Imagine that your department is tasked with handling customer liability claims.  You would like to make this a “customer service” experience but your manual processes make it difficult to keep the customer in the loop at all times.  You just can’t afford to staff a customer service hotline where the customer can call at any time, day or night to inquire about the status of their claim.

Suppose, however, that you could set up a special “status” field in your claims administration system and sprinkle workflow throughout the system that keeps the status field up to date. For example, when a check is cut and mailed, the system updates the status field with “Check mailed on <date>”.   When the claim is first set-up, an e-mail is automatically sent to the claimant that says… “Hi customer, anytime you would like to know the status of your claim, just -REPLY- to this e-mail and the status will arrive in your e-mail inbox within two minutes.”

This capability exists today and is in use by your peers.