A health insurer using Airdocs, hosted on Microsoft Azure, for a personalised customer experience

Executive Summary

A leading health insurer in Australia is sending close to a million policyholders notifications of their new premiums each year. This is a difficult communication that often results in complaints and even attrition.

Previously, they had taken a ‘one size fits all’ approach, with little in the way of tailored messaging.

Moving to Airdocs, hosted on Microsoft Azure, empowered the health insurer to create a highly personalised customer experience. And in a streamlined and cost-effective way.

AnonymousHealth Insurance

Importantly, policyholders got a much clearer understanding of the price changes that affected them, accompanied by highly tailored and relevant messaging about the value of their membership and cover.

Business Challenge

Most private health fund customers expect an annual review to their premiums, but don’t look forward to it.

This communication has the potential to create higher costs for the call centre due to increased complaint calls, as well as lost revenue from people who lose their belief in the value of membership. They needed to notify their policyholders about their new premiums.

As usual, this had potential negative consequences for customer satisfaction and the business. In the past, there had been a ‘one size fits all’ approach with only minimal tailoring of the communication. Until 2016, the communication had included both a partially personalised letter and a separate brochure with generic messaging. This was a costly, impersonal and ineffective way to deliver the message.

The Communication Challenge

The communications challenge was to help members clearly understand the changes to their premium, which were predominantly increases. To counter this largely negative news, they also wanted to demonstrate the value of membership by communicating the benefits in a highly targeted way. For this to be effective, they needed to deliver a personalised experience to each one of their policyholders, and to do that meant embracing digital technology systems.

The Solution

The insurer saw the premium review as one of its key annual communications, and looked for a new way to deliver this as part of their digital transformation. They chose to partner with Airdocs in 2016 because it gave them the flexibility to manage the project in-house with the ability to make changes to the communication template and logic, without the need for external providers. This was important, because with such a time-critical project (the 1 April date of the increase is immovable), Airdocs made it possible to make changes quickly, right up to the “11th hour”.

The process of passing data to the Microsoft Azure platform and back to them was streamlined via a high speed SFTP process, providing security and reducing the time and associated costs of moving large amounts of data.

In terms of execution, they were able to move from one-size-fits-all approach to a highly targeted document using details about:

• The policy type of which there were numerous combinations.
• The family type from single parents, to families, to couples.
• The price impact whether they had an increase, a decrease or no change.
• The product benefits focusing on the ones most relevant to the individual customer.

​​The resulting communications matrix included well over 100 unique variations across the almost 1 million customer base.

All the personalised content was formatted into a single A4 document, delivered either by mail or email according to the customer’s subscription preference. The Airdocs platform uses the state-of-the-art CSF composition tool by FIS Global which also enables a print-ready PDF to be sent to a print and mail stream (in the case of a hard email bounce) creating time and reporting efficiencies.

The double-sided document was personalised in nine different areas – ranging from the letter and panels on the front (which provided details of the changes), to the panels on the back that supported the value benefits of being a member and the types of cover they owned.

The communication was designed and written in a more targeted way to explain the changes clearly and reinforce the value that members consistently enjoy.

After the communication was generated within Airdocs, these were supplied back to the insurer via SFTP for loading into their Member Portal.

Transformation & Differentiation

The founders of Airdocs had a long history in the Customer Communications Management industry, designing, implementing and supporting customers using on-premise and ASP style solutions. Frustration with the complexity, time to market and cost of these ASP solutions led to the formation of Airdocs as a company and a product. From the outset Airdocs was designed as a cloud first solution based on a Microsoft stack.

Some of the key benefits / drivers are:

Global reach – Airdocs has global aspirations and by selecting Microsoft Azure as their core platform they have instant global reach and the ability to create Airdocs environments within different GEO political regions to meet the data sovereignty (as well as data performance) requirements of customers in each region.

A comprehensive development platform – after much research Airdocs chose to base their architecture on .NET core as it gives them a lot of flexibility when choosing the most appropriate target platforms. The tight integration of Visual Studio with Microsoft Azure, MS SQL Server, GIT and obviously .NET have made it an ideal platform for building and growing the solution.

High-levels of data security, sufficient to meet the needs of the most demanding customers, was a very important part of Airdocs’ decision to host in Microsoft Azure.

Freedom to choose IaaS or PaaS based components. In the early stages, Airdocs chose a simple infrastructure model on Microsoft Azure to reduce development complexity. As Airdocs rolled out the platform they were migrating more and more to Microsoft Azure PaaS services which gave them access to lower costs of operation combined with high levels of performance, scalability and security.

Support from Microsoft ISV Partner programs was another key factor in Airdocs’ decision, unlike other Cloud providers, Microsoft actively supports Airdocs through their ISV programs.

The low incremental cost of cloud computing in Microsoft Azure allows Airdocs to quickly scale up and down to meet workload spikes without increasing the underlying running cost of the platform.

Market need

The solution Airdocs developed for this anonymous private health insurer is relevant to any midmarket company anywhere in the world. Every mid-market company with more than around 10,000 customers will be challenged to access sophisticated technology like Airdocs. This is because traditional on-premise CCM solutions are costly, complex and time-consuming to implement and use. Airdocs brings world-class CCM functionality to mid-market companies as a service. Their customers can launch campaigns in a matter of days and pay for the usage they consume. So, mid-market companies now have access to the technology to implement a full digital customer experience.