The insurance industry runs on documents. Various locations, regulatory, and situational versions make document management a momentous task in any insurance organization. Common documents produced by insurers include quotations, policies, statements, reports, renewals, reminders, checks, remittance notices, and statutory letters. Insurers must meticulously manage and constantly update these documents because of regulatory changes and market forces.
The insurance industry is predicated on paper. Or specifically, on transactional and reference documents. Insurance companies handle many transactions in both printed and digital formats. When customers buy an insurance policy, the insurer often sends PDF documents to their email inboxes and duplicate printed versions to their postal mailboxes. These communications are the only immediate confirmation that customers bought something costing hundreds or thousands of dollars. The documents customers receive are important and should not only explain the coverage but also be easy to read. The documents have value, and insureds should keep them for reference if they file a claim.
Regulation Adherence, CX Challenges
As a highly regulated industry, insurance firms are especially careful to make sure the legal department approves all the documents they produce, but repeated document review requests made necessary by manual processes are costly. Inefficient document systems often force groups or individual employees to handle document maintenance on their own. Under these conditions, version control and branding are at risk. State-specific rules may force nationwide insurance providers to support 50 versions of a document. Keeping all regulated documents current and compliant is a big job.
Insurance providers have the added challenge of working across many departmental silos to create a unified customer experience. Entities such as marketing, underwriting, product groups, and legal departments all have different objectives and responsibilities that influence how they communicate with customers. Legal must be certain the language is correct and the description of the insurance product is not misleading. Marketing is concerned with brand consistency, upselling, cross-selling and other promotional offers. All the variables insurance firms encounter make regulatory compliance and customer experience management a challenge.
Dynamic Data-Driven Documents
With data driven-document software like DocOrigin from Eclipse, insurers can modify document templates with a minimum of IT intervention. Departmental stakeholders can react to market or regulatory changes using a single dashboard or interface. A central repository contains the data required to print policies, invoices, or promotional documents. The software pulls the data as needed, based on business rules, during the dynamic printing process. Centralized data sources accessed by templates enable employees to update the stored data just once to implement changes across all relevant documents, for all departments. This eliminates the need to find and update documents and “one-offs.” Companies can maintain document accuracy, regulatory compliance, or consistent marketing messaging across all printed and digital material.
Businesses set rules so managers or department heads must approve document revisions. An individual user may have permission to change a document, but the changes are not made permanent until approved. Various levels of “rights” give management the power to control access levels according to employee roles in the organization.
A central repository is also important from a postal point of view. Since most printed documents enter the United States Postal system, current, valid, and standardized mailing addresses are necessary for effective delivery. Approximately 15 percent of all U.S. residents move each year. Move updating programs such as National Change of Address (NCOA) improve the deliverability of transactional and marketing documents. Maintaining “clean” addresses in a single, centralized database accessed by all mailed documents improves deliverability and allows insurers to take advantage of significant postal discounts.
The Visual
Current print technology allows companies to print high-quality documents including variable graphics, color, and fonts. Insurance consumers expect quality printed documents. The pages represent the product they purchased and build trust and awareness. By leveraging the power of data-driven documents, insurers can operate more efficiently and remain in compliance while simultaneously making their documents easier to understand.
Companies often include trans-promotional content in data-driven documents. Promotional content connected to individual customer data provides terrific marketing value, but the marketing messages cannot overshadow the main document content, which is often a legal document. Colors, fonts, graphics, and messaging should not mislead or confuse customers.
Once a document template is set, users can only change the content authorized by managers or allowed by business rules. Fonts, font sizes, colors, graphics, and layout all stay on brand and follow the directives of each departmental stakeholder.
Eclipse supports many insurance industry customers. With our software, insurers eliminate the complexity and overhead associated with maintaining an overwhelming number of documents. See this case study for an example of how DocOrigin is a perfect fit for highly regulated and complex applications like insurance.