The Customer is Always Right

This article, Insurance & Technology : The Customer is Always Right: Leveraging ACORD Standards to Meet Their Expectations, is a great description of how the ACORD standard helps insurance companies help their customers. In it the author gives three great examples of customer expectations

• "I want a policy that meets my needs."
• "I want to know the status of the claim now."
• "I need to know, now not later."

What makes these particularly interesting to me is that they are all decision-centric questions. They mean that the customer wants their insurance company to be able to give them a decision whenever, and presumeably however, they want. This means not only having the right data, as the article points out, it also means being able to put that data to work in providing consistent, precise decisions across touch-points so that anyone (or anything) that interacts with a customer can deliver the right answer. Business rules, and an architecture that emphasizes decision management applications or services, is the way to go.