In order to earn a place in the customer experience era, health insurers need omnichannel communications. They need communications that understand context and that facilitate two-way conversations.

In order to begin to create such communications, insurers must examine their full cycle of pre- and post-sale materials and consider how they can be made more interactive, more responsive and more contextually aware. And indeed, many are. The conclusion they reach? That they can no longer invest in customer communications management in the traditional sense of managing composition and print production. Instead, they must invest in building interactive communications management capabilities, which means investing in technology.

Insurers are redesigning their communications for omnichannel interactivity by partnering with forward-thinking technology providers who not only carry a deep understanding of the health insurance industry, but of responsive design and dynamic composition. They are in search of content management systems that allow for the seamless auto-personalization of marketing and member materials using pre-formatted, responsive design templates.

Cierant is one of the trusted technology partners insurers are turning to for such solutions. Across our full portfolio of health insurance clients, we build fully customized material ordering portals that enable sales, marketing and broker personnel to login and create, order, deliver and track fully personalized member materials and cross-media marketing campaigns featuring dynamic content, links and imagery. This is achieved through the integration of our material ordering portals with our world-class dynamic composition system. Through applied business rules, programmed within the connected composition system, users are able to flawlessly customize materials through a number of simple methods. Methods include member id entry in order to auto-populate account information into designated fields, and the selection of variable plan benefits data from menus of brand-approved content. Upon customization, the system generates the proof in real-time, and the user can then submit the PDF file for print-on-demand production or schedule the sending of a cross-media campaign by simply uploading a distribution list.

By applying content management systems built for personalized, omnichannel output, insurers can move from print-to-inventory to print-on-demand integrated with e-delivery. What is essential to remember in transitioning to interactive communications management, however, is that it isn’t purely about trying to digitize all of your materials and ramp up e-delivery consent—it’s about truly transforming each and every communication into a retention driver. Anyone can post a PDF version of a print file online and send an email notification, but crafting truly interactive communications is about changing the language to be less about avoiding litigation and more about communicating with the customer consistently, transparently and understandably. It’s about thinking beyond the static PDF and migrating to HTML5 email and Web display communications that guide the user through the information, offering helpful links, video tutorials and terminology definitions along the way.

From enabling the auto-generation of fully personalized email campaigns to generating thousands of mobile activated postcards and electronic welcome kits on-the-fly, an interactive communications management system can not only reduce the complexities of template and print management, but transform the traditional sequence of transaction-driven touch points into interactive journeys that engage far beyond the static page.