Driven by the rise in penetration of mobile phones and tablets, in the past few years, it has become ineluctable for every business, to embrace mobility. Especially any business, for which success depends largely on customers’ service experiences, must have a sound mobile strategy, in alignment with the changing customer preferences.
While mobility finds its applicability across all industries, it can play an essentially critical role in the success of an insurance organization. When leveraged across the insurance value chain, mobility can yield real business value, in terms of enhanced customer satisfaction, simpler processes, and reduced cycle times and administrative costs.
Insurers can use mobile technology to establish virtual offices for their field staff, allowing them ‘anytime-anywhere’ access to relevant information, such as customer details, new policy features, policy quotes, etc. This would result in faster sales cycles and improved revenues. Using mobile applications, insurers can enable sales agents to capture customer information at the point of contact, transfer it to the central processing office in real time, and initiate the processing of applications instantly.
Customer self-service is another area where mobility can add immense value. Today, mobile phones have become a norm, and the proliferation of smartphones is witnessing unprecedented growth rates. In such a scenario, in order to retain and expand its customer-base, it becomes imperative for an insurance organization to offer self-service tools, allowing customers to access their policy information, locate agents, pay premiums and apply for claims over their mobile devices.
Owing to the benefits that it promises to insurers, the case for adoption of mobile solutions is very strong. However, before an insurer invests in mobile solutions, it is important to outline a sound mobile strategy based on its specific requirements, in order to maximize the benefits of mobility.
Bio: Garima is part of the Marketing team at Newgen Software.
We live in a world of ‘instant noodles’, ‘home delivery’ and ‘short attention spans’. Customers have developed an insatiable need for products and services that provide “instant” gratification. It is not surprising then that companies around the world are tailoring their offerings to cater to this evolving trend.
One of the most important touch points between a company and its customers is Customer Service. It plays a major role in defining customer experience. Therefore, it cannot remain immune to these changes, especially since customer service in most verticals is highly document intensive and process cycle times take multiple days.
The primary challenge faced by customer service/field executives in delivering effective customer service is getting paper documents from the point of initiation to the actual processing center. This is true for verticals like Banking, Telecom, Healthcare and Logistics. Typically the information is captured on a physical application form, submitted to a branch from where it gets couriered to the processing center and then finally gets processed. Improper filling, missing supporting documents, loss in transition add on to the turn-around-time for the process. Capturing information at the Point of Customer Contact and initiating its processing in real time is a challenge both in terms of time and cost.
There is a dire need for a tool or technology that can bridge this gap between service delivery timelines and customer expectations. One avenue that gives some reason to cheer about is the tremendous strides that mobile technology has made over the years. For the customer service industry, this opens up several opportunities, some of which if absorbed into its processes, can yield very encouraging results.
One such innovation is ZapIn – a Mobile Capture solution and one the latest product offerings from Newgen Software. It comes in the form of an enterprise app that is pre-loaded on a smart phone or tablet. It is a revolutionary technology that allows the business executive to capture physical application forms and supporting documents along with the key metadata. The advanced imaging capability of the solution allows the field executive to capture documents remotely and instantly initiate its processing at the back-office. The captured documents are compressed making it feasible for them to be transferred over a GPRS/EDGE/3G data connection. Given the potential this technology holds, it is bound to become pervasive in verticals where quick retrieval and transfer of data and images are business critical components of customer service.
Mobile capture is a way to boost the energy level and excitement around a technology that has clear business value. For users such as banking/insurance/logistics executives and other on-the-move professionals, it will allow them to do their jobs better and more efficiently. The technology will give a major boost to the green initiative by reducing the demand on replication of paper. The growing stature of Cloud services and more technical advancements in imaging/scanning tools in mobile devices will further propel the growth of this technology.
The future of the mobile capture market, even from the most conservative of perspectives, is going to be huge. It may not skyrocket to instant fame but slowly and steadily it will fulfill its vast potential. The growing affordability of smart phones and tablets will act as a catalyst for the adoption of this technology solution. Above all, it will depend on organizations that are smart enough to embrace and implement this technology and derive measurable business benefits.
Name: Imroz Adeeb
Bio: Imroz is Associate Manager - Corporate Communications at Newgen Software.
Information sharing is a process through which team members collectively utilize their available informational knowledge/resources and make it available to their peers for a mutual learning experience. With the ever increasing demands to fulfilling business needs it becomes extremely important to stay ready and face any business challenge with relative ease. The situation gave us an idea to create a platform for peer Newgenites and it embarks the birth of Newgen Brown Bag Club.
What is Brown Bag?
Brown bag is a symbol for meals brought along by the attendees, or provided by the host. In the most part of the world, those are often packed in brown paper bags.
Brown Bag Session:
A brown bag seminar, session or lunch is generally a training or information session during a lunch break or during a non productive hour. Brown bag seminars normally run an hour or two. The aim is to use regular breaks, e.g. the lunch break, to share some information amongst the attendees in a voluntary and informal setting. It is often followed by a discussion on the topic. This is an interesting medium for knowledge management and internal communications.
Brown Bag Club Vision:
To create a platform for knowledge and information sharing amongst peer Newgenites.
To allow them to grow horizontally and vertically in all Newgen involved domains and practices.
To make the brown bag club reach at a level where it can be used by the peer Sales and Pre-sales teams to allow Clients/Prospective clients have a strong reference.
Objectives of the Club Sessions:
1. Creating an environment of peer learning
2. To share, what all information any member have on any domain and/or any process
3. To debate on the concepts, brushing your workflow processes, discuss about an upcoming product/technology/business and anything or everything
4. To polish your ideas on implementation, delivery methods etc
5. To improve the project management skills
6. To improve the communication skills of the members
7. To improve the inter-personal skills of the members
8. To create a knowledge vault of information
Outcomes/Benefits of the Club Sessions:
1. To deliver a much refined process workflow for Newgen Customers
2. Debating will clear the concepts and would invite fresh ideas and methodologies to polish up work
3. To learn about various domains and industries, this would allow the members to bridge any gap with ease
4. To expand horizontally and vertically across Newgen products and industries
5. Better customer facing and presentation skills
6. Information archival for future
Brown Bag Session – Conducting Procedure
1. Finalize the topic voluntarily between the members / Invite someone outside of the club to present
2. Finalize the date and time
3. Discuss about the expectations of the members for the incoming session
4. Share the expectations with the presenter
5. Ice Breaking – Member nomination
6. Session/Discussion
7. Information archival for future use. (Archive articles, White Papers, Case Studies, PPTs etc. )
Brown Bag Club Moderators:
• Sumit Sahdev
• Sumit Aggarwal
• Ranjan Kumar
• Sparsh Arora
• Gagandeep Madan
Brown Bag Session Schedule:
| S.No. | Topic | Presenter | Domain | Date | Time | Venue |
| 1 | Newgen Brown Bag Club | Sumit Sahdev | General | 5-Jan-12 | 2:30-2:40 PM | D152 Conf room |
| 2 | SWIFT | Sumit Aggarwal | Banking | 5-Jan-12 | 2:40-3:30 PM | D152 Conf room |
| 3 | Insurance | Sparsh Arora | Insurance | 5-Jan-12 | 12:30-1:30 PM | VC Carpet Room |
Newgen hosted a webinar ‘Better Customer Experience Demands Smarter Communication’, on February 01, 2011, to discuss current trends and best practices in Customer Communication Management.
Craig Le Clair, leading international expert in Customer Communication Management (CCM), of independent research firm, Forrester Inc, kicked off the presentation by explaining to the participants, how an integrated Customer Communication Management (CCM) approach translates into customer loyalty and reduced operational complexity.
The webinar was co-hosted by Ashish Deshmukh, Director – Business Development, Newgen Software, who shared invaluable insights, revealing ways of achieving personalized customer communication for up-selling, cross-selling and meeting regulatory compliance. His session included a case studies walkthrough on how a leading Financial Service Organization and a large Healthcare Insurer transformed their Customer Communication Management (CCM) processes so as to enhance customer experience, augment operational performance and drive growth.
New generation customers demand more personalized, contextual communications, delivered in real time, through their preferred channel. Customer Communication Management provides a platform to deliver smart communication, maximizing the effectiveness of all communication touch points while complying with regulatory mandates and branding guidelines. An integrated CCM with enterprise content & BPM framework provides organizations an agile process for creation, review and distribution of personalized communication across multiple channels consistently.
Key Takeaways from the Webinar:
For many useful tips from both Craig and Ashish, click here to view the podcast.
The world over, Banks and Financial institutions are facing a tough economic climate. It is only natural that they are looking for ways to increase their business and without the burden of incurring costs. There is a need to be more innovative and Banks and FIs today realize that it is critical to effectively communicate with customers and deliver superior service, improve efficiency and reduce costs. In this light, maximizing the effectiveness of daily communications such as bills, statements and correspondence is becoming a top priority. This also means improving customer interactions in a consistent manner across a wide spectrum of customer touch points and media channels.
The 21st century is being annunciated as the information economy, wherein knowledge is power. The more knowledge and information banks have at their disposal, the more prepared and equipped they will be to handle the complexities and uncertainties of the economic ecosystem. So how is this unassailable knowledge extracted?
From customers of course!
The easier banks make it for customers to do business with them, the better it is, to gain an understanding of customer needs and the easier it becomes to enhance their relationship with them. The challenges that retail banks face today will not evaporate overnight. Banks will continue to face reduced marketing budgets, increased regulatory and compliance issues, ever demanding consumers and a diffident economy.
It is natural, in volatile times, for businesses to undertake serious self-introspection. The current economic gloom therefore throws up some intimidating questions:
The questions are compelling but their answer lies in one comprehensive solution. The answer is Customer Communication Management (CCM). CCM simply means enhancing customer experience in a cost-effective manner by communicating and engaging with customers through a multitude of channels and mediums. CCM enables banks to connect with their customers by providing them with personal and immediate attention. CCM also ensures that banks have better control over their communications, provide an opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell their services while also keeping their operations profitable.
Today’s customer is more informed than ever – and more astute in making purchase decisions. Effective customer communication can act as a catalyst for companies to create greater organizational efficiency while optimizing the profit potential of every touch point with the customer. Businesses need to realize the importance of customers’ data as a reflection of customers’ voice, and initiate the first step in giving voice to the customer by incorporating a timely and effective communication strategy. For an organization to achieve this, a robust Customer Communication Management (CCM) strategy – offering full functionality required to deliver on all aspects customer communication – is an absolute must.
Timely, personal, relevant and compelling communication is critical to building trusted and long-term customer relationships — this should be a given. However, organizations still struggle to manage and deliver consistent and cost-effective communications across today’s multitude of communication channels. The chances of cross-selling or up-selling are dramatically dropped if there is a gap between the customer’s requirements and the offer made to him. Distribution to multiple output channels like print, email and web presentment is challenging due to high turn-around-times for replicating changes and absence of versioning. Dependency on vendors/ IT experts for performing minor changes, like templates, business rules and workflow — things that should be in the hands of the business, not IT, leads to escalated costs and unnecessary delay in communication. Another major challenge lies in enforcing branding guidelines like font style and background to ensure consistency across all customer communication for brand recognition.
Inconsistent and irrelevant communication may have serious implications for any business. The solution lies in co-creating products and services with customers by intelligently using customer data to create personalized and targeted communication. In today’s “connected” consumer-centric world it has become imperative for businesses to adopt new channels to engage and stay in tune with customers’ needs, demands and expectations. To be able to up-sell and cross-sell effectively, businesses must monitor customer data in real-time to enable need-based targeting. CCM harnesses the power of existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and transaction data to ensure that the on-going communications are highly personalized and relevant.
With an explosion in new communication channels, businesses are faced with the challenge of ensuring clarity and consistency across all customer communications. The very definition of “customer communication” has expanded manifolds to include everything from billing to direct mail marketing to e-marketing to electronic bill presentment and so on. Banks and Financial Institutions have always been the leaders in setting high standards for customer expectations by continuously enhancing customer experience. The result is that high-touch, 24/7 service across multiple channels is no more representative of customer delight but has become a basic requirement for keeping customers happy and loyal in real time.
To survive in a competitive market place it is necessary to effectively manage all customer communications. Reduced customer acquisition costs, increased client retention and maximized lifetime value of each customer are the end objectives of every communication strategy. Customer Communication Management (CCM) refers to a convergent set of Information Technology solutions that help businesses achieve these objectives by providing a tool to advance the way they communicate with their customers. CCM takes care of every aspect of customer communication – including content creation, personalization, and multi-channel distribution and archiving using a single integrated solution. Dependency on vendors/ IT experts for performing minor changes on different systems leads to escalated costs and unnecessary wastage of time. CCM tools overcome this challenge by empowering business users to create and manage customer communications, reducing the reliance on costly IT resources.
Data-rich industries such as banks process volumes of transactional documents daily. Each such document is an opportunity for revenue realization. CCM treats these transactional documents like bank statements, statement of account, invoices etc. as marketing collaterals to promote company offerings to customers.
A properly implemented CCM solution can bring significant benefits to organizations. Let’s take a look at the advantages that a CCM or Customer Communication Management solution can bring.
Going by the J.D. Power and Associates 2010 U.S. Retail Banking Satisfaction Study the overall satisfaction of retail banking customers has decreased for a fourth consecutive year, to 748 on 1,000-point scale. The research has drawn a direct correlation between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. As the US retail banking industry struggles to adjust to the changes in the global financial and economic environment, the focus on customer loyalty to protect revenue and ensure the continuation of the most important customer relationships is of utmost importance to banks. Increased customer awareness about financial products, demand for better customer experience and growing customer attrition mean banks have much to lose if they fail to align their communication strategies with customer expectations and focus on retaining existing relationships.
The study has further identified 12 core Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) of customer satisfaction that focus on three key objectives: managing customer expectations; effective customer communications; and providing convenient and flexible service.
Capturing customer interest on various promotions for lead generation can be a daunting task if you don’t have an efficient communication strategy in place. Effective customer communication has the potential not only to enable banks realize customer loyalty but to deliver customer advocacy by making the best use of myriad customer touch points as marketing opportunities.
With formidable competition to fulfill customer demands, banks must take radical steps to maximize the use of various communication tools. Transaction documents should be treated like personalized marketing collaterals targeting the right offer to the right customer on the basis of analysis of transaction. For instance, a bank account statement may include details of an investment option or a credit card statement may be personalized with invitation to open a new bank account. Or if a customer uses his credit card/bank account to make utility bill payments you may introduce him to automatic utility bill payment service. When looking at managing cross channel communication between a business entity and its customers, an interactive customer communication management system is an intelligent proposition to bank on.
Regardless of the diverse risk profiles of individual banks and measures taken by regulators and governments in different countries to support their banking systems, banks across the EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) region are faced with the challenge of combating consumer mistrust, a major consequence of the economic recession and credit market crisis of 2008.
The current market scenario is extremely challenging. A recent Forrester research emphasizes on the importance of “customer advocacy” in developing deeper customer relationships among financial services consumers. The key here is the perception on part of the customers that a firm’s strategies and actions are governed by their needs and well being, not just the firm’s own selfish motives. In order to survive today’s market environment, banks in the region our under tremendous pressure to deploy advanced functionality, comply with regulatory requirements, improve security and enhance customer experience.
Banks are dissatisfied with the outcomes of their cross-selling/up-selling efforts. Other major concerns include consolidation of multiple products like account statement, credit card statement and investments and loan statement, consolidation of multiple systems like loan management system, wealth management system and CRM, distribution to multiple output channels like print, email and web presentment and dependency on vendors/ IT experts for performing minor changes on different systems.
Banks that succeed in defining and implementing solutions to offer fulfilling banking experiences to their customers will be the ones that will thrive into the future. Making the best use of customer data and segmentation is the key to high-quality interactions that attract and retain customers. An effective Customer Communication Management System would help banks leverage demographic profiling to capture customer interest, establish customer intimacy and earn customer advocacy.
A study (Source: Prentice Hall, Leading on the Edge of Chaos, by Emmett C. Murphy and Mark A. Murphy) suggests that a 2 percent increase in customer retention has the same effect on profits as cutting costs by 10 percent.
Recently banks in the Asia Pacific (APAC) have been on a spree to accelerate branch automation and enhance customer experience. The trend suggests that in APAC the countries with high economic growth prospects, like China, India and to some extent Indonesia are leading the IT implementation race in the Banking industry. The pace at which APAC banks are implementing modern IT systems indicates that they have realized the importance of customer experience to ensure continuation of the most important customer relationships.
To enhance customer experience, banks today need a robust and scalable Customer Communication Management system that ensures superior customer service through consolidated information, single statement template for multiple distribution channels, easy change management by incorporating version control mechanism and conformance to regulatory compliance.
With increasing competition in the banking industry, there is a strong push towards capturing customer interest by dynamically including highly customized and personalized marketing messages in statements. This would reduce the time to market considerably and facilitate up-selling and cross-selling by targeting the right offer to the right customer on the basis of analysis of transactions.
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