Customer communications management (CCM) has become critical for businesses.

CCM solutions help insurers optimize and improve their customer communications to provide a positive customer experience, create loyalty and trust, as well as positively impact the bottom line.
Customer lifetime value (CLV) evaluates future profits generated from a customer, discounted to reflect the time value of money. Because it focuses on long-term value, [pullquote position=”right”]CLV is an important business metric for insurers[/pullquote].
Total CLV across all customers can be increased by increasing customers’ revenues, decreasing the cost to serve and market to them, replacing low value customers with high value customers, or by retaining customers longer. The latter can strongly influence the CLV; as the customer retention rate increases, so will the CLV.

[pullquote position=”right”]CCM relates to strategies and technologies that enable the creation, administration, production, and fulfillment of data-driven, multi-channel communications[/pullquote]. Communications can be produced in a scheduled or structured way, triggered on-demand by sales agents or customer service representatives, or interactively by the client filling out and submitting a request for quotation form through the website or mobile devices.

Modern CCM solutions significantly outpace their predecessors and offer communications management well beyond the print realm. They are typically part of a wider eco-system that includes archiving systems, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, enterprise content management (ECM) systems, as well as legacy information systems (e.g., mainframes).
Modern CCM solutions provide means for business users to create, manage, deploy, and approve communications themselves. A key concept required for this is a tiered template architecture that separates content from design. Templates will form the building blocks for customer communications.

Supporting mobile communications as part of CCM is absolutely crucial for insurers to connect with their customers. Nevertheless, [pullquote position=”right”]mobile communications require new thinking about the customer dialogue as it puts the customer in control of the communications[/pullquote]. On the other hand, mobile communications provides insurers with a powerful tool to learn about customer behavior and preferences.

Modern CCM solutions support legacy migration strategies by transforming legacy data formats into modern ones, too. They also enable connectivity to legacy systems for direct data processing from these legacy systems to make them part of modern CCM solutions instead of managing them in parallel.

Being able to communicate through multiple channels – and to ensure synchronization across them – is paramount for achieving a rich customer experience. Listening to customers by tracking and analyzing their responses will provide important insights and allow insurers to improve their customer communications even further. It will also help to determine the next-best-action to take with the customer. The customer’s interests and needs, as well as the business objectives of the insurer, determine this action. Therefore, the more insurers know about their customers, the better positioned they are to improve their CLV. Modern CCM solutions can support insurers by providing multi-channel communications, tracking, and analyzing capabilities.

Choosing and implementing a CCM solution within an organization with existing processes and legacy data as well as IT infrastructures is not an easy task to accomplish and needs to be managed carefully. With the right CCM solution and vendor, the challenges  be mastered in an effective and efficient way, saving time and money.