The situation
Insurance is a highly regulated industry that’s densely populated with proposals, complex policies, product disclosure statements (PDS), schedules and certificates of currency – where everything must be consistent, correct, timely and compliant.
Historically, our client - a large transport insurer – had used inefficient and cumbersome cross-departmental processes to check, approve and roll out any changes, updates and corrections. Those processes unnecessarily extended delivery deadlines, by months and years.
The challenge
Our client initially approached us with an isolated pilot project that required the design, execution and delivery of a suite of new business documents, across eight products, within three months. Their needs were specific – consistent, accurate, secure and time efficient policy documents, PDSs and direct-to-client emails.
Given the document complexities and need for accuracy, our client required a time-efficient way to not only create new templated documents, but also cascade changes down through all related documents – thus ensuring consistent compliance.
The solution also had to enable the provider to test various policy response scenarios and deliver considerable time savings, as the lead CoTé Communications Business Analyst explained, “the client had extensive pain points around their internally generated documents. They were poor quality, unable to be efficiently customised and even the most minor of regulatory changes or updates, equalled extensive time delays.”
The process
The scope of work included implementing virsaicTM, CoTé’s customer experience management (CXM) platform along with consultation on design requirements, creation of brand style guide/standards and template specification, creation and testing within a tight timeframe.
A pilot project was run, involving the creation of policy documents for a new business line. Its aims were brand consistency, improved efficiency and lowering of internal department workloads. To that end, the team were able to arrange for real time, automated transfer of data from the insurer to the virsaicTM platform, the population and generation of personalised documentation customised to business line variations, and the supply of those documents to their brokers – almost instantly. At the same time, universal templates were created which allowed for easy customisation.
Once the solution had been established, tested and proven, the insurer started to realise the potential for further quality, time and compliance improvements. According to the CoTé Analyst, “Once they were happy with the quality, they were keen to do more and more with virsaicTM.”
Subsequent projects expanded communication channels to direct-to-client emails and SMSs, including innovative value-add such as digital wallet integration for membership cards. CoTé directly distributed the materials to policy holders. Emails were tested, tracked and clicks & opens recorded within the platform’s workflow, for future campaign adjustments to be identified and implemented.
This multi-year relationship has recently seen the digitisation of its most complex documents – four of the provider’s twenty Product Disclosure Statements – transferred to the virsaicTM platform. The documents were built as templates, with clauses and business line branding separate to, but related to those templates. The approach of managing each clause independently, including in-platform workflow-supported change review and approval, allows for extensive content optimisation and re-use. The insurer, at a glance, can see which clauses are associated with a given PDS template and vice versa.
The result is that PDSs can be tailored for each insurance product, with the potential to be personalised for policy owners. Although seemingly simple, all of this required extensive work by CoTé to identify differences, standardise information and allow for quick, easy, controlled, reportable and auditable changes when regulatory or commercial adjustments were made to policies.
The results
The years-long partnership between CoTé and the insurer has removed the need for printed forms, facilitated template creation, opened opportunities for future inbound correspondence OCR/data entry and enabled 100% end-to-end straight-through workflows.
By progressively moving their outbound and inbound multi-channel correspondence and key documentation across to the virsaicTM platform, the insurer has completed work that had sat on their ‘like to do’ list for some time:
- Improve the look and feel of their policies
- Create consistency across the information and language used in their PDS
- Ensure all regulatory and compliance issues were seamlessly addresses across all document versions
- Optimise the language across all documentation
In particular, the digitisation of the four PDSs to date has produced immediate gains and offers enormous potential for future efficiencies. A recent update to the four documents took the virsaicTM platform one day, when the equivalent work (done manually, inhouse) would have taken weeks. As a Senior CCM Consultant at CoTé Software and Solutions noted, “the additional benefit of the project is that they’ll now be able to normalise and optimise their PDS content across all twenty versions.”
As the CoTé Analyst sees it, “moving their documentation to the virsaicTM platforms has given the Operations team the opportunity to address issues that they’d been wanting to pursue but were unable to achieve on their own.”
Final thoughts
Over time, this long-term relationship has built a significantly deep level of trust between our client, ourselves and the capabilities of the virsaicTM platform. It has also delivered unexpected gains, by breaking down their silos of information which in turn, has created greater alignment and brand consistency across the entire organisation.
Our client sees an even brighter future for their document digitisation, because, as CoTé Analyst explains, “with virsaicTM on hand, whenever they have new documents, they always find the funding because its results speak for themselves… and they have something to show at the end of the project.” In short, virsaicTM delivers.