Company

The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America is over 150 years old and one of the larges mutual life insurance companies in the United States.

Challenge

A key to The Guardian Life's long-term success has been keeping its clients’ needs central to all aspects of its business practices. So, when they began to implement e-delivery of customer communications and transactional notices, reinforcing this 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 the critical components of the system is to notify customers that an action such as approving account changes or providing information about a beneficiary is required. As such, 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 at Guardian Life, Exstream was deeply integrated into the company’s business processes and workflows. So, Guardian Life turned to the platform as a natural solution for e-delivery as well. Leveraging Exstream, the company developed an enterprise-wide tool for transactional notices. However, ensuring delivery of these customer messages, as well as receiving affirmative notification of delivery status, message opening, and customer response, required messaging infrastructure that was up to the task.

Solution

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 were:

• Bird's API-driven architecture and flexible integration options allowed for seamless

  connection of Exstream’s message-generation capabilities to the delivery infrastructure.

• The deep messaging capabilities of Bird’s infrastructure provided enormous flexibility in sending choices, with policy-driven traffic shaping, throttling, and batch delivery. This flexibility enables Guardian to control the flow of transactional notifications for maximum deliverability and to meet the needs of various business processes.

• Bird's instrumentation and reporting of message disposition data (whether a message was received, opened, bounced, blocked as spam, etc.) enabled end-to-end message 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

Results

Today, the technical and business benefits for Guardian Life 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.

• Personal and proactive support from Bird Technical Account Managers and the dedicated deliverability team.

The performance of Guardian Life’s eNotification application has helped to ensure that transactional notifications are a reliable part of its customer-facing business processes. The application reinforces the high expectations and trusts Guardian Life’s customers have for the company and its brand.

“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