Organizations like to tout how “digital” they are, but when you dig below the surface, you often find shops that have spent millions to improve customer engagement, and back offices that are disconnected and struggling to keep up.
A true digital environment is about more than a front-end customer engagement portal. It’s about a straight-through, connected and digitized environment that links customer outcomes to process improvement. Only by elevating the customer journey above functional silos and legacy systems—and embracing intelligent operations—can organizations truly achieve operational excellence.
How intelligent is your insurance operation?
A successful intelligent operation has three key attributes:
- An unrelenting focus on the customer experience.
- Meaningful outcomes.
- A culture of continuous learning and process improvement.
- It’s all about the Experience. While a major objective of digital is straight-through, there are situations where human involvement is requested or even required. A dynamic, 360-degree view of your customer’s interactions allows you to bounce from the high-tech to the high-touch world as necessary. For example, has the customer filed a past accident, theft or injury claim? If so, chances are they have an idea of how the process works. If not, stress levels and anxiety may be really high. Arming your staff with a complete history of a customer’s interactions enables them to be more understanding, help diffuse the situation, be proactive and provide more value.
You also can focus on your customer’s broader needs, not just the transaction at hand. By concentrating on what’s driving the interaction, companies can retain business and up-sell or cross-sell. That’s the difference between taking orders and driving customer value.
Case management can prove particularly effective in support of these goals. It combines predefined processes, ad hoc tasks, structured and unstructured content, automation, analytics, and customer communication into an integrated environment for the case worker. Uniting the process control of business process management (BPM) with the flexibility of case management, companies can deploy powerful frameworks that enable their customer service agents while still providing the flexibility to handle a wide range of value-add possibilities.
- Delivering Meaningful Outcomes. “Big Data” has been a hot topic for a while, but it’s only a means to an end. Intelligent operations unlock the data stored in myriad warehouses and use it to tune the process and enhance the experience. By embracing robotics, machine learning, visualization and cognitive/AI, for example, firms give their customer service staff the right context to deliver relevant and personalized solutions for each interaction.
Consider the process of triaging broker submissions. For some carriers, the majority of their interactions are with brokers. Whether it’s evaluating new risk or evolving risk during the renewal process, those interactions require making servicing easier to ultimately drive higher retention ratios. Speed and service are very important—carriers need to respond to brokers quickly and there’s often lots of data that flows back and forth during the submission process.
The combination of analytics, process management and cognitive computing holds the potential to drive significant efficiency by improving straight-through rates while also improving quality and overall customer experience.
- A culture of learning and continuous process improvement. Change is constant. Organizations that embrace intelligent operations are built for agility and speed, and use rapid response as a competitive advantage. Closed-loop processes throughout their operation sense and notify, and soon they will also be able to learn and adapt on their own. This knowledge drives continuous improvement efforts to harvest latent capacity and increase overall throughput while improving the customer experience and employee engagement.
Get smarter with intelligent automation
Great customer experiences are about more than the front end. By embracing the many facets of intelligent operations, firms can finally achieve their goals of delivering faster, more elegant, and more personalized experiences for their customers.
