Connecting the Dots
Siloed systems and disparate customer data sources always have been inhibitors to creating the oft-cited 360-degree customer view. Here's how several insurers have made the crucial connections to create service strategies that are more than just the sum of the parts.
Recently, I received a bill for my umbrella policy from my insurance company–for a term that expired two years ago. I called the company, but the first service rep wasn't able to help me because she had access only to my auto and home policies, not the umbrella, because they were on different systems. (Incidentally, that disconnect also explains why I can pay for my auto and home policies via EFT, but I have to send a paper check to pay for the umbrella.)
After being transferred to a few more call center reps–and having to explain the situation from the beginning each time–the mystery finally was solved. When my insurer calculated the umbrella premium two years ago, it hadn't included all the underlying policies I had with the company, even though those polices haven't changed for years. Somewhere along the line, the company figured it out and now was looking to go back in time as far as it could and get some more money. The call center rep actually told me this was to my benefit, since I had been able to keep my money longer rather than paying the premium that was due.
Leaving aside the matter of unsympathetic call center staff–and the questionable legality of asking me to pay for the company's mistake–my experience is the perfect example of the service problems that have plagued insurers due to disconnects between the various systems and disparate databases that hold different bits of information on the same customer.
"One thing that drives system integration projects [for insurers] is they need a single customer view," says Steve Craggs, vice chair of the Integration Consortium. "When I call, I don't expect my broker to have to say, 'Wait a minute, I need to get onto one system for your car and another system to find out about your house.' That frustrates people."
This is hardly a new problem, so why hasn't it been solved? Aside from a host of business-related issues (where to focus investment, who the ultimate customer is, or even whether good service really is important), complicating integration efforts is the fact that when companies look to create a single picture of a customer, they are dealing with not just separate jigsaw pieces but pieces that are from different puzzle boxes.
"These systems never were built to communicate, and even if you do the technical integration, data is in different formats," says Kimberly Harris-Ferrante, vice president of research at Gartner.
Smoothing the Seams
Insurers have been doing a better job of realizing customers expect to be offered several different channels of service. But Harris-Ferrante indicates carriers haven't been good at integrating those channels to provide a seamless service experience.
"Each channel should be knowledgeable about the others, but most companies aren't at that point," she says, meaning customers still typically have to start over when, for instance, calling their agent after getting stuck halfway through a Web self-service task.
One company that has removed this type of disconnect is BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina (BlueCross). The carrier offers healthcare providers several service options, including live call center agents as well as self-service through an interactive voice response (IVR) system and BlueCross' My Insurance Manager Web portal, which first was deployed in 2000.
Today, My Insurance Manager provides doctors' offices with access to coverage information on patients and, by integrating with BlueCross' claims system, allows the company to open a claim and supplies physicians with an accurate breakdown of the carrier's claim payment and a patient's responsibility while the patient still is in the office. Genesys' computer telephony integration (CTI) solution enables the connection between the Web, IVR, and call center applications, so that when users opt out of one channel and call a service rep, that rep can take over the process midstream.
However, BlueCross wanted to make the opt-out process even smoother for users. In late 2004, the company added a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)-based call-in feature from CrystalVoice to the portal. The new service, which BlueCross calls STATchat, allows Web users to connect with service reps simply by clicking the STATchat link (and having a headset plugged into their PC).
BlueCross saw STATchat as an opportunity not only to improve service but to reduce costs, as well. "There's nothing 'free' about a toll-free call to us," says David Boucher, the insurer's assistant vice president for healthcare services. "The value proposition for us is to get users off the phone and onto the Internet."
As an enticement to use the VoIP system, STATchat callers are moved to the front of the call queue, virtually eliminating an average five-minute on-hold wait. STATchat usage currently is about 350 calls per day and steadily increasing. Boucher says it's too early to project ROI accurately until calls reach the 600 mark.
BlueCross hopes by making the VoIP feature more attractive than the 1-800 option, providers will use the Web as their primary channel. "Our ultimate goal is 100 percent self-service," says Anne Castro, the company's chief design architect.
Turning Service Into Sales
"One of the [other] reasons companies have looked at integration is to generate revenue by cross-selling and upselling," Craggs points out. AAA Carolinas sees cross-selling as a potential benefit of an ongoing data warehouse development and service-oriented architecture (SOA) project designed to modernize and increase the interoperability of its systems. AAA, which provides travel services and personal auto insurance, is building out its SOA based on IBM's WebSphere software and middleware and iSeries hardware.
Even though the projects still are in progress, AAA has been able to create marketing campaigns by mining new consolidated sources of customer data. "Before, we had to run reports and manually try to merge information together. Now, we are able to use [business intelligence software including] Brio [from Hyperion] and Infinium [from SSA Global] against our data warehouse," says Harry Johns, manager of insurance IT at AAA Carolinas. Also, by being able to access information more easily from multiple systems via the SOA project, AAA plans to do in-process analyses and identify new sales opportunities in real time.
This second activity, en-abled by effective systems integration, is a key point in bringing the service and sales processes together, Craggs asserts. "Instead of just doing data mining, you can spot events occurring, such as customers looking to insure something for a lot of money, which might give an upsell opportunity," he says. "If you provide more products [to a customer], you're doing a better job of servicing that customer."
Yet for several reasons, effective cross-selling has remained an elusive goal for insurers despite any foundational successes of their integration projects. Carriers are reluctant to step into the middle of the agent-customer relationship, a particular problem for independent-agency carriers that can't control the technology or activities of their agency force. Insurers worry about privacy issues. And Harris-Ferrante says there actually is cultural resistance to cross-selling at some insurers.
"The performance [compensation] of executives often is based on the number of customers in their product line, and therefore [they may think]: I don't want the other sides of the business to 'bother' my customer," she says. Those types of political feuds can boil over to affect service projects, as well.
"There's not much resistance to system integration driven by straight-through processing or transaction-based [objectives], but projects around 360-degree customer profiles, where the next step might be mining the profile and marketing to those customers, that's where companies get a little more edgy. Information sharing within the company isn't easy because of those politics around customer ownership," she contends.
Different Strokes
There's no single integration approach that works universally for all companies. "A fair number of companies create a [new] system of record that's responsible for maintaining customer information and turn off the function in the administration systems that did that maintenance. Some companies have created an elaborate data-warehousing approach, where information is captured and legacy systems are updated overnight," says Paul McDonnell, senior vice president and insurance segment leader at BearingPoint.
GE Insurance Solutions is an example of a carrier taking a combination approach to system integration. (At press time, it was announced GE Insurance Solutions was to be purchased by Swiss Re.) Previously, GE service staff had struggled to respond to inquiries from commercial lines property/casualty customers because those customer records could exist on any one of 15 different mainframe and client-server systems.
"We wanted to accomplish three things," says Greg Sovich, customer insights leader at GE. "First, to increase our first-call resolution. Second, to capture information about what issues we were receiving inquiries on in order to mine that for additional improvements. And third, both to reduce transfers from first-tier to second-tier agents and to transfer call details more effectively when calls did need to be transferred so that customers weren't starting from scratch with another agent."
In 2003, GE consolidated a number of distributed call centers to one location in Overland Park, Kan., and deployed Siebel's Insurance CRM solution, including a consolidated customer database, in support of that effort. Rather than bring together all customer data, GE focused its efforts by identifying the most common service questions and loading the database to enable call center reps to answer those questions without having to access legacy systems. The Siebel system also serves as the new system of record for many common, cross-product service tasks, such as address changes, feeding those updates directly to the legacy system. For less common changes and product lines, reps access the legacy platforms.
Today, 84 percent of customer issues are resolved on the first call, up from just five percent before the project. GE also has reduced the number of transfers to second-tier agents by 60 percent and reduced call referrals to staff outside the call center (such as sales staff or underwriters) by 90 percent.
Ease of integration and increased automation are key objectives of AAA Carolinas' IBM-based SOA project. As a direct writer, the company supports both agency management systems and insurance administration systems, but the two platforms had not been connected, meaning information captured at policy quotation had to be rekeyed at policy issuance.
"We were trying to eliminate that redundancy and opportunity for data-entry error," says Johns. Furthermore, different systems that contain information on the same customer–such as policy administration and AAA membership information–weren't connected.
In early 2005, the company completed rearchitecting CSC-based policy and claims administration systems as Web-services-based applications that can communicate via XML with agency management and membership information systems. Johns reports the IBM architecture also allowed AAA to integrate more easily a new document management system from RJS Software, which in addition to helping transform the formerly paper-based application process, reduced policy processing time from several weeks to a few hours and produced a two-month return on the investment in the document management system.
Also driving AAA's efforts is a future plan to target the independent agent market where interfacing with agency management systems, particularly in personal auto, is becoming an increasingly important service objective. Thus far, the company has been able to reduce policy-processing time from weeks to hours and has experienced a growth rate of 48 percent over the past 12 months, which Johns attributes to speed in processing.
Securian Financial Group was comfortable with the existing interfaces between its back-end insurance administration systems and its customers' various loan origination platforms, but it wanted to provide better customer service for claims on debt protection, credit insurance, and mortgage life and disability insurance products.
"We wanted to solve the problem of clients needing to use multiple systems and methods to report claims and obtain claim information," says Diana Baumer, manager of financial services technology at Securian, which included separate Web-based systems for reporting claims on debt and credit products and a manual reporting process for mortgage insurance claims. In August 2005, the company deployed a J2EE-based system, called e-Services, which provides customers single sign-on access for any type of product claim and integrates with Securian's claims administration system for claim origination and inquiry.
Securian projects a financial return on the system due to eliminating paper processing, although customer service was the primary driver of the project. While claims portals readily are found in other lines of insurance, Baumer says, e-Services gives Securian a point of competitive differentiation in its industry. "We are the only insurance company in the loan protection industry to be doing this," she claims.
The Data Factor
In solving customer service problems caused by disparate systems, Craggs maintains carriers tend to overlook the problems of data consolidation that system projects necessarily entail.
"The first focus always is on the train that's going to hit you–system integration–but if you look in the distance, the next train on the track is data. Once you solve one, you're going to get hit with the other." Data integration is a topic in and of itself (see "A Well-Oiled Machine," Nov. 2005), but suffice it to say data quality problems all are inhibitors to the 360-degree customer view.
"We had a lot of problems from the policy processing side accessing information from the membership side," says Johns. "In one system, [a customer] could be 'Robert,' and in the other system, 'Bob.' He could live on 'Road' or 'Rd.' because we had different people entering the information. We're still cleaning that up."
Securian addresses the front-door data quality issue in the way its systems interface with clients' loan origination systems. "Because Securian can't control the systems banks and credit unions use, we have created a series of programs that perform data scrubs prior to loading the client files into Securian's production databases," Baumer says.
A Process of Improvement
Improving customer service also doesn't stop when the systems integration project ends. First, by bringing together different systems, integration projects can allow for better visibility into the service process. GE, for instance, went from not being able to measure such basic information as call time to now having dozens of detailed call measurements. "We have Six Sigma black belt resources that are aligned to the service center," Sovich says. "If we have processes going out of control, [the black belts] look at that, and they talk to the call center agents to see whether anything unusual is going on. That data and anecdotal information turns into a black belt responding to the situation."
At The Hartford, performance manage-ment within customer service is itself a story of system integration. The carrier's Customer Experience Management Sys-tem (CEMS) is a combination of call center performance monitoring systems, PBX (telephone switch) data, a database of the results of opt-in after-call surveys completed by customers, stored recordings of all calls made to the call centers, and captured screens from all transactions made during a call.
"From an integration point of view, it was significant," says Saad Ayub, The Hartford's CIO of common business and subsidiary applications. "A lot of times people talk about integration only in the application area. Here, it also was an integration with different types of hardware–down to which device driver should be used on which PC."
The system is designed to provide users–quality assurance staff, call center managers, and individual call center agents–both summary information of call center performance as well as the ability to drill down into what happened during a particular customer call. Complicating the matter is to assess what may have happened in an exceptional service situation (either good or bad), CEMS needs to reconstruct effectively history from data stored in different systems.
"We have to integrate what was going on in the screen display with the voice recording, even though the voice recording was started from an event within PBX and the screen capture was triggered by the CTI system. That was a major task," says Stanley Prushinski, CEMS application manager at The Hartford.
Also, the company wanted to make CEMS fast and effective for eight distributed call centers and 3,500 agents while not putting an undue strain on a network that needed to support the remainder of the company, as well. "We had to have the ability to replay a call without taking up all the bandwidth," says Prushinski. The Hartford addresses the problem through a number of solutions, primarily involving the use of packeteers for network traffic management and quality of service (QoS) applications for routing.
Since deploying the final component of the CEMS system in 2003, The Hartford has seen a 15 percent improvement in first-call resolution and a decrease of as much as 15 seconds in average call time.
Like it or not, the realities of the insurance business will continue to make system integration a necessary part of carriers' efforts to provide leading-edge customer service.
"I often hear [companies say] they're going to solve their problems by going with one package–they'll go with SAP so they won't have an integration problem or Siebel to solve all their CRM problems," Craggs says. "The problem is, particularly in insurance with all the different touchpoints and business partners, no matter what, you'll never be running a 100 percent Siebel or SAP shop. There is no silver bullet."
Tech Guide: Customer Service Tools
Afni Insurance Services
Bloomington, Ill.
309-828-5226
Allfinanz
New York, N.Y.
888-824-2929
Alterian
Chicago, Ill.
312-704-1700
Amdocs
San Jose, Calif.
408-965-7000
AMS Services
Bothell, Wash.
800-444-4813
Aspect Communications
San Jose, Calif.
408-325-2200
Avaya, Inc.
Basking Ridge, N.J.
866-462-8292
Avolent
San Francisco, Calif.
800-553-5505
Benefits Technology Group
Hopedale, Mass.
866-315-7100
Bristol Consulting Group
Shelby Township, Mich.
586-992-9134
CGI
Montreal, Quebec
514-841-3200
Cincom Systems
Cincinnati, Ohio
800-224-6266
CSC Financial Services
Austin, Tex.
800-345-7672
Decision Research Corporation
Honolulu, Hawaii
800-836-6057
Diagenix Corporation
Norwell, Mass.
781-871-6624
Duck Creek Technologies
Bolivar, Mo.
866-382-5832
DWL
Atlanta, Ga.
770-325-4000
eAgency Systems
Newport Beach, Calif.
888-377-8200
EchoMail, Inc.
Cambridge, Mass.
617-354-8585
EDS
Plano, Tex.
800-566-9337
Envoy WorldWide
Bedford, Mass.
781-482-2100
Exstream Software
Lexington, Ky.
859-296-0600
E-Z Data
Pasadena, Calif.
800-777-9188
Fineos
South Portland, Maine
877-893-7904
Firepond, Inc.
Mankato, Minn.
866-826-6344
Firstlogic
La Crosse, Wis.
608-782-5000
First Notice Systems
Boston, Mass.
800-310-4367
Fiserv Insurance Solutions
Cedar Rapids, Iowa
800-943-2851
FMR Systems, Inc.
Palatine, Ill.
847-934-5566
FrontRange Solutions
Dublin, Calif.
800-776-7889
Genelco Software Solutions
St. Louis, Mo.
800-983-8114
Guidewire Software, Inc.
San Mateo, Calif.
650-357-9100
Identity Systems
Old Greenwich, Conn.
203-698-2399
InsureWorx, Inc.
Emeryville, Calif.
800-785-4526
InterlinkONE, Inc.
Wilmington, Mass.
978-694-9992
Konexx
San Diego, Calif.
800-275-6354
MarketSoft
Lexington, Mass.
781-674-0000
Mobitor Corporation
San Ramon, Calif.
925-552-8230
NaviSys
Edison, N.J.
800-775-3592
Oaktree Systems
Calverton, N.Y.
631-369-0094
onClick Corporation
Houston, Tex.
866-722-5425
OnlineBenefits
Uniondale, N.Y.
800-274-8300
Pragmatech Software, Inc.
Nashua, N.H.
800-401-9580
Robert E. Nolan Company
Dallas, Tex.
800-248-3742
S1 Corporation
Atlanta, Ga.
888-457-2237
Sage Software
Scottsdale, Ariz.
800-643-6400
SAS Institute, Inc.
Cary, N.C.
919-677-8000
Siebel Systems
San Mateo, Calif.
650-389-1128
Skywire Software
Frisco, Tex.
972-377-1110
SSA Global
San Mateo, Calif.
650-578-7200
Steel Card, LLC
Santa Barbara, Calif.
800-553-9961
Talisma
Bellevue, Wash.
888-462-3484
Teradata
Dayton, Ohio
937-445-5993
Touchstone Corporation
Costa Mesa, Calif.
714-755-2810
Value One, LLC
Morrisville, N.C.
900-565-9598
Witness Systems
Roswell, Ga.
770-754-1900
XDimensional Technologies
Brea, Calif.
800-789-2567
Xerox Global Services
Rochester, N.Y.
716-264-6550
Want to continue reading?
Become a Free PropertyCasualty360 Digital Reader
Your access to unlimited PropertyCasualty360 content isn’t changing.
Once you are an ALM digital member, you’ll receive:
- Breaking insurance news and analysis, on-site and via our newsletters and custom alerts
- Weekly Insurance Speak podcast featuring exclusive interviews with industry leaders
- Educational webcasts, white papers, and ebooks from industry thought leaders
- Critical converage of the employee benefits and financial advisory markets on our other ALM sites, BenefitsPRO and ThinkAdvisor
Already have an account? Sign In Now
© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
