Bart Carlson, Founder & CEO The insurance industry relies heavily on document automation, both as part of its internal operational strategy and for customer communications. An insurance company with a vast customer base has a multitude of applications to carry out their operations and communication processes. Riddled with legacy approaches and archaic technology tools, most companies end up indulging in the sheer drudgery of manual processes to create, manage and disseminate information related to policies, claims, and other business data. Illinois headquartered Napersoft is a company that is built on the premise of enabling business managers to better manage the most complex processes with little support from IT teams. A provider of customer communications management solutions, Napersoft, helps insurance companies take an automated approach to compose, format, and deliver relevant, personalized customer communication at the right time through customer-preferred channels, enriching the overall customer experience.
The Template of Success
Bart Carlson, CEO and founder of Napersoft, explains that the primary challenge for insurance companies today is to keep track of the content in a customer’s policy. A given policy could be subjected to a wide range of changes owing to numerous reasons, thereby, requiring a greater effort to communicate accurate policy information in a personalized manner. To the rescue comes Napersoft with its key offering that segments policy communications information into ‘content objects.’ Rather than writing templates from the beginning till the end, Napersoft breaks down these templates into tiny fragments, termed ‘Paragraphs.’ “A Paragraph can be anything from a sentence to a page or even ten pages,” explains Carlson. These templates are processed in Napersoft’s engine to find the appropriate communication for a particular policyholder. The processing takes into consideration the details of the policy before it is sent over to the recipient. The key concept behind these Paragraphs is that one Paragraph could be used in several different templates. And yet, if a Paragraph changes, these changes are updated in all the templates dynamically. “We excel in managing the content embedded in the templates for some of the largest insurance organizations.”
According to Carlson, their most significant differentiator is the ability to run on all the major platforms, including IBM Mainframes as well as Windows and Linux servers, to keep track of the information and updates seamlessly.
With Napersoft, companies can avoid the expensive and time-consuming orchestration of their tools and systems, and yet have consistent UI, policies, security, and operational flexibility. This agility allows companies to overcome the barriers to information access and deliver the most recent updates about the policy and the claims to customers across channels in a secured manner.
The other core capability of Napersoft is in the area of data extraction. The company can extract the latest data from across the business systems without programming. The extracted data is taken to the decision engine to analyze a particular policy holder’s data. “We support 99 of the most popular databases in the entire world. This helps users manage the processes better,” explains Carlson. Napersoft comprises a document distribution system that automatically delivers the policy and the claims data or other content to the right user through one of many supported channels, including print, email, fax, text, or a mobile device.
One of the prime concerns in document template management is maintaining the accurate version and communicating the same with the user. Napersoft has built a content management system that keeps a copy of the data that is generated in the company’s systems while time-stamping the templates and according them a version number. With this approach, a user can easily recreate the exact template sent to the client, say on April 3 at 12:01 p.m. Besides, it allows clients to reprint the documents generated over the last five years or more. The company can also consolidate all the transactions in a single document for the recipients. With support for more than 100 different languages, Napersoft provides communications to customers in their language of choice.
A People-Driven Approach
Besides their software being functionally-rich, Napersoft’s solution can be deployed and configured in the client environment, in just a week. And, during that initial week, the business template authors also receive onsite training on how to author templates and paragraphs. Post-deployment, they engage the clients template authors through 1 to 2 hour weekly web meetings where they discuss any pain points and needs of the clients’ business users to help them utilize the solution to its maximum potential. They also help clients integrate the software with their existing line of business applications, allowing users to work seamlessly within those systems.
Carlson mentions how their overarching document management and communications strategy has helped their insurance clients to create better policies, improve customer service, and be in a strong position to tackle emergencies. For the last three years, Napersoft has also been investing in building solutions specifically targeting the health insurance vertical. “We are working with some of the largest healthcare organizations in the U.S., and we are all set to be a game changer in the industry,” ends Carlson.
