An Integrated Customer View. Ample White Paper

Transcription

1 Health Insurance Platform to Create Enterprise 360-DegreeCustomer View An Integrated Customer View

2 The Need for a 360-DegreeCustomer View How often have we heard that system data is incomplete or inconsistent, and cannot be used across various business processes supporting business units and their applications? Given these limitations, each business unit must make the best possible decisions they can, but holistically these decisions may not be the best because of this incomplete view of data. Consequently, it is difficult for the enterprise to make correct and timely decisions that are in the best interest of the business and their customer base. For example, insurance companies typically have their information distributed among multiple platforms and silos. This type of unassociated data prevents companies from making the right decisions. It is often difficult for enterprises to obtain answers to these relatively simple questions: 1. Who are our most valuable customers? 2. Which agents and brokers are best at transforming leads to prospects and customers? Managing the expectations for both new and existing customers has never been more challenging than it is in the current environment. This challenge grows exponentially whenever customers interact through multiple channels for information transfer such as the Internet, mobile devices, , social media services and other modes of media exchange and communication. Within the business enterprise customers are not only positioned on ERP systems, but they are also on other channels, such as the call center, IVR platforms and servers. The problem of creating a comprehensive 360-DegreeCustomer View is a major challenge for most companies that use traditional EDW platforms. One of the reasons for this challenge is that the EDW platforms that must be built to support a 360-DegreeCustomer View are expensive, and typically it does not justify the company s ROI. New Challenges for a 360-DegreeCustomer View Legacy systems are not very flexible, extendable or scalable when it comes to capturing and maintaining newer data sets that exist in semi and unstructured formats. Maintaining real-time data changes, at or near data receipt, is another major hurdle for these systems. Creating an enterprise 360-DegreeCustomer View must take into account data that is received from a wide variety of sources including: websites, social media sites, CRM platforms, POS, customer interactions, mobile applications, ERP, legacy systems and surveys.

3 The Ample 360-DegreeCustomer View Ample has built a proven and flexible framework that solves the problem of obtaining a 360- DegreeCustomer View. The frameworks that Ample builds are generic enough to integrate with multiple platforms for data ingestion, data integration and data availability to present a unified access layer. These platforms offer flexibility, extendibility and scalability that integrate data from the CRM, Enrollment, Policy Administration, Billing, Claim, as well as those from new customer interaction channels. Ample attempts to maximize benefits for their clients by capturing comprehensive data from all channels, and executing analytics that generate insightful reports from all these touch points. The end result is that the client has a better understanding of their customer s values and needs and data from customer interaction channels can be better integrated and consolidated. An integrated customer view can then be generated for every business unit within the enterprise, such as Marketing, Sales, the Call Center and other customer contact centers. Figure 1 illustrates an overview of the 360-DegreeCustomer View process, with data sources of all types appearing on the left-side, followed to the right by the Ample Data Lake database services, and finally leading to the 360-DegreeCustomer View. Figure 1

4 The CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system provides the tools necessary to help enterprises to manage leads and the potential customers derived from them, through one consolidated and integrated platform. The promise of enterprise-level CRM systems has been their ability to deliver streamlined business processes and organized structures, focusing them on customer and prospect management. The reason why business processes are not able to deliver lead transformations is primarily due to the lack of data integration and analysis. Additionally, the problem of bad data as expressed in the old maxim garbage-in-garbage-out remains an ongoing concern and diminishes the process. The illustration shown in Figure 2 displays the various business processes that exist within a typical insurance carrier workflow and the CRM Web services that integrate the data collected from these different channels. Figure 2

5 Healthcare insurance enterprise sales are obtained mainly through the efforts of agents and brokers. To enhance their ability to generate sales, agents and brokers need to be able to coordinate their activities by communicating the information they receive from multiple channel outlets. They do not want the communication threads that they have developed to be broken, simply because they exist on multiple channels. Integrated Lead, Agent, Broker and Customer Experiences In the current scenario prospective leads are generated for agents and brokers from a variety of informational channel sources that need to be properly integrated. Ample excels in this because it can provide a robust and integrated experience, allowing agents and brokers to be more effective and be able to succeed in their mission better. What these two groups need is a tool that generates filtered leads that are pertinent to their jurisdiction and their contracts. Often, agents and brokers are flooded with duplicate leads, or leads which have already been transformed to a customer profile. The Ample Lead Management (ALM) framework provides these tools by allowing users to load leads and filter them based on their type, location and the products with which these leads might already be associated. These new filtered leads are then assigned to the correct agent or broker who has the proper contact and assignments for that location so that he can follow-up with the potential customer. In addition, marketing campaigns may also be generated from this filtered list of leads. Customer Insight from an Integrated 360-Degree Customer View From the perspective of the CRM, the first step is to identify leads and their attributes in order to fulfill them. The knowledge acquired in this first phase of accumulation is used to create marketing campaigns and to define business strategies. Once leads have been defined, interaction and continuity from every channel can be easily maintained. The goal of the ALM framework is to produce a one-on-one relationship with the customer and with the enterprise, regardless of the number of channels the customer employs. Every customer is unique and every enterprise is unique, so there should only be one central enterprise platform to focus on. The illustration shown in Figure 3 represents the integrated process view and collaboration that occurs when leads are acquired and converted to customers through the ALM framework.

6 Figure 3 Actionable Customer Insight from Integrated View The integrated view maximizes benefits for clients by analyzing and presenting data that has been captured from numerous touch points within media channels. Some examples of the benefits of the ALM Big Data platform include: The ability to integrate and distribute data on different platforms and silos The ability to consolidate attributes from various source channels Disparate data types can be supported (such as semi-structured and unstructured data) The cost per terabyte of storage and processing is manageable on a Big Data platform Providing insight about a customer s values and interests by capturing customer profile data

7 Understanding a customer s relationships by viewing customer interactions that occur across multiple channels Building stronger relationships with customers Integrating and making consolidated customer information available for customer interaction channels and touch point analysis Providing the same integrated experience to all business units, such as Marketing, Sales, Call Center and other contacts.