Bridging the Digital Divide and Providing Insurance to South Africa’s Rural Areas

by Mari-Elize Nel, Assistant Manager CCM: Product Development at Clientèle Life

As one of a handful of document developers in South Africa, I’m a bit of a pioneer. There were only two or three of us when I started my journey a decade ago. Now we’re up to approximately six strong. I’m happy to share knowledge with the next generation in my field, as it is something of a necessity. A couple of years ago, I took six-weeks sick leave, and my projects were all put on hold due to resource and specialist knowledge limitations. This is a big deal because of how important communication is with our customers.

I work in the Financial Services Industry for a company that focuses mainly on what we call the lower LSM market. The LSM — or living standards measure — is a demographic tool that cuts across race, gender, and class boundaries. It identifies South African consumers based on where they live, as well as on their access to sanitation, infrastructure, and technology in order for industry to better service and understand specific needs and requirements.

As you can imagine, those who are low on the LSM scale often face considerable socio-economic obstacles. Like all consumers, they deserve access to suitable products.

Our business offers affordable peace of mind to the people who need it the most. Our brand is a trusted one and our goal is to make the client experience so valuable, they’ll want to and be in a position to hold on to it. We believe in the promise we sell to our clients.

Creating a CCM Mindset in a Vacuum

As a seasoned document developer, I oversee our customer communications management solution (CCM). It’s an understatement to say this is a challenging role, since CCM is not widely implemented in South Africa and the mindset of creating solutions with a future view is not always a shared one.

This is partly because our businesses are not always optimized for centralized communications. We have a lot of legacy systems in place that all operate independently, a challenge shared by many within the Financial Services sector. One system, for example, will handle email. Another will deal with web content. A third will generate written documentation. Many of these older systems are not setup to fully integrate. Certainly a great journey a lot of South African companies will soon embark upon.

Another struggle is that many companies see documentation as a legal and regulatory necessity and not the opportunity that it is.

CCM isn’t just about compliance. Use it to transform customer experience.

Our biggest opportunity with client communication is external. Less than 40% of South Africans have internet access. A third of these users have only mobile access, and of those that do have many only connect to the internet at work or at Wi-Fi hotspots. Email adoption is even lower, at roughly 16%.

As a result, most of our customer communication happens through regular mail or mobile SMS functionality.

Taking Control of Customer Communications

Three years ago our documentation and customer communication was outsourced. The upside meant fewer internal headaches, as was the case with many other businesses at the time where the outsource model was strategically favored. As such, systems alignment was not a necessity and IT focused on other priorities. The result was that a centralized coordination point emerged in order to coordinate all the necessary steps in the process, as well as internal resources to manage the content or the solutions. All of this was previously managed by the outsource solution, resulting in overall less internal control and increased risk.

But this meant less control for us. In that making a change to a policy was a timely task and our outsource partner at times struggled to relate to our communications and the link it has to our products — there was no assurance that the generation or that the content remained consistent.

Bringing CCM in-house means more control.

A few months before I joined the company, a rigorous solution evaluation process was conducted and Quadient proved the most appropriate supplier to deliver against our CCM needs. Ease of use, an excellent interface, and easy integration played a huge part in the selection. But the most outstanding features, at least immediately, were online approvals and version control. Being able to centralize these two functions was critical to our workflow.

The other integral feature was automation. The ability to manage and send email and SMS messages form a centralised place helps us transition to a digital strategy. We adopted Quadient Inspire as our CCM platform, and began to centralize document creation and management and streamline our paper-based documentation.

Within a few months of adopting Quadient Inspire, we saw a 95% reduction in the development time needed to create new documents, or to alter existing ones.

After we brought the process in-house, we were able to make changes in four days that used to take a couple of weeks, an important requirement in our highly regulated industry to be first to market and reduced implementation times despite tight regulatory deadlines…

Read the full story here.