Grange Insurance Deploys HP Exstream to Transform its Customer Communications

Based in Columbus, OH, Grange Insurance offers auto, home, life and business insurance protection through its network of independent agents. Established in 1935, the company and its affiliates serve policyholders in 13 states across the Midwest and Southeast generating around $1.3 billion in annual revenue. For an insurance firm of this size it’s integral that its claims processing and policy production systems are flexible enough to meet the unique and individual needs of the customer, while achieving a desirable and predictable outcome for the company.

Managing claims, correspondence

Like any insurance company, Grange Insurance generates a huge amount of documentation including claim forms, contact letters and legal correspondence. Managing these effectively can be challenging and time-consuming. A few years ago, Grange had reason to take a fresh look at its document management and customer communication system when it discovered that its legacy batch print system was being discontinued.

The company wanted a supplier that could not only support its batch print requirements for its high volume of policies and billing statements, but could also provide interactive documents to make its claims correspondence and other customer communication more effective.

“A single solution for the enterprise aligns with our ‘Corporate One’ strategy which is about having one solution per key function of the business,” continues Michael Fergang, chief information officer, Grange Insurance. “By selecting HP Exstream as our enterprise-wide customer communication solution, we will eliminate multiple-point solutions with a single platform to support all of our interactive, batch and real-time document requirements.”

“We looked at other vendors but the HP Exstream solution met our needs perfectly. HP has become the de facto standard for the insurance industry so it understands our objectives and pain points,” explains Andrew Hellard, application development supervisor, Grange Insurance.

HP Exstream customer communications management software enables Grange Insurance to help substantially reduce document processing costs and improve customer retention by streamlining workflow processes to produce more effective and relevant communications faster – from high-volume policies, bills and statements to personalizing and automating fulfillment of on-demand policies, correspondence, quotes and proposals. It provides the platform for Grange Insurance to enhance its customer’s communications easily and cost-effectively.

A streamlined and simplified system

Grange Insurance hadn’t considered its documents from a design perspective since the early 1990s so the implementation of HP Exstream provided the business with the opportunity to redesign and consolidate its forms, which are printed in overnight batch processing. This resulted in a 90 percent reduction in identification card forms from 111 to 10 and a 79 percent reduction in billing invoice forms from 47 to 10, simplifying the batch process dramatically.

HP Exstream has also made the batch process much faster by eliminating the need to run documents through a separate PDF convertor. This has contributed to reducing the nightly print generation process from six hours to one.

With HP Exstream successfully creating policies and delivering significant results in the batch processing times, Grange Insurance moved to the second phase of the deployment – streamlining the claims communications process. Previously, there was no consistent way in which claims departments handled correspondence. Although the company was using Microsoft Word templates pre-filled with certain information, the system was so unwieldy and inefficient that many representatives weren’t using it.

“Under the old system, you had to log out to generate a letter template which was very frustrating for users so they tended to ignore it altogether and use their own templates,” adds Beth Rickard, senior project manager, Grange Insurance. “As a result, we had nearly 2,500 different letters across the organization. In one case there were 111 variations of one single type of letter. This made it difficult for us to track all the correspondence accurately.”