Responsiveness in all sectors of the economy has decreased because of COVID-19 concerns and the worldwide supply chain turmoil. However, regulated industries like health insurance and financial services must respond to late-breaking regulatory changes even with the unprecedented effects the rest of the economy has experienced. When these changes require communicating with customers quickly, the document composition and generation process must be ready.

Healthcare providers quickly realized the importance of a responsive document system when the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) implemented new policies because of COVID-19. Healthcare providers had limited time to change customer-facing documents and meet the CMS in-home delivery deadlines.

Document responsiveness is the ability of an organization to quickly change document content following regulatory, environmental, or market changes. A government agency may mandate a content change or modifications could betriggered by an event such as the COVID pandemic. The challenge for document producers is making the necessary changes and then distributing them to customers, suppliers, and other constituencies systematically so that no one is missed.

Regulatory Compliance

Banking and insurance companies have years of experience reacting to new regulations and communicating those changes. Outdated legacy customer communication systems still work, but they make the process slow and cumbersome. With current cloud-based technology, updating templates with new content can happen in days or weeks, not months. Regulatory change reactionmust be accurate and responsive.It means rethinking and re-engineering how organizations manage change.

Centralizing Content

Over the years, most healthcare and financial institutions have isolated their customer information and content in silos. This sequestration was not political. Internal departments and teams took ownership of various parts of the customer experience and data because point solutions were the quickest and easiest path to meeting departmental requirements. Each department created documents, many featuring regulated content. The result in such environments is duplicated content in dozens of different templates across various systems, including print, email, and SMS. There is little control over versioning. Not only is this wasteful in terms of time and resources, it is also risky.

A centralized content hub that non-technical staff can use to maintain and update communications and regulatory content solves this problem. Marketing staffers or compliance officers can change content quickly without relying on IT resources or time-consuming coding. A cloud-based third-party organization that specializes in customer communications across all channels, document control, and risk mitigation is the solution. Centralized content hubs simplify and streamline the process of managing regulated and other mission-critical communications.

Besides centralizing content, establishing what happens when a change is made and who is responsible is key to rapid updating and deployment. What are the business rules in place for escalation? For example, a document change that is not regulatory in nature may not require the involvement of a compliance officer. The modification might be a low-level marketing offer or something as simple as fixing a typo or misspelling. Business rules help drive the workflow for document generation and approvals. An established workflow is imperative to change document composition quickly, while still meeting regulatory obligations.

The choice of communication channel directly impacts document dissemination. Some channels might not be appropriate for some information or regulations may dictate a certain channel, such as First-Class mail. The preferences of the recipients or demographics may also contribute to the method of document distribution. The key is to balance the communication channel with the level of security required, regulations, audience preferences, and how quickly the document is delivered.

Quickcoms’ next-generation customer communications management platform enables organizations to build and execute effective communications while lowering operating costs and ensuring compliance. Quickcoms’ cloud-based technologies provide banks, insurers, and other regulation-sensitive companies with new and effective ways to improve regulatory change management. The technology catalogs and manages regulatory data and automates processes for rapid document updates by business users. An intuitive interface and no coding gives an organization the power to meet all regulatory deadlines and also offer excellent customer service.