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 How Smart Carriers Know, Serve, and Keep Their Best Customers
Independent insurance agents are many things. They
act as distribution channels for a carrier's products and
serve as the point of connection to policy-holders.
They perform like a sales force, generating revenue
and driving business growth. But above all else,
independent agents are a carrier's best, and most
frequent, customers.
Like any customer, independent agents have choices
about which companies they decide to work with.
Instead of choosing a carrier solely for the products
it offers, agents are behaving like the customers they
are and electing to work with companies who deliver
superior service. Read More |
Enhancing customer experience while reducing costs for a leading Medicaid provider
Since May 2005, the call center traffic at Michigan's
second-largest Medicaid Plan has decreased significantly,
even though membership numbers top 140,000 people in 19
counties across the state.
The slowdown in calls
is intentional, caused by launching a suite of
innovative web capabilities that give medical
providers direct access to up-to-date patient
eligibility and claim status information, online and
around the clock.
Moving routine inquiries to the web allows the
staff to handle time and service-critical functions,
and provides improved customer service. The web
capabilities also allow the plan to monitor and
capture usage data, and make informed decisions
about future enhancements and technology
investments.
Read More |
The Race to Deliver Next Gen Web Capabilities - Do You Have a Winning Strategy?
If your company is like most, you are constantly
looking for ways to deliver increasing levels of service
to your customers and distribution channel partners
in order to keep pace with or get ahead of your
competitors.
Many insurance company executives that we have
spoken to say that customer expectations regarding
service levels, choice, and value are continuously
rising. This, in large, has been driven from examples
provided by leading edge companies in both the
insurance industry as well as other industries. The
use of web channels to conduct business is an
area specii cally with high expectations and large
unexploited potential.
Of course, the web is not a new concept and all carriers
provide some web functionality to their customers.
What is new, however, are expectations of just how
dynamic, full-featured, transactional, fully integrated,
and usable these capabilities can be. Customers
expect to find a clear and simple account of all of their
services and products in one place that allows them
also to make inquiries and changes, 24/7. Read More |
Centralized Architecture Groups: To be or not to be
While some IT executives are
conifdently forming enterprise
architecture groups, others
tell us they're disbanding
such groups because they
see no recognizable value or
meaningful results. Both seek
the processes and disciplines
that reduce long-term costs
and tilt IT budgets toward
strategic spending rather than ongoing
operations and maintenance. Yet, there
appears to be an inherent paradox in the way
the executives in these two camps go about
accomplishing their mission.
X by 2's experience has shown that companies
emphasizing architecture in enterprise application
and integration initiatives experience reductions
in the costs of initial system development, as
well as the costs of extension, maintenance, and
support over the long-term.
As fixed-costs rise and budgets decline, there's
a real possibility that maintenance outlays could
soon account for all IT spending. The importance
of preventing this cannot be understated.
Still, the question remains: Why is it that some
architecture groups flourish and positively
influence the entire enterprise, while others
flounder and ultimately deconstruct? Can the
most challenging aspect of setting up enterprise
architecture groups, measuring their output
and the value of the output, be quantified? Read More |
Agile Architecture Reviews- The Ounce of Prevention for High-Stakes, High-Cost, Enterprise Application and Integration Initiatives
Gaining or defending competitive
positioning drives some companies
to embark on high-stakes enterprise
application and integration
initiatives. Many of which do not
come to fruition as originally
envisioned, or do so at great financial
and human cost.
CIOs and senior leaders often us in
as objective and independant outsiders
to troubleshoot, offer candid advice, and
determine if projects can be put back on
track. Most often, we discover that lack
of appropriate attention to and investments
in the underlying architecture is one of the
leading causes for the problem. The problem
is compounded when large project teams are
working on a weak foundation - choices that
equate to pounds of cure are made, when just
ounces of prevention early on and throughout
the project would have staved off issues that
cause a project to become problematic.
It is our point-of-view that planned and
periodic architecture reviews - what we call
agile architecture reviews - keep projects
healthy and on track, much like periodic
physicals stave off the potential for serious
illness.
Read More |
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