I'll admit it - as I watched the trailers for the Justice League and Avengers movies, part of me turned back into a six year old kid. The same kid standing at the top of the stairs in my superhero costume ready to jump down onto a pile of cushions stolen from the brand new family couch (sorry mom - and kids, please don't try this at home). Luckily, I survived many a catapulting down the stairs many times without major incident - and I still love superheroes!
If you aren't in the loop, in the next Avengers movie we are going to see one of the biggest bad guys in the history of comics (named Thanos) come to earth to collect the infinity gems - items of incredible power. If he captures all six of them, he will become the most powerful being in the universe - and only our heroes can stop him.
It occurred to me that Quadient’s customers are a lot like superheroes - constantly battling to overcome technology challenges and organizational silos to create super experiences for their customers. So in the spirit of superhero movie season, let's look at how six of our current customers have harnessed the "six power stones of customer communications management and Quadient solutions" to generate their own amazing experiences!
Power Stone #1 – Super-Powering Existing Templates
Many insurers are looking to consolidate letter templates and automate correspondence processing; provide robust design, version control and automated approval features, and enable multichannel output. This was certainly the case at Pacific Life, who used Inspire CCM to significantly streamline correspondence processes that reduce manual labor; improved version and brand control and e-delivery capability that will reduce the organization’s print and mail costs and enhance the customer experience.
The company’s customer service representatives (CSRs) had been manually generating client letters from a MS Word based tool. This process also required the CSR to prepare the letter for mailing as well as archiving. Letter archiving, completed by the document control center, was also a manual process.
“The way we were generating on-demand letters was inefficient and we recognized the need for more advanced systematic controls to ensure we were sending properly vetted documents. Quadient Inspire has enabled us to automate the process so that our CSRs can do what they do best—provide industry leading support to our clients, eliminating the need for CSRs to be involved in handling the letters.” ~ Brian Pead, assistant vice president, annuity applications, Pacific Life
With Quadient Inspire, Pacific Life has also been able to reduce the number of document templates it uses by two-thirds and has greater functionality within the remaining templates to generate different types of output. According to Brian Pead, the new solution has resulted in significant productivity improvements and cost savings:
"Quadient Inspire allows a CSR to generate pre-formatted letters with pre-approved text options that are consistent in their look and content and to submit the letter for printing directly to the mail room, with automated archiving. The mail room manages the printing and mailing, and has removed the burden from our CSRs entirely. We currently process a few hundred on-demand letters per day and are saving five minutes per transaction, which translates into approximately 16 man-hours saved every day.”
Power Stone #2 - Business User Enablement
Enabling subject matter experts across your business to participate in the customer communication process is a big benefit to companies looking to adopt CCM solutions. A major US insurer adopted Quadient Inspire to seamlessly and quickly improve functionality in template design; build communication standardization into its organization; and provide streamlined workflows.
“As we analyzed the print environment, we found that it took an average of 100 hours to make an endorsement change to a policy, and nearly 100 days to complete the work. We needed a simple way to transition from our outdated legacy system to a single, standardized solution.” ~ Senior Vice President (SVP) of policy business integration
Shortly after Inspire was implemented, the state of Texas changed some laws that required the company to revise 70 forms. Previously, this would have taken close to 500 hours to accomplish. Using Inspire, the development took less than a quarter of that time, only 110 hours.
“On this project alone, Inspire saved us approximately $300,000, and a six to seven times reduction in development costs,” said the SVP. “A similar project in California involving more than 100 forms took only 240 hours to complete with Quadient Inspire. Again, this gained the company a dramatic savings in time and expense.”
Power Stone #3 - Multichannel Output
Multichannel output and Omnichannel output is super important to customers in a world that is becoming increasingly mobile. A great example of Multi-Channel output is Ping An Bank. Ping An Bank worked with Quadient to create a new, integrated billing management system that interfaces with online banking systems, resulting in a unified messaging platform across multiple media as well as batch mail. This includes support for multichannel output for the generation and delivery of bills as paper, electronic, SMS/MMS, online banking and fax formats.
The bank’s billing division uses at least two print providers for bill printing. The platform provides tools that assist with the management of these third parties and reduces operating costs for billing, while improving the quality of the printing.
As a result, Ping An Bank looks forward to a future of improved account conversions, accelerated transaction times, and reduced operational costs.
Power Stone #4 - Digital Transformation
In 2017, Bank of Montreal was recognized as the winner of the Celent Model Bank Award for Process Automation for a project they completed with Quadient. During the first phase of the process, BMO was able to transform their existing paper-based onboarding process to an automated digital process, as outlined in the figure below:
The result? What used to take days, now takes minutes.
"From a smartphone, customers can open a banking account in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee — assuming no spills"
So far, the project has generated an estimated $132M (CAD) in savings on paper reduction alone, and reduced account opening data errors by 92%, making digital transformation a powerful force indeed!
Power Stone #5 - Postal Savings
Royal Neighbors of America recently integrated their Inspire customer communications management solution with their Ignite presort and address update solution to reduce the time and resources required to create documents and mail documents:
"With Inspire, we have better visibility into our document process and can manage the process from beginning to end, And the process improvements from Inspire’s Automation are saving us the equivalent of the work of one full-time employee.” ~ Denise Hiner, customer service manager for Royal Neighbors of America
In addition to the time savings, Royal Neighbors has been able to significantly increase its postal savings. The organization is now getting deeper bulk mail discounts because having Quadient Ignite integrated into the workflow enables the ability to meet the stringent guidelines for Full-Service Intelligent Mail barcode (IMb). Royal Neighbors reports it has saved more than $50,000 in postage since implementation and more than $5,000 annually as a result of return address updates.
Power Stone #6 - Integration with Legacy Systems
The ability to integrate legacy systems into new content channels is an incredibly powerful transformation for companies that have been hampered by their exisiting systems. Take the team at La Caja for example, who were looking for a customer communications management (CCM) solution that would allow the company to achieve its goals of streamlining internal processes and improving the effectiveness of its member communications. The initial objective was to find a robust platform that had the full capability to design, produce, deliver and measure its email and SMS/text campaigns. Additional capabilities the team required included the ability to seamlessly integrate into La Caja’s existing IT environment and to have better control and tracking of all outbound communications and subsequent response from customers.
“Having the ability to integrate Inspire with our existing IT environment meant we could move to a more automated multichannel environment without disrupting the current processes we have in place” ~ Alfredo Colombres, Chief of Technical Support, Infrastructure Management, La Caja de Ahorro y Seguros
Being able to build on La Caja’s existing investments has made it possible to control costs and maintain brand consistency and ensure compliance across 123 concurrently running electronic campaigns.
So there you have it - six amazing customers that are leveraging customer communications management and postal solutions to superpower their businesses and deliver great customer experiences. Which of the “Power Stones” are the most compelling for you? Rank them from most to least compelling using the survey below and we’ll share the results with you in a future blog post: