American Family Insurance, John Hancock, Empower Retirement, and HTC Global Services Recognized for Excellence in Customer Conversations

Smart Communications, a leading technology company focused on helping businesses engage in more meaningful customer conversations today announced the winners of the 2022 SCALE Awards. The company honored customers and partners who are making customer conversations smarter through their strides in digital transformation. Winners were announced during this year’s conference, INNOVATE 2022: Conversations Without Limits which was held in Nashville, TN on May 18-20, 2022.

“We are thrilled to honor these forward-thinkers with a SCALE Award to shine the spotlight on their exceptional efforts in reimagining customer conversations to be faster, smarter and more interactive,” said James Brown, CEO of Smart Communications. “These companies are driving business value by delivering conversations without limits that lead to more rewarding customer experiences and brand loyalty and are doing so by fully embracing cloud technology and a digital-first approach.”

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The four companies to receive 2022 SCALE awards were:

Pacesetter Award: This award showcases a company that is going above and beyond in their digital innovation efforts while delivering high performance results. ​American Family Insurance received this award for driving consistency and ultimately a better claims experience for their customers. By using SmartCOMMTM, claims business team members can more effectively manage and change customer correspondence with minimal dependence on IT partners, resulting in quicker turnarounds and faster time to market. Since its use of SmartCOMM, the company has reduced its claims templates by more than 80 percent, with 70 percent of all templates built by business team members after only two days of training. A process that used to take months, now only takes days. By consolidating systems and processes, the company has enhanced its ability to serve customers from multiple brands through an efficient and consistent claims experience.

Best Customer Experience Award: This award goes to a company that leverages digital channels to drive exceptional customer experiences. ​John Hancock was recognized for their modern omnichannel approach by providing 24×7 access and services across the customer’s preferred communication channel. The company turned to SmartCOMM and Salesforce to provide quotes, policy packages, and customer correspondence that were quick to set up, secure, easy to use, and open. ​This allowed them to not only improve customer engagement but also to launch new products quickly, including their life insurance offering combined with a technology-enabled program that incentivizes and rewards customers for the small, everyday steps they take to live longer, healthier, better lives. The company is truly innovating when it comes to the customer experience and shifting strategies to work with customers instead of expecting customers to conform to their way of doing business. ​

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Lifetime Achievement Award: This award recognizes a customer that is driving transformation within their industry as an early adopter of technology to improve the entire customer lifecycle and support internal processes as they rapidly grow as one of the largest retirement providers in the United States. Empower Retirement was selected for migrating to cloud solutions and transforming their forms processes to improve customer satisfaction, digitize customer-facing processes and reduce Not In Good Order (NIGO) rates. Dedicated to simplifying their processes, having a document platform like SmartCOMM to dynamically merge data together has allowed them to better serve their customers with more personalized communications. They are also setting out on a journey with SmartIQTM that will make forms easy to understand, enhance the customer experience and provide the flexibility to scale.

The Conversations Without Limits Award: This award honors a Smart Communications partner who is committed to enabling conversations without limits.​ HTC Global Services was recognized as an instrumental partner for their expertise counselling many Smart Communications customers with their innovative solutions that accelerate digital transformation, maximize business value and generate long-term success for their clients. HTC, through its extensive capabilities, SmartCOMM-specific prebuilt accelerators, and SmartCOMM-trained professionals has been helping clients solve complex customer conversation challenges and orchestrate interactive two-way conversations.

In addition to honoring these four companies, INNOVATE 2022 featured other Smart Communications customers and partners who shared their digital strategies, best practices and success stories.

“INNOVATE 2022 provided a tremendous opportunity for our customers and partners to share best practices and key learnings along their journeys to more exceptional, digital-first customer experiences,” Brown continued. “Through these conversations, we learned more about how to succeed in this new world in which customer expectations are higher than ever and cloud-based solutions are critical tools to deliver on these demands.”

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