By Grant Patten, Digital Media & User Experience Specialist, CSIO
A 2015 Forrester Research survey revealed that 49% of Canadian insurance customers switched from paper to electronic statements for their primary chequing account because of the amount of paper mail they were receiving. And that number is likely to grow in the coming years, as more and more customers seem willing to replace paper correspondence with digital. The fact that over 9 million Canadian consumers already have an epost™ account with Canada Post attests to this rising customer demand. CSIO’s eDelivery solution meets this need by enabling the broker channel to leverage their existing investment in CSIOnet and eDocs to deliver personal lines policy documents to customers through epost.
The P&C industry is already quite familiar with eDocs – the solution enables electronic transfer of policy documents from insurers to a broker’s BMS, substantially reducing the cost and effort of printing, mailing, sorting, scanning, filing and destroying paper documents. Since eDocs debuted in 2012, broker adoption has soared to approximately 80% for personal lines, and its expansion into commercial lines is well under way. Extending that paperless workflow to the insurance customer with eDelivery is a natural next step.
According to Entrepreneur Magazine, it costs $25,000 to fill a four-drawer filing cabinet holding 15-20,000 files, and another $2,000 a year to maintain it. Not to mention the cost of simply sending mail.
Using eDelivery, CSIO members will be able to offer electronic document delivery to customers registered with epost.
As of September 2016, two insurers - Northbridge Insurance and Peace Hills Insurance – have obtained CSIO Certification for eDelivery, and other companies across Canada have added eDelivery implementation to their IT roadmaps. Brokers and insurers can try the Personal Lines eDelivery Calculator, available on CSIO.com, to calculate their potential return on investment (ROI) of implementing eDelivery.
By using an online account such as epost, which is free to individuals, customers can retrieve their document history at the click of a button. Leveraging epost, customers will have one digital mailbox, allowing them to conveniently receive all their policy documents in one location.
epost is also more secure than the average paper filing system that a customer has in their home, safely protecting all data while simultaneously blocking spam, ads and junk mail.
For additional information and to view a new video featuring customer testimonials about eDelivery –Consumer Perspectives on eDelivery & epost - visit www.csio.com/edelivery.
