Customer story
Guardian Life
One of the largest mutual life insurers in the U.S. made transactional notifications a reliable part of its customer-facing business — citing Bird's superb delivery to the inbox and real-time, individually personalized messages.
Sector
Life insurance
Channels
Headline
Reliable transactional notifications
The challenge
Transactional notices where any delay could leave a policy transaction incomplete.
Keeping its clients' needs central to all aspects of its business has been a key to Guardian Life's long-term success. So when the company began to implement e-delivery of customer communications and transactional notices, reinforcing that strong commitment to its policyholders with a reliable user experience was a paramount consideration.
Guardian Life's eNotification application functions as a hub to distribute and fulfill policy transactions from across the company's multiple business units. One of its critical components is notifying customers that an action — such as approving account changes or providing information about a beneficiary — is required. Any delay in message delivery means a transaction could be affected or left incomplete. Reliable and fast delivery was not negotiable.
As a long-time solution for creating printed customer communications, Exstream was deeply integrated into Guardian Life's processes and workflows, so the company turned to it as a natural solution for e-delivery as well. Leveraging Exstream, Guardian built an enterprise-wide tool for transactional notices. But ensuring delivery of those messages — and receiving affirmative notification of delivery status, message opening, and customer response — required messaging infrastructure that was up to the task.
The solution
Superb inbox delivery, real-time personalization, and a seamless Exstream integration.
After evaluating e-delivery options, Guardian Life selected Bird, citing its superb delivery to the inbox, ability to generate individually personalized messages in real-time, and seamless integration with the company's Exstream customer communications management (CCM) platform. A few key features stood out.
- API-driven architecture.Bird's flexible integration options allowed for seamless connection of Exstream's message-generation capabilities to the delivery infrastructure.
- Deep messaging capabilities.Bird's infrastructure provided enormous flexibility in sending choices, with policy-driven traffic shaping, throttling, and batch delivery — letting Guardian control the flow of transactional notifications for maximum deliverability and to meet the needs of various business processes.
- Instrumentation and reporting of message disposition data. Knowing whether a message was received, opened, bounced, or blocked as spam enabled end-to-end tracking, delivery confirmation, and flagging problematic messages for exception handling.
“Bird's performance reinforces the high expectations and trust Guardian Life's customers have for our company and brand.”
Shivani Rawat, Senior Developer and Team Lead, Guardian Life
The results
Transactional notifications customers can rely on.
The technical and business benefits are clear: native integration with Exstream and flexible options for expansion with Bird's API; real-time reporting for immediate redirection of failed messages to alternate channels, ensuring regulatory delivery compliance; and personal, proactive support from Bird Technical Account Managers and the dedicated deliverability team.
The performance of Guardian Life's eNotification application has helped ensure that transactional notifications are a reliable part of its customer-facing business processes — reinforcing the high expectations and trust the company's customers have for its brand.
27M
Customers served by Guardian Life across its business units.
150
Years in business as one of the largest mutual life insurers in the United States.
244
Rank on the Fortune 500.
“Bird and Exstream have helped us ensure that transactional notifications are a reliable part of our customer-facing business processes. Their performance reinforces the high expectations and trust Guardian Life's customers have for our company and brand.”
Shivani Rawat, Senior Developer and Team Lead, Guardian Life
Carry-forward reference from bird.com. Metrics and named quotes reported by Guardian Life.
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