In a highly competitive market, every insurance document needs to engage the customer inside a consistent way to ensure a positive customer experience. However, using the plethora of economic correspondence that an insurance enterprise produces, many insurers have lost tabs on their document inventory – all those policies, statements, invoices, proposals, letters and even marketing materials – that have been created over time and what those pieces actually say. Making sense and maintaining these large inventories of communications can be an overwhelming task. It is a huge challenge to ensure you're reflecting and reinforcing your company's brand while also ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements.
Additionally, companies often go through ideation phases where they attempt to refresh a bit of correspondence and label it a “redesign.” That is one misnomer, as a true redesign of the document needs to get beyond applying a brand new coat of paint (the look and feel). Your “redesigned” communications still need ensure they're meaningful, comprehensible, targeted and personalized, and that is exponentially harder to offer the larger your inventory.
Find the patterns
So, if it is not a traditional redesign that will create more compelling, relevant communications, what's going to?
The answer starts with identifying what content you'll need that you can share and re-use in a consistent way. Set a course streamlining and lowering your correspondence content right down to core chunks – for instance, minimal teams of paragraphs that might constitute instructions or perhaps a group of letters in a way they become your kernels within the system. These kernels are the foundation, the structure blocks that you define once with a common voice and tone and deploy consistently to elicit the expected response you hope to get from the recipient. The reputation for this process is “rationalization.”
Rationalization also means taking a hard look at what we should call “outlier items of content,” stuff that might appear just once in 1,000 letters, and asking why that paragraph only appeared once; was it a real situation where this company required to say this at all? Sometimes the answer is “yes,” sometimes “no.”
As an engineer by training, I'm intrigued by the idea of rationalizing content since it is really about applying the principles of pattern recognition. By finding meaningful patterns in content, you can reduce your communications inventory towards the minimum group of content “chunks” necessary to efficiently produce the correspondence in a manner that meets the vision you have for any better customer experience. It comes down to more than replication; think about it as revitalization. It's understanding your articles puzzle pieces and achieving an intelligent method to assemble them to complete the communications picture. With rationalization in position, you may make communicating with customers easier – on their behalf and for you.
