There is a school of thought that incumbent carriers, even those that are industry leaders, are at a disadvantage to be digital innovation leaders, because people with more time spent within the industry are less inclined to see the opportunities for change. Yet what I have learned from my own insurance journey, is that success and longevity in the industry requires change to be foundational in the company culture.
What if you could give every single customer from whom you needed sensitive documents a portal-like experience to upload their files securely and cost-effectively? Or a portal-like experience where they could check the status of a claim they had made against their insurance? These "Just-in-time" experiences are what Ushur calls "Invisible" and we are excited to share that we are launching Invisible Portal for general availability, today.
95% of IT leaders are worried that documents exchanged over email are a vector for bad actors to gain sensitive data. Documents can be sent to the wrong party, and it's unsafe to have key data sitting in an inbox to be forwarded accidentally with just a click. With a portal-like experience, IT leaders can rest assured their files and data are in the correct place, with the correct people. It also shortens turnaround and processing time.
A leader in the pension management business saw a 95-99% reduction in processing and turnaround time for pension file contribution management. That's due to the fact that they, like many other businesses, had previously used email to receive updates for pension contributions via static files. Those files would then have to be received, confirmed, and then manually evaluated and submitted to core systems to make updates to each employee's contribution plan.
A process with that much intervention is fickle and error-prone. By comparison, the resulting process with Invisible Portal received the employee contribution data, confirmed receipt to the sender, persisted contribution files to a core system, and provided a historical view of their interactions with the enterprise.
Client portals are not a new idea in the tech world, but Invisible Portal offers an easy way to build and deploy portal-like experiences that exclude it from the long drawn out development processes for IT teams. With drag and drop automation abilities and no-code configuration of portal experiences, the development and deployment costs of portals shrink significantly. No-code capabilities disrupt the world of IT-driven portal creation because it doesn't depend on traditional software programming paradigms.
As a result of this disruption, any business partner or key stakeholder becomes worthy of their own portal. Automation experiences that didn't seem worth the time and investment, are now tractable with Invisible Portal.
Secure document exchanges, managed file transfers, or bespoke client portal software are usually the solutions that sit in front of sites created and managed by IT teams. They're often just secure file transfer protocol sites (SFTP) sites. That just means they are file directories on a server that have been approved and whitelisted for receiving files or key information. They can feel like nameless and faceless vehicles for transferring files. Invisible Portal by comparison helps users select the end destination with ease and confidence, and without requiring business users to learn technical commands for moving files around.
When users send their pension management vendor an email with a document attached, they depend on the employees within the vendor to send them back a confirmation email. Additionally, the receiving employee has to process that file by hand - meaning correcting information and uploading the file to a core system; or even worse sending back an email asking for missing information.
When a user instead submits their monthly file via Invisible Portal, they instantly get feedback whether the file was uploaded or not. They can see historical tracking information for previous files submitted. And if the pension management team has also implemented Intelligent Document Automation, they receive immediate feedback on what data is missing or is incorrect in the file they submitted!
Originally, Invisible Portal was born of the need to securely handle a monthly file submission from an employer with data on the current status of pension contributions. If that doesn't mean anything to you, you can imagine a columnar file where each row represents an employee and the monetary value that their employer was contributing to their pension fund.
It's the same principle for defined contribution plans (like 401k's) where employees elect how much money they want to defer pre-tax to their retirement account. If it's a percentage of their income, and they were recently promoted, that value they contribute will change. That contribution amount could even change every couple of weeks! But whenever it does, there is an employee responsible for taking the employee roster from an employer and persisting the values into a core system. That could mean that someone is receiving an email as often as every couple of weeks which they need to manually evaluate and from which they extract key information to persist.
Any document which is regularly submitted and contains private data is one that businesses don't want to sit in an employee's inbox. It would feel like overkill to build a portal for each and every one of those cases, until you realize how easy it is to build, deploy, and maintain these portal experiences. It's not just a game-changer for business-users, it's a life saver for IT and security teams.
Finally, in any automation where files submitted would benefit from the ability for submitters to view and track the status of their submission, Invisible Portal can provide peace of mind to both originally submitting party and recipient.
Invisible Portal is the next product to change customer experiences, but the Ushur Customer Experience Automation (CXA) platform has included major capabilities for the platform included in this release - both advanced analytics and no-code integrations.
No-code integrations in the Ushur platform means that enterprises can easily let business users, who have been appropriately permissioned, add the ability to make real-time updates to their core systems of choice. With just a few clicks, IT administrators can provision the first connection and then business users can see all the relevant fields to update in their workflow dropdowns. These integration procedures save business time and money by minimizing the dependency on systems integrators.
Finally, in any automation where files submitted would benefit from the ability for submitters to view and track the status of their submission, Invisible Portal can provide peace of mind to both originally submitting party and recipient.
Ushur is introducing advanced analytics to the Ushur Customer Experience Automation platform to make it easy to inspect, analyze, and optimize customer experience campaigns. There are two components we've added that are key for perfecting customer experience: Micro-analytics and Macro-analytics.
Micro-analytics provide the view of every minute interaction between a brand and their customer. In each initiated activity, an Ushur client can view how their customers are engaging with the deployed customer experience workflow: whether they've opened it, tried to complete it, and where they left off. By analyzing the initiated activities, brands can see whether there are problematic steps in the customer experience process.
Macro-analytics show the holistic view of a customer experience campaign and how the thousands of customers have interacted with the automation workflows designed by an enterprise. A business can see what percentage of their overall target group have completed key processes like updating their address, or reviewing their account information.
All together, the segmentation and predictive analytics capabilities included in the advanced analytics feature help businesses get closer to their customers than they ever have been before.
If you want to see how these products and features can help you build a customer experience you can be proud of, reach out to us at Ushur.com. We'll help you understand the gaps in your customer experience, and how an automation platform like Ushur helps brands get closer to their customers..
Otherwise, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and stay tuned for more exciting announcements in the world of customer experience.
