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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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