Dear Insurance CXOs – Expect More from Your Content Production Processes
Blog: Capgemini CTO Blog
The mood in the room was somber – I felt it the moment I stepped into the boardroom. In many ways the meeting had potential to be a services salesperson’s dream – one whole hour with the CFO and CSO of a major insurance provider, and an amazing opportunity to introduce Capgemini and our entire insurance services offer. And although they were extremely attentive during my two introductory slides, I decided to pause and politely ask them directly.
The news was bad – a mounting backlog of customer communication due to excessive regulatory changes, a content production team struggling with a legacy tooling system and barely managing to meet 75% of the annual expected contracts and documentation output, and mounting customer dissatisfaction actively voiced on social media. And if this wasn’t bad enough, the final straw – a declining trend in new product sales and renewals.
For me, however, this doesn’t come as a complete surprise. Insurance companies run content production departments that have to produce vast quantities of content – the most important being the insurance docket, contract or benefit booklet that goes out to the customer. The content in these documents is strictly regulated by the government regulating authorities, and it isn’t unusual to see a huge number of changes close to the document release date that need to be immediately incorporated.
While most insurance companies have adopted front-end digital and social media analytics, their middleware, content production processes and tools are a different story altogether. There are several insurance platforms that have content production capabilities, with more than one tool often used to produce content. Some of these content tools and processes may be legacy – inherited via mergers or acquisitions – that continue to soldier on due to prohibitive costs of migration, and all of which combines to have an adverse impact on the final content production time and volume.
Another snapshot – an aging in-house workforce with no new blood. With content management losing its sheen as a sought-after career, fewer young people are entering the profession, leading to a market shortage in content production personnel, writers and publishers. And the result? Insurance companies in this situation lack the agility to respond to their customers and regulatory demand, and are not able to alter their output quantity, quality or introduce new products rapidly to satisfy demand. This leaves them with the only available option of having to completely retool, migrate and integrate their content production department – an option that also happens to be the most expensive option.
Thankfully, there’s another way out. The following five-point plan can help your insurance company boost content production as well as reduce the response time needed to create new products and effect changes related to regulatory and customer demands.
- Create a future production and response time plan that synchronizes with your sales growth and new product launch plan, and clearly defines the investments needed.
- Set up small focused groups with clear tasks and time set aside to:
- Map your existing processes used to produce content and identify time- and labor-intensive processes to create a process map that ensures redundant processes are identified, re-engineered and/or phased out.
- Identify new content production technologies, startups and management tools that can enhance the capabilities of your existing legacy tools.
- Examine and upgrade the capabilities of the workflow tool used by your content team to ensure that all work-related communication between the team is conducted via workflow rather than by email.
- Adopt a change driver or modification driven process. Instead of tracking a document, instead track the change that causes a revision or new creation, and ensure complete incorporation and tracking of the change driver via the workflow tool.
- Set up separate processes for tracking customer-influenced changes and changes due to regulatory requirements. These processes have to be completed quickly and should be carefully engineered to ensure response time is minimized.
With technology continuing to grow rapidly in terms of better and more advanced tools and with the increased skills of content production personnel, content creation and revision is now often regarded as a separate science. However, by following this five-point plan, you can certainly expect much more from your content production processes.
To learn more about how your insurance company can benefit from a content solution that reduces the time it takes to publish and deliver benefits booklets, contact: lakshman.aragam@capgemini.com
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