10% to 20% fewer calls and up to 50% fewer form errors, with mail volume, printing and postage costs falling 10% to 20% as well. Meanwhile, full-time-equivalent efficiency has risen 10% to 30%, and end-user satisfaction, referrals and other loyalty metrics have climbed — even as time-to-market has accelerated and technology upkeep has declined.

How it works

CCM simplifies and modernizes future correspondence touch points across the value chain, from building the sales pipeline, to onboarding and enrolling new customers, to servicing their needs. These interactions can happen through email, text messaging and websites, as well as through traditional documents, using personalized, conversational writing — at an eighth-grade level — instead of highly complex “legalese.”

This capability creates, delivers, stores and retrieves outbound communications, including those for marketing, introductions to new products, renewal notifications, claims correspondence and billing/payment notifications. Insurers are equipped with a cloud-based application to improve these communications with their distributors, partners, regulatory bodies and customers.

Our CCM projects follow a defined methodology to rationalize and prioritize communications:

  • Building a correspondence fact base to define scope and sequencing
  • Outlining the project objectives, approach, team resources, costs, risks and success measures
  • Creating and analyzing an inventory of in-scope communications
  • Recommending a detailed plan for simplification and estimating the business impact
  • Redesigning and testing new communication documents based on recommendations, aligning with your company’s standards and guidelines
  • Building, testing and implementing, with help from EY formal alliances and software vendors
  • Monitoring and tracking the effectiveness of the simplified communications

Disability claims intake

CCM also can have another component for modernizing the disability claims intake process, with a hassle-free customer experience through a web portal that can be accessed remotely. The functional flow, depicted in the video above, reduces the prevalence of “not in good order” errors in documents and requires less time and labor for processing and disbursement. In turn, the insurer gains a solution architecture with a collection of integration-ready and use-case-agnostic reusable microservices.

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