Information at the Speed of Light

I would not want to be the CEO of an insurance company. Aside from traveling first class, CEOs have few luxuries. They face a dizzying array of problems with an equally large number of potential solutions from which to choose. Constant top and bottom-line pressures, seemingly uncontrollable, make the task of running an insurance company difficult at best. Added to this, is that “I” word, the Internet. With the advent of e-commerce, chief executives are faced with the dubious task of taking a traditional business and having to compete on very non-traditional terms. Will they be ready?

PRODUCT COMMODITIZATION

Few would argue that many insurance products have been or will easily be commoditized. Homeowners, auto, and even simple life insurance products are now seen as homogenous, even by the very consumers that purchase them. These insurance products are perfect for the digital age. Consumers cannot touch or feel them. They cannot be taken for a test drive. They are intangibles. Information regarding these products is readily available from a number of sources via the Internet. Insurance is, in fact, ideally suited for the world of e-commerce.

Moving away from the sale of a product to the sale of a relationship places a burden on legacy technologies that insurers have invested heavily in. “Silos of operation” are no longer acceptable. Insurers must take small pools of information, such as those found in underwriting systems, billing systems, transactional documents and customer files, and integrate them into a single stream of information that flows in the direction of the customer, at lightning speed.

According to the Meta Group, “how effectively organizations deal with mission-critical information and expose it as usable content to support employees, partners and consumers is becoming a recognized differentiator”.

BRIDGING THE GAP

Unfortunately, up to 75% of the information required to manage these relationships is contained in disparate, unstructured (non-database) format. Examples include documents, reports and images. According to AMR Research, the problem that e-business exposes most often is that of inadequate integration. Put simply, vital information about customers, transactions, finances and products is trapped in back office systems such as policy management systems and ERP applications. These systems rarely talk to one another, and the traditional methods of integrating them are costly, time consuming and marginally effective.

The challenge to the enterprise is to take these disparate pools of information and web-enable/web-present them in a meaningful context that recognizes shared customer value.

Content management is a complex process of capturing, indexing, integrating, transforming and displaying business rules and associated information (documents). Content management solutions must be robust, scalable and flexible in order to successfully tackle the challenge. The initial step, capturing the documents, includes taking documents from the many systems that produce them, and depositing them in an integrated repository.

Next comes indexing them based upon key identifiers. Multi-level, multi-key indexing makes retrieval easy and that much more meaningful. The creation of “virtual folders” of information, based upon common key values, allows for indexing regardless of format, document source, time, platform and storage media. It is precisely this indexing structure that enables employees and/or intermediaries to collect information about the complete customer relationship, from inception to now. Providing this information to customers, based upon strictly defined security, enables unparalleled customer self-service opportunities that have the potential of driving down costs while enhancing relationships with the insurer and/or the producer.

DRILL-DOWN CAPABILITIES

Presenting integrated and indexed information in a meaningful way may require the presentment of documents in a number of formats. When electronically presenting a customer’s bill, data must be extracted from one or many documents and presented in summary format with drill-down capabilities. This flexible content presentment allows insurers to define what information should be extracted and where, when and how it will be presented.

In the final analysis, the insurer/customer relationship is defined by the documents produced to support the business. Customers, the insurer and intermediaries should be able to view exact replicas of these documents on-line, as a result of a simple automated process. This reduces customer wait times, improves overall satisfaction and adds a dynamic element that has, until now, been missing from insurance transactions. By linking back office systems with customer facing applications and business processes, insurers can support a number of key transactions such as on-line quoting, policy issuance, billing, broker relations, reinsurance and co-insurance, claims management and electronic data mining and report distribution.

The added efficiency, reduced customer wait times and lower costs will translate to highly satisfied customers who will look for opportunities to expand their relationship with insurers who meet their needs.

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