Case management may be defined
    differently across industries, but those
    who rely upon it to service, retain and acquire customers know well that it is
    a complex and critical component of customer care that can make or break your
    business in a competitive environment.


    Key
    Case Management Scenarios



    • Account opening/closing/changes

    • Compensation processing

    • Claims management

    • Underwriting and contract management

    • Campaign management

    • HR/benefits administration

    • Fraud investigation

    • Service repairs


    The central, common issue in case management is that all
    too often, cases take too long to close due to any of number of internal
    factors, including:



    • Limitations of rigid corporate policies
      and processes

    • Missing collaboration between
      knowledge workers and external experts

    • Limited resources

    • Misplaced information

    • Lack of standardization

    • Difficulty of enforcing compliance
      with policies, regulation and best practices

    • Lack of visibility into key
      performance indicators


    Experts agree that a
    case is not simply a collection of isolated activities, processes and
    documents, but a single and evolving entity progressing toward completion. Efficient business case
    completion must be enabled with collaborative
    processing for structured and
    unstructured data that results in an integrated solution combining documents, data
    extraction, business processes and rules, content management and customer
    communications in a unified approach.


    Business
    and IT organizations in the enterprise have learned that successful execution
    of case management requires the best of all worlds -- BPM for workflow,
    productivity and accountability; ECM for collaboration, compliance and
    communications; and CRM for customer history, service, satisfaction and
    retention.


    Beyond BPM

    Defining and automating processes
    is just part of the story in case management. Processing a typical claim
    requires not only the management of various types of information -- audio and
    video files, electronic forms, docu­ments and emails -- but also action and
    approvals from multiple knowledge workers and experts in consecutive or
    parallel processes to resolve the case.


    In addition to standard processes and
    activity that must always be completed, the adaptive (or dynamic) case
    management we demand today involves ad-hoc, on-the-fly activity, events,
    decisions and processes within and alongside those predictable parts of bringing
    a case to resolution. But today's knowledge worker is often placed in a
    straight jacket of policy and process restrictions that prevent successful (or
    efficient) resolution of the case of the case within the boundaries of the
    corporate rules.


    State-
    and event-based processing and business rules speed up the completion of the
    business case by allowing and enabling ad-hoc elements and rules to be
    addressed and incorporated into the progress of the case by enabling knowledge
    workers to do what they do best with what they know best.


    Rather than routing the case folder to the
    next task sequentially down the line, a case must advance through both external
    and internal events:




    • External events: Message content from
      a phone call, letter, fax or email is added to the case folder upon receipt,
      and new tasks or processes may be triggered or created.


    • Internal events: Assignments and
      business rules allow case workers assign tasks and initiate processes as well
      as to enable fully automatic creation, assignment or triggering of tasks based
      on external events, task completion or expiration of deadlines.


    Single
    Customer View


    A holistic view of
    all tasks and
    business processes, including deadlines, documents, contracts and all related
    communications, guarantees 24/7 real-time access to all pertinent informa­tion
    for a case or claim. Represented by the case folder, the case as a whole is
    easily understood through simple review of the unified and customized view that
    summarizes the status and provides access to key content and details.


    Two major
    keys for success are 1) the optimization of rule-based processes and 2) the
    integration of inbound and outbound business correspondence, electronically
    connecting business partners while creating an efficient, holistic process.


    Collaborative
    business case management improves transparency, turnaround and efficiency by consolidating
    all relevant information for internal administration, customer care and
    external staff, analyzing data and improving processes collaboratively across
    departments, functional levels and locations. Deadlines and strategic targets
    can be incorporated into the workflow to ensure service-level requirements are
    met on time and on budget.




    Service
    Quality and Efficiency


    Effective case management results
    in improved service quality and less process time for customers and partners. Using
    process-enabled document capture technologies, for example, digitizes documents
    to automatically extract, classify and index data for expedited processing,
    analysis and search.


    Automating
    administrative processes and audits operations improves effectiveness in the
    procedural flow by optimizing time and attention for those steps that only
    human judgment or action can accomplish. Events or status changes can trigger
    automatic alerts for immediate action when required, and dynamic task
    assignment routes work to available staff according to roles, skills and
    priority.


    A truly effective case management solution
    offers an integrated solution combining data, business processes and rules,
    document creation, capture and output management with support for dynamic
    business process management in a single platform.


    Integrated Case Management: the
    Requirements



    • State-driven/event-based
      processing

    • Centralized
      storage of inbound and outbound documents in a virtual case file

    • Consolidated
      view of all procedures (activities, calendar, checklists)

    • Distributed
      capture and classification of incoming complaints, requests or claims

    • Rules-based
      optimization of business processes

    • Ad-hoc
      process updates

    • Integrated
      correspondence via browser or fat client

    • Collaboration
      across departments, partners, agents and customers

    • Output
      management from print to archive

    • Easily
      definable GUI in multiple languages with automated web and desktop distribution

    • Integrated
      sign-off, auditing, reporting and legal compliance

    • Integrated
      user authorization and authentication, change management and versioning

    • Seamless
      integration with business applications


    Annemarie Pucher [annemarie.pucher@isis-papyrus.com]
    is CEO of ISIS Papyrus Software, providing enterprise software for personalized customer
    communications and process optimization business applications in the global
    financial, insurance, utility, telecom, health care and public sectors.
    Worldwide more than 2,000 enterprise customers use Papyrus standard software
    for business applications to manage customer communications and billing, case
    management, business correspondence, multichannel delivery, ADF, indexed
    capture, TransPromo and archiving across systems and departments.



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