Jan 16
2015
Achieving Effective and Targeted Customer Communications: It’s All About Managing the Three “C’s”
Guest post by Doug Cox, chief strategy officer, Elixir Technologies.
The good news is that there is plenty of great content being generated throughout most health organizations to create engaging, effective member and patient customer communications, which we will call “customer communications” to include any recipient. The bad news is that the content is often locked away in siloed systems and workflows, making it very difficult for marketing, customer experience and mobile strategy teams to leverage information in a streamlined, cost-effective way. The result? Marketing promotions and graphics are only available for use in brochures, purchase history data is only accessible for billing, and so on. Content is trapped in the specific system it served originally, limiting its value to the organization.
These challenges can be overcome by implementing the newest concept in healthcare document creation: content lifecycle management (CLM). The goal of CLM is to enable business teams to create and manage correspondence themselves using portals configured for specific document types, such as healthcare plan summaries, coverage change notifications and benefits statements. Implementing a CLM approach can unlock valuable data, avoid dependence on the availability of IT resources, reduce costs, and speed time to market.
Employing a CLM approach requires achieving three important “C’s”: centralization, collaboration and control. Each of these areas plays a critical role in attaining effective communications that speak directly to the customer’s individual needs and desires.
Here’s a look at each of the three C’s:
Centralization
An important step to improving customer communications is centralizing access to content and templates so that they are readily available to business users. Making it possible to reuse content in multiple health plans and versions, for instance, rather than having substantial amounts of duplicate content that is not shared, will improve efficiency and reduce the amount of effort and time needed to update or change data across versions. Changing a plan benefit for example, can be accomplished in one step for hundreds of document versions, rather than having to replace the information in each individual file.
Collaboration
Participation from people outside the primary workflow is often required but can cause bottlenecks. A good collaboration tool sits atop the entire enterprise, integrating people automatically into the workflow on an ‘as needed’ basis. A browser-based system provides the greatest flexibility because it can be accessed by anyone regardless of location.