Enhancing Customer Communication with Forms Processing
Customer retention is critical to business success, and in today's environment, it is more important than ever. With more choices and power to shop around, customers have become more sophisticated, demanding personalized, relevant tools and information they can use, when they want to use it and in a format that best suits their needs. They know the value of their business and can easily be swayed by the competition's offerings. Companies that meet their customers' needs increase the likelihood that their customers will reward them with their loyalty. Yet, as competition increases and operating budgets continue to shrink, companies must learn how to enhance customer communication while improving operational efficiencies and reducing costs. By improving forms processing and storage, companies can capitalize on this opportunity. With the right technology, companies can turn resource-draining manual processes into electronic workflows that enable personalized, customer communications, such as bills, account statements and policies to be instantly created, stored and accessed. The benefits are endless for companies that are in industries driven primarily by manual, document- and data-intensive processes, such as insurance and financial services. With forms processing and storage technology, companies can reduce the time, errors and labor costs associated with manual processes and input, while eliminating hardcopy storage costs and speeding customer service response time by electronically accessing archived information. Additionally, companies can reuse electronically captured and stored data to reduce duplicate data entry and accelerate document preparation by automating and routing workflows. Not to mention, leveraging personalization tools to tailor the content and appearance of customer communication, making it more convenient, easier and relevant for customers to read.
By leveraging forms processing and storage technology, insurance and financial services companies can take advantage of many different applications that can help enhance customer relationships and improve operational efficiencies.
Key Applications
Forms management: Forms management applications enable banks to automate the creation, processing and storage of forms, improving what has typically been an unnecessarily error-prone, inefficient and costly process. With a forms management solution, banks can create new forms using pre-existing content stored in an electronic library and distribute work-in-process and final documents via multiple channels. They can also facilitate straight through processing (STP) with automated workflow capabilities, all while ensuring version control and a complete audit trail. With an enhanced forms management process, customers benefit from faster turn-around time and more accurate processing.
Financial statements and correspondence: Financial statement and correspondence applications allow banks to leverage specific business logic to personalize data, formatting, messaging and delivery methods based on individual account information and preferences. With this technology, banks can create accurate, personalized communications that reinforce customer loyalty, improve customer satisfaction and facilitate new revenue generation through cross- and up-selling products. Advanced graphic capabilities, including color, charts and graphs, make statements more attractive and easier to read, while device-independence gives companies the flexibility to deliver their statements via multiple channels.
Additionally, customer service representatives can instantly access archived customer information, providing more informed and responsive service. Subsequent correspondence can then be easily created from pre-existing content, such as logos, digitized signatures and text blocks, which have been electronically stored in a library. As a result, representatives save valuable time, while enhancing customer relationships.
Policy production and correspondence: Policy production and correspondence applications provide companies the ability to create, produce and distribute personalized, intelligent policy documents and correspondence. Using state-of-the-art archival, retrieval, creation, presentment, printing and Web-enabling technology, insurance companies can automate lines of business previously considered too small, specialized or expensive. And by reengineering paper-intensive policy production processes into electronic workflows, they can dramatically shorten the time to introduce a new product and realize revenue.By using automated insertion fields, insurers can also reduce the time, errors and labor costs associated with manual processing and input, as well as ensure accuracy and compliance. Not only does this improve their response time, but it also allows insurers to produce more attractive policies and communications, resulting in improved customer satisfaction.
Content management: For banks and insurance companies, managing all of the information related to a customer can be a challenging and time-consuming task, especially when a majority of that content is stored in multiple, disparate locations. Content management applications allow companies to create a single, centralized repository for storing, accessing, displaying, annotating, printing and electronically routing all digital assets, including customer data, electronic documents, video/audio clips and scanned hard copies of printed material. Businesses can easily manage the flow and storage of these assets throughout the company with electronic workflow, audit trail, version control, expiration dates and check-in/check-out capabilities. With a content management application in place, companies no longer have to spend time locating misplaced or lost files, or creating backup and duplicate copies, and can instead focus on spending more time with potential and existing customers. With increased competition and savvier consumers, it is more important than ever for insurance and financial services companies to invest in effective technology solutions that deliver reduced costs and operational efficiencies. Most importantly, companies that communicate more effectively and efficiently with their customers will create the foundation for an enduring customer base for the future.
Brenda Kai is vice president, marketing, for Docucorp International. Docucorp is the authority in providing dynamic solutions for acquiring, managing, personalizing and presenting enterprise information. Servicing the entire enterprise information lifecycle, Docucorp's information software, application service provider (ASP) hosting and professional consulting services enable companies to implement solutions in-house or fully outsource to Docucorp. The company has an installed base of more than 1,300 customers, including many of the largest insurance, utility, financial services and health care organizations. Headquartered in Dallas, Docucorp has facilities in Atlanta; Silver Spring, Md.; Bedford, N.H.; Eindhoven, Netherlands; Brussels, Belgium; Prague, Czech Republic; Zurich, Switzerland; and London