Documentation Software: A Key Resource for Insurance Organizations?

Insurance companies need to continuously create and update all kinds of documentation, including insurance policies, compliance manuals and underwriting guidelines. Let’s explore how documentation software can help teams save time, reduce costs and collaborate better.

Detailed documentation is the foundation of the insurance industry. In order to protect people and businesses from financial risks, insurance companies must have standardized processes for assessing risks, evaluating potential customers, creating insurance policies and ensuring compliance. All of which requires documentation.

But managing and updating all of this documentation presents a major challenge, particularly in an industry where change is constant. In order to remain competitive and profitable, insurance companies must find new ways to streamline and automate their documentation processes. Here’s how documentation software can help.

With digital transformation, most insurance companies probably already use some type of documentation software. For example, document management software can help insurers store and organize insurance policy contracts for easy retrieval, and policy administration software enables them to issue and modify insurance policies more efficiently.

In this blog post, we’ll focus on a type of documentation software called a component content management system (CCMS). A CCMS helps insurance companies more easily create, update and collaborate on complex documentation about polices, procedures, guidelines and regulations. It also helps insurance companies automatically publish content across several channels at once.

A CCMS is a documentation software that not only serves client-facing content, such as policies, but also internal content. Using a CCMS when working with policies offers a high reuse opportunity because policies typically have very common components. Plus, the motivation for an insurance company is to provide good service while minimizing their risk of loss due to incorrect coverage or legal challenges, which a CCMS can address. We will discuss this in detail further below.

Internal content refers to the procedures and standards an insurance company needs to follow. The content describing procedures and standards is often incomplete or of poor quality, especially in larger and older companies. Most of the knowledge resides with career professionals who keep the information to themselves rather than documenting it.

The challenge insurance companies have with internal content can be measured in efficiency and quality. A CCMS offers a single platform for easily locating data, plus topic-oriented writing and monitoring to guarantee uniformity and decrease errors for improved accuracy.

When insurance companies adapt their products, policies and guidelines to meet new market demands or changing regulations, they often need to update their documentation across all operations. Making these changes can be time consuming and involve multiple departments, including teams for underwriting, compliance, legal review, risk management and sales.

Insurance companies also need to keep close track of changes made to documents and who approves them. And if a change is made in one document, even if it’s just one sentence, it needs to be updated everywhere that document or sentence is used.

Since the insurance industry is closely regulated and is based on carefully worded contracts, there is little room for error.

One of the main advantages of using a CCMS is that it stores all your documentation in a central location. The documentation software ensures that the latest and approved versions of documents, such as insurance compliance manuals and underwriting guidelines, are easily accessible and exist in only one place.

By providing a single source for documentation, a CCMS reduces content duplication across an organization and ensures that teams are using or working on the correct and most up-to-date material. This helps streamline workflows and prevents documentation from being developed in silos.

A CCMS also takes a structured approach to creating and updating content. You create your documentation based on a predetermined structure, made up of individual components. A component can be a headline, a short text, or even an image, with each component categorized by a topic.

As we’ll get into, structuring your documentation in this way makes it easier to find, update, review and reuse content in different formats and channels. This helps ensure consistency and accuracy, while saving you time and resources.

Let’s say a life insurance company is creating a compliance manual for agents and brokers. When creating this manual using a CCMS, the documentation is structured using individual components. For example, you might have a component that defines life insurance replacements, where an existing policy is replaced with another policy.

When the compliance manual is ready for review, or if just one component needs to be reviewed, the collaboration tools of a CCMS make it easy to share with different teams in your organization.

For example, with the Paligo CCMS, you can assign people in your organization to create or review documentation. Once assigned, the contributor receives an email notification with your specific instructions, where you can also set a start and end date for the review. You can allow the reviewer to edit the content or only allow them to leave comments.

These collaboration features enable multiple teams to work on insurance documentation simultaneously, while keeping track of input from multiple stakeholders.

Insurance companies often need to create different versions of documentation, due to differences in regulations, insurance products, or target audiences. For example, an insurance company in the United States might need to create different versions of its compliance manual based on the regulations of each state where it operates.

Documentation software like a CCMS makes it easy to create different versions of your documents from a single source. You can create a parallel version of the documentation, then change only the parts that need to be updated, such as regulations for sales and marketing in different states or regions. At the same time, you can also make changes to the source documentation, then apply those changes to all the different versions.

With Paligo, you can easily keep track of all changes that have been made, compare different versions of components, and revert to previous iterations if needed. This helps you work more efficiently and ensure that all content is accurate and up to date.

Insurance companies often need to use consistent language across different documents and policies. A CCMS allows teams, such as those working with legal and compliance issues, to create reusable content components. For example, if a component is created regarding a regulation or a definition, changes to the component can be updated centrally and published everywhere that component is used. This saves time and helps ensure consistency.

Also, since components are tagged according to topics, this makes them easier to find and replace. This feature is an efficient way to keep all documentation up to date, which is particularly useful when there are changes to regulations, insurance policies or products. A CCMS enables you to efficiently update all relevant documents at the same time.

With the Paligo CCMS, you can automatically publish your documentation in a variety of formats, and also integrate the software with your other systems. Since you create documentation in Paligo with a structured approach, rather than based on a layout, you can quickly publish professional-looking content as a PDF, with the layout tool, or through HTML5 and content delivery platforms.

Paligo also integrates with sales and support software, like Zendesk, Salesforce and ServiceNow, so that your teams, agents and brokers always have access to up-to-date documentation. Automated publishing and integrations save you time, and help you ensure accuracy and compliance with regulations. You can also use our REST API to develop your own integrations.

For insurance companies operating in multiple countries, or that need to provide documentation in multiple languages, a CCMS can help you efficiently manage translations and keep all translations up to date. With Paligo’s translation management, all translations are stored in one central location, making it easy to ensure quality and compliance for different languages.

Paligo has built-in workflows for managing and approving translations, which help you track progress and ensure accuracy and consistency. Paligo also has integrations with leading translation services, or you can manage translations yourself with our translation editor.

If you want to learn more about how the Paligo CCMS can save your insurance company time and resources, while helping ensure accuracy and compliance, schedule a demo with us. We would be happy to discuss how we can tailor our CCMS to your company’s needs.