Success story Mondial Assistance

ITP Helps Travel Insurer Map Out Personalization Strategy

When travelers book trips on online via sites like Orbitz or CheapTickets, they can also purchase insurance policies to cover car rentals as well as any number of travel mishaps. Trip cancellations, missed connections, emergency medical care, baggage loss or damage -- Mondial Assistance (part of the Mondial Assistance Group, active in 38 countries) and its travel insurance division, Access America®, provide insurance for a variety of travelhazards like these. Last year, more than four million people sought insurance from the company. Customers select insurance online or through a travel agency. Each application, policy and claim form is built by ITP Software from Aia Software. Over 8,000 documents a day – one every three seconds – pass through the transparent ITP document engine. When the self-service transaction is online, ITP makes it possible to compose and deliver a customized policy within minutes. With ITP, Mondial Assistance meets all enterprise document needs within one environment. The ITP document solution is based on one easy platform of intelligent automation for all document needs. It enables web forms like customer self service online applications, interactive documents like price quotes, and documents like legal correspondence based on structured text blocks. Mondial Assistance gains the advantages of consistency, automation and speed.

More Sophisticated Personalization

More advanced personalization was required to meet customers’ expectations and compete in the marketplace. “The midrange system could do the basics, but we couldn’t do personalization or document composition with the sophistication we have today,” said Program Analyst Dwayne Hinds. An interface to the PeopleSoft CRM application allowed integration with this key enterprise function. “One-to-one marketing provides the personalized touch, especially for our travel agency business,“ said Randy Hill, Director of Applications. “Before, we couldn’t do as much personalizing. Now we can do it with ease.” As a result, they streamlined the process of creating personalized documents and correspondence, and IT doesn’t have to get involved.
Travel insurance-related documents make up the bulk of the daily processing volume, along with customer service correspondence and claims forms. An ITP/Repository holds day-to-day documents. Confirmation letters, terms and conditions and other materials are available in PDF and Word formats. “With ITP, policies and other correspondence can be sent instantly to clients by email, web or fax, and ITP streamlines production of PDF output,” Hinds explained.

Dynamic and Consistent Content Across All Channels

Content for policies comes from a policy management system. As each document is built, they use ITP to pull all the benefits that have been purchased for that policy and assemble them on the fly for each customer. “ITP allows inclusion of dynamic information from a database, as well as static text,” said Hill. Branding objectives require a consistent look across all documents and delivery channels. “We want to get each document as close as possible to what you see on the web.”
ITP Helps Travel Insurer Map Out Personalization Strategy “With ITP, we can combine content with images and data and link systems across the company’s three business units,” Hill noted. ITP/Server coordinates document traffic for all the lines of business. The software must handle embedded images in terms and conditions, plus static text. Images can include logos of contract companies such as travel agencies, online travel services or credit card providers that offer travel insurance through Mondial Assistance.

Online Purchases Trigger Documents

Documents can vary for each travel agency using insurance services, and their agency clients number in the thousands. With the help of ITP software, documents are generated by web site activity when someone purchases insurance. Documents are also generated by associations requiring
fulfillment, or from batch processing. ITP accesses databases in real time, so no extra time for downloading, pre-processing or copying of data is required. ITP uses simple processes to create complex documents. It seamlessly combines data from corporate databases using ITP model documents as templates. The transparent document creation can be invoked through common word processors, and users like customers, customer service, travel agents and account managers don’t realize that ITP is driving document creation. Policies can be delivered to customers online in just minutes. Companies like Mondial Assistance gain faster, more integrated workflow process and greater productivity, as well as measurable savings through better use of resources.

Streamlined Document Development

ITP has streamlined the personalization process from a business standpoint and opened the door for more people in the organization to have input into document creation. ITP empowers employees by putting document capabilities directly in the hands of those who need them, without burdening IT staff with extra programming or multiple systems to support. “Business units like Marketing and Legal are creating the documents,” said Hinds. “They provide the
designs, templates and requirements for logos and other graphics. They provide their content via a Word document. IT only gets involved when they need to pull new database information that has not been pulled before.”

Support for Business Growth

ITP makes life easier for IT, but it also helps them contribute to company goals. “The main benefit is being able to keep up with the business without any hardship on our side,” said Hinds. “We have more clients, so there is a greater need for personalization, and IT can facilitate that.” “Four years ago, we had 100 products, and now we have 400, but IT staff has not increased,” noted Hill. “We can do more documents with the same number of people that we had before. And we can support expansion of our business.” ITP helps Mondial Assistance maintain branding, increase productivity and provide the personalized information customers expect. It’s a roadmap to success in a competitive market.