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Insurers today are growing through existing products, lines, channels, and geographic areas. They understand that a better understanding of customer needs and improved customer service increases sales and improves retention rates, which drives profitable growth.

Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) has released a fairly in-depth white paper, researched by SMA, a strategic advisory firm for insurance companies and providers, looking at customer communications management. CCM (News - Alert), the paper finds, "plays a critical role in maximizing every customer interaction to capture more information about customer needs, make timely offers, and enhance customer service."

SMA (News - Alert) believes that CCM is most valuable "when considered holistically as the integration of all forms of communication and all types of information across the enterprise." In other words, a comprehensive CCM vision is pretty much essential today with what SMA finds to be "the advent of new customer demands, shifting demographics, and the expansion of the various devices and channels that policyholders, agents, and third-party partners use to interact with insurers."

The white paper finds that insurers should choose an approach that creates seamless flows of information from all voice and data communications, generating both structured and unstructured data, via a wide range of channels, and gives advice for how to do just that.

According to the study, CCM is "already providing significant value and good ROI to insurers for specific customer interactions in specific parts of the business."  Insurers that can implement an integrated CCM approach across the enterprise, the paper contends, "will gain a competitive advantage through a more complete understanding of their customers and the ability to capitalize on interactions in real-time."

Insurers have what SMA finds to be "an outstanding opportunity to gain competitive advantages by implementing holistic CCM." There are products on the market today which provide the capabilities to begin using CCM in specific high-impact areas of the business, while providing the base to integrate these interactions across the whole value chain, and the paper discusses those.

"Customers will appreciate the enhanced service and rapid responses to address their needs. For insurers, use of CCM will ultimately lead to increased retention and greater share of wallet, producing a winning combination that drives not just growth, but profitable growth," it concludes.