Smart Communications: Delivering More Meaningful Customer Conversations

Bob Dunfee, VP, Product Marketing

In today’s times, delivering a rewarding customer experience is critical to retain customers and drive brand loyalty. However, the need to quickly scale and deliver individualized communications to each customer is where the rubber meets the road; Smart Communications is helping insurance companies do just that. As the only independent company focused 100 percent on customer conversations for the enterprise, its cloud-first approach helps customers deliver more meaningful customer conversations while improving internal efficiencies. “We help customers scale the conversation by helping them deliver more meaningful, multi-channel, interactive customer communications while also increasing internal efficiencies,” says Bob Dunfee, VP Product Marketing of Smart Communications. Smart Communications goes beyond the boundaries of traditional customer communications management software with a modern SaaS-based architecture that extends the frontiers with true cloud, in-depth workflow capabilities, and a preference database management system.

The company addresses diverse challenges in the customer communications management space by centralizing content as components and, in doing so, reducing the mangement of multiple versions. By enabling access to this content, across functional areas,divisions and templates it provides a vantage point to reduce compliance risk and improve the quality and consistency of communications delivered to a customer from across the enterprise. The firm’s flagship solution, SmartCOMM^TM, allows users to create and establish multi-channel templates that enable efficient customer communications across three primary conversation use cases— interactive, on-demand, and batch communications.

With Smart Communications’ solution portfolio, business users can make changes to templates, and push them out into production rapidly

From providing personalized, on-brand, customer communications across all print and digital formats to ensuring the relevance and accuracy of communications securely, SmartCOMM^TM equips clients with a smart communication solution, enabling the shift from paper to digital communications in minutes or hours. “The solution offers a single template that can manage all languages, jurisdictions, brands, and channels, thereby resulting in a 60-90 percent reduction in the number of templates needed to manage the communication process on their customer’s behalf,” explains Dunfee. With the Smart Communications solutions portfolio, business users can make changes to templates, and push them out into production rapidly.

The company also offers a solution, SmartCORR^TM for Salesforce, specifically for companies and customer service representatives working in the Salesforce environment. Built on the foundation of SmartCOMM^TM, SmartCORR^TM is embedded within the Salesforce marketing and service cloud, which means that users will never have to leave the Salesforce environment. Smart Communications can even embed SmartCORR^TM as a widget so that customers need not use third-party tools like MS-Word to create and email the information. Operating in a pure SaaS environment, these solutions benefit CIOs who are looking to cut costs, reduce infrastructure and be part of a more modernized cloud deployment architecture.

Specifically, Smart Communications has helped insurers reduce costs, smooth out editing processes and make global updates faster and easier. For one customer, global changes used to take months to perform and required the support of IT. Now, a single change that’s reflected in the system can be made in a matter of hours. And in another instance,an insurer expects to reduce template design upkeep by at least 50 percent.

Recent product enhancements further bolster the digital capabilities to drive two-way conversations and extend the boundaries of customer communications management into the Conversation Cloud. This helps customers easily integrate multiple technologies to form customized conversation ecosystems. By combining best-in-breed technologies that address a company’s unique requirements, a tremendous amount of customer data can be collected. Companies can extend their knowledge beyond basic demographics and gather much more valuable data about each individual’s interests, habits, communications preferences, history of recent interactions, and channel of choice. This approach can even increase internal efficiencies by breaking down silos and bringing together multiple groups within an organization. More importantly, it’s more data to validate that Smart Communications is changing the game for today’s customer-focused insurers.