Improving Customer Engagement Process

Rahul Pandey, Deputy Chief Manager-IT, Kotak Mahindra Old Mutual Life Insurance Co elaborates how Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite 2 solutions have made it easier to be better connected to customers and agents

Tell us about a transformational technology initiative in your organization in the past year that you are proud of.

For any insurance company, correspondence and communication play a vital role in maintaining effective engagement with customers as well as with third-party agents who help attract and acquire new customers. For us, having an effective communication management system was important, given the companys rapid growth.

Our existing system was unable to support expanding requirements and had become a bottleneck in building an efficient correspondence process. So, we decided to replace our existing printing solution with an integrated communication platform using Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform that includes Data Services, Output, and Workbench.

Overall, the new solution has helped us to ensure standardization and consistency while improving efficiency and document customization.

How was the business case for this initiative made? What justifications did the organization use to approve, fund and deploy this initiative?

Since this project was an internal productivity improvement initiative using IT, our IT team had to present to the top management the issues in the existing system and how it critically affects our performance and competitiveness in the market. The team also showed the benefits (in terms of the productivity improvements, cost savings etc.) that the new system would bring in.

Some of the main issues that we faced included:

• Existing system was unable to support expansion. It had a heterogeneous correspondence management architecture, which comprised several different applications operating independently
• Scalability limitations
• Challenges in the maintenance of the documents, including version control, reprinting, recreating or personalizing of documents

As benefits, we were able to showcase tremendous cost savings and substantial productivity improvements due to the implementation of the new communication management system.

Highlight any key challenges and successes along the road to implementation.

Migration of older policy related correspondence templates to the new platform was a big challenge. We also had to clean the garbage code from the existing system. We also had to standardize the structure of the policy documents.

But we were able to overcome all these issues and the system achieved excellent throughput.

Please provide qualitative and quantitative measures of success and the time it took for the initiative to be completed. Also address the following points:

• What set of internal or external customer needs did the initiative meet?
• How did this differentiate your organization from your competitors?

The first phase of the project implementation took about one year.

Qualitative measures of success

• The solution offers better document template management by breaking them into fragments, which helps us to dynamically load templates on demand and mix different fragments
• The new system is capable of maintaining different versions of fragments, enabling us to retrieve any older template with ease. Using fragments also enhances personalization of communications with the customer, as different batches of information and different templates can be maintained for different sets of customers
• The solution can be easily integrated with the customer portal
• Ease in standardizing of various critical documents such as the policy documents
• Effective performance of key operations such as re-printing, distribution, version maintenance, merging correspondence, and regeneration of documents amongst others.

Quantitative measures of success

• Significant reduction in correspondence costs (Estimated savings of about 25 to 30 %).
• Significant reduction in printing costs (Estimated 40 to 50 % in the Phase 1 of the system implementation).
• With the new solution, the turnaround time for editing existing templates is estimated to reduce from a couple of months to just a few minutes.

Internal customer needs met by the initiative

The solution being an internal IT initiative, it helped serve following internal customer needs:

• Standardization of policy related documentation and communication, enabling time savings
• Significant reductions in printing and distribution costs
• Significant improvement in the turnaround time for editing existing templates
• Improvement in the following critical communication processes such as reprinting, distribution, version management, merging correspondence, document regeneration, and finally linking the system to the customer portal. Internal users now see a significant improvement in productivity.
• The implemented solution has significantly enhanced the value of our communication processes, enabling us to engage with our customers and agents more effectively.
• The solution has the capability of making our business more agile to rapidly respond to ever-changing business needs, helping us build a stronger brand and solidify our relationships

Obtaining competitive edge

The implemented solution has given us a strong competitive edge in following ways:

• We are amongst the first insurance companies in India to have a standardized and integrated environment for communication management.
• Optimized communication processes have greatly reduced costs while improving the productivity simultaneously.
• Such a high-quality and high-performance communication management solution has enabled us to perform all the documentation printing in-house as against the outsourcing to vendors as performed by our competitors.
• The above has also helped us to keep the level of data security very high as all the data is generated, analyzed and utilized in-house.
• The implemented solution has significantly enhanced the value of our communication processes, enabling us to engage with our customers and agents more effectively.

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