Efficient Insurance Documentation: Benefits of CCMS in Policy Management

Insurance companies face unique challenges when producing and managing policies and procedures. They must carefully curate what is included in policies, identify and track subtle differences between countries or states, fulfill complex language requirements, and maintain strict compliance with regulations. Curating insurance documentation in an efficient and compliant manner is complex!

What is needed is an innovative way to manage documentation. A component content management system (CCMS) is the answer. A CCMS enables content reuse, and reduces the time needed to develop and update policies and procedures. It also supports cross-functional collaboration, reduces translation time and costs, and ensures regulatory compliance.

Let’s look at how Paligo can help insurance companies streamline the development of their policy and procedure documentation.

Insurance companies deal with many types of insurance, from home and car insurance to life insurance, travel insurance, and more. They also work with partners such as brokers and travel agents to provide insurance to the end consumer. These companies create and use hundreds or even thousands of policies and procedures—and they must all be actively managed and kept up-to-date.

Creating insurance policies and procedures is time-consuming. Product managers responsible for creating and updating these documents regularly recreate documents that contain much of the same information, with variations for different products, customers, partners, or jurisdictions.

Frequently, creating a new policy requires building a document from scratch, a template, or manually cloning an existing policy and changing contract details, terms, conditions, coverage details, applicable endorsements, and other information.

Common documents, such as glossaries for terms and conditions and policy wordings based on jurisdictions, need to be maintained separately and added to policies where required. In the case of policy documentation (like an insurance contract), these documents must adhere to legislation and be under tight control.

Imagine the insurance company that provides travel insurance through brokers and travel agents. They offer multiple products that include features such as baggage coverage, medical coverage, trip cancellation coverage, emergency assistance services, or an all-inclusive product. Travel agents work with their customers to determine what type of coverage they want and then request the product from the insurance company.

When changes are required to policies, either by a change from the customer or a regulatory update, product managers have to manually go to each impacted policy and make the change. They often have to make these changes to many documents at once.

In addition, global insurance companies must maintain their insurance documentation in multiple languages. This requires significant time and effort and can be inefficient and expensive, especially if the same content is translated multiple times. This challenge is compounded when multiple translated versions must be maintained for a given product.

For many insurance companies, the processes for managing documentation involve physical paper copies, emailing documents for review, and other disconnected systems. The need to digitally transform is both a real challenge and a huge opportunity.

A better approach to manually creating and managing policy documents is to adopt a structured authoring strategy and leverage a CCMS. Structured authoring allows product managers to easily break down common elements of policies and procedures into reusable components, such as paragraphs, sections, and lists. These components are stored and organized in a documentation system that allows for simple and consistent reuse.

When a new policy or procedure is needed, the product manager can pull the required sections from the repository to build the document. Not only does this make document creation faster, it also becomes easier to access and manage updates (including translations) and guarantees greater accuracy and consistency.

In the example of the travel insurance policy above, a product manager could easily create a policy by selecting reusable components for medical coverage and trip cancellation and adding in any necessary legal wording. Another product manager could work from the same set of components to create a different policy that includes medical coverage, emergency services, and trip cancellation.

With insurance legislation continually changing, policies require frequent updates. By following a structured content model with reusable topics, product managers can quickly change affected content and have that change reflected everywhere that content is repurposed.

The advantages of using a Component Content Management System (CCMS) for insurance companies are clear. With Paligo, insurance companies can benefit from streamlined policy management, automated versioning capabilities, and collaborative features that make it easy to work together on content even when teams are located in different places.

There are four ways the Paligo CCMS improves policy management and operations:

• Complete audit trails and revision control ensure insurance documentation is always accurate, consistent, and up to date.
• A collaborative environment where team members can work together.
• Support for multiple languages as well as complex regulatory environments.
• Paligo’s powerful publishing engine can quickly deliver content in different formats to different channels.

Staying compliant with regulations and creating accurate policies can be a complex process for insurance companies. Paligo includes full versioning and revision control so you can see who changed a policy or procedure, when they made the change, and what they did.

For example, coverage limits and deductibles may change from year to year. Product managers can make the required changes to policy content in the CCMS, and a record of those changes will be maintained throughout the life of the policy.

Tracking changes to content on a section or paragraph level helps product managers ensure information is always up to date with regulations while guaranteeing they can see when changes were made.

A CCMS provides insurance companies with single sourcing and reuse. Single sourcing allows product managers to store and manage the same insurance documentation for different languages and markets in one place, reducing time spent on creating, managing, and localizing content.

Continuing our example of the travel insurance company, we know that the company develops policy documents that include policy wording, terms and conditions, coverage summaries, and disclosure statements. These documents outline the policy features, limitations, exclusions, claims procedures, and other important details that customers need to understand before purchasing the insurance product.

But a policy document isn’t created by one person alone. An author may create a policy document, but it must be reviewed by others to ensure it is accurate. Sending a Word document around to the appropriate people for review and approval is a time-consuming and error-prone process.

A better alternative is to give everyone access to the policy in the CCMS and allow them to seamlessly collaborate in that space, based on their roles and permissions.

Paligo equips authors with that workspace, and simplifies how they collaborate, regardless of their physical location. Reviewers can log into the system, comment on changes and make edits. Once the review is complete, the content is sent for translation (if required).

Insurance companies must comply with complex regulations and manage policies and procedures across multiple languages and markets. Without a CCMS, this would require managing multiple versions of each policy that reflect regional compliance differences as well as different languages.

The Paligo CCMS eliminates the need to manage multiple copies of complete policies, since all content is managed in simple topics, paragraphs, lists, or other components. It supports variables and filters that allow you to easily replace small pieces of text (like a product name or a broker or agent name) within a section without duplicating the content.

Variables and filters also help regional language differences. It’s possible to quickly adapt content to different locales while maintaining accuracy between versions.

Also, Paligo facilitates smooth translation processes through a built-in translation editor, as well as through integrations with translation services. Translation workflows ensure content is tracked and translated in a timely manner. And, because the content is structured, it is only translated once, allowing product managers to quickly get their policies out to multiple markets.

Insurance companies distribute policies in different ways. A policy might be published to an online customer portal, emailed as a PDF, or printed and mailed to a customer.

Some insurance companies are also required by law to make their policies available in multiple languages. The best way to do this is to have one policy document that includes each language required.

Paligo makes it easy to create multiple publishing channels and distribute policies and procedures wherever needed. By using variables and profiling, product managers can set publishing parameters for a policy to include multiple languages and customize an output for a particular product and audience. You can even save publishing presets for future use.

Insurance companies face significant challenges in managing policies and procedures efficiently and compliantly. A component content management system, such as Paligo, offers a solution for streamlining insurance documentation. By adopting a structured authoring approach and working with components, insurance companies can accelerate document creation and ensure consistency.

Learn more here about how Paligo supports policy and procedure documentation.