Leading financial services group offers policy document completion via social media; reduces the length of sale from weeks to 30 seconds
As enterprise and customer demand for digital transformation grows, businesses face a real concern: how to maintain current workflows while moving toward new ones to support innovation and customer experience. A leading financial services group did both to launch a new line of boutique insurance policies on a social media platform. Now, review, approval, contract generation, and delivery takes less than 30 seconds.
Gartner Group explores the need for a combination of traditional and exploratory operations in the article “How to Achieve Enterprise Agility With a Bimodal Capability,” by Simon Mingay and Mary Mesaglio, September 2, 2016.
You’re already familiar with Mode 1—it’s stable and predictable, provides safety and accuracy, and takes a linear approach to change. In other words, it’s business as usual, with day-to-day operations dependent on information systems that have been in place a long time.
Mode 2 works with the digital channels needed today to deliver an exceptional experience to customers and prospects. This mode supports existing systems and workflows but is nimble and iterative, emphasizing agility and acceleration, and able to manage uncertainty and risk.
The financial services group took a bimodal approach to achieving their goal with strong results—18,000 new customers in the first month and 30,000 more in six months, with 3X more using the social media app instead of the website.
Read the case study "Leading FinServ group uses messaging app to attract next gen."
Beat the Time to Abandonment
The financial services group was targeting a large, young, urban, population. Although a traditional insurance application process that takes three weeks is still available, the firm reworked it for the social media channels the next generation uses. The team integrated Elixir into the core underwriting system, with the Elixir API interface to connect back-office underwriting to the digital channel.
Due to the high expectations of the target audience, speed was of the essence. The goal was to prevent prospects from abandoning the application. The clock now ticks down from only 90 seconds as customers enter and submit information and receive contracts almost instantly.
Choose the Right Place to Start
One of the keys to implementing a bimodal approach is choosing your project wisely—often one that requires some combination of agility, personalization, versioning, and business change. Gartner Group recommends learning by doing but jumping in at the shallow end to start.
Customer communication management (CCM) projects are ideal. Although the end document may be the same, CCM empowers a better customer experience for real-time, on-demand applications.
The Elixir set-up and platform works as a bimodal tool, letting you pull together content, data, and design, so it’s ready for any channel. That can be a tremendous advantage for business continuity when circumstances require remote or digital channels.
No matter which channel you want to use, the best approach is to work backward from the experience you want customers to have and applying strategy and technology to create it. That’s why consultation is a primary part of Elixir’s practice.
See how we worked with the financial services group to achieve an exceptional outcome in "Leading FinServ group uses messaging app to attract next gen."
