Insurance: Customer Stories

Allianz Brasil Seguros, the Brazilian subsidiary of the Allianz Group, wanted to improve the productivity of its insurance sales team and give it access to information about brokers in the field. The company deployed Microsoft® Dynamics® CRM for 400 employees—half of whom work remotely. Managers now have better strategic and day-to-day control over the sales team, which, in turn, has detected more new business opportunities and improved customer service.

Leading insurer Allianz Belgium wanted to improve its distribution relationship management with the brokers who sell its insurance products while boosting the quality of information and reducing costs. The firm replaced its outdated broker database for customer relationship management with an integrated application using Microsoft Dynamics® CRM software. As a result, Allianz Belgium is improving sales and providing a better service to brokers.

The insurance business of AXA Belgium—the largest non-life insurer in the country and second largest in life insurance—set an objective to improve the quality of service offered to its 5,000 independent brokers. These brokers sell the company’s products in a highly competitive market to hundreds of thousands of clients. The company chose Microsoft Dynamics CRM for its new customer relationship management system to help business managers support brokers more effectively with targeted marketing campaigns. In addition to a broker portal, AXA introduced processes for marketing, sales, training, service, and document management. Supported by the CRM system, visits to AXA Belgium brokers have increased, and the solution is now under evaluation for adoption by AXA insurance subsidiaries in other countries.

AXA Seguros, part of AXA Group, is an insurance company that strives to deliver superior customer service, which is critical for success in this industry. The company is replacing an inefficient, manual, claims-management system with one based on the Windows Azure platform. AXA Seguros experienced simplified development and deployment, was able to focus its efforts on business logic rather than technology, and avoided capital expenses.

Esurance has been offering auto insurance policies online since 1999. Today, the majority of its customers purchase their policies from the company’s user-friendly Web site. Many of those customers carry mobile devices, so Esurance decided to migrate some of its applications to run in the mobile environment. The company chose the software-plus-services strategy to offer this new option for using its products. In just six weeks, Esurance used the Microsoft® NET Framework 3.5 to migrate its applications to the Windows Mobile® 6.1 operating system. It also integrated two services: a text-messaging gateway and AutoWatch, which customers use to view photos of their car being repaired at an auto body shop. Esurance is poised to capture the mobile market with more claims-related features than the competition and expects to boost customer retention, cut costs, and drive revenue.

Auto insurance provider GEICO provides coverage to more than 10 million people in the United States and uses Windows Phone 7 to connect with them. GEICO created a mobile application called GloveBox that customers can use to pay bills, obtain policy ID information, and receive helpful advice in tough situations such as changing a flat tire. GEICO also supports Windows Phone 7 as a corporate phone for its sleek and easy-to-use interface, quick navigation, and seamless integration of Microsoft Office. Employees are as mobile as their customers are. They can work on the go, place calls, send email, create appointments, and attend meetings. With Windows Phone 7, GEICO can connect with customers, wherever they may be.

Spanish Insurance business Groupama Seguros couldn’t match its competitors in terms of productivity. Insurance was sold in a traditional way with lots of paper-based correspondence, and a 60-day wait for a response wasn’t unusual. The company saw the Internet as the medium to change the company’s fortunes, increasing productivity and boosting sales. It replaced an existing IBM AS-400 infrastructure and built a number of portals based on Microsoft® software, which automated a number of key processes. Today, 80 out of every 100 policies are completed online in a few moments and productivity has increased by 240 per cent. People wait a few days instead of 60 for a response, and the cost of IT has fallen significantly. Under this new way of working, premiums have grown by €720million (U.S.$1.1 billion) in the last three years.

To properly manage pension funds, ING Insurance Benelux ran Monte Carlo simulations on standalone PCs. The company wished to speed up the process so that risk managers could run many more simulations, giving them increased accuracy and greater confidence. It worked with Bitbrains IT Services to deploy a cloud-based solution that uses the Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 operating system and the HPC Excel Acceleration Toolkit from Grid Dynamics.

Insphere Insurance Solutions, one of the nation’s largest independent career-agent distribution groups, serves small businesses and the middle-income individual market. Insphere aims to be the leading distribution channel for each of its strategic carrier partners and wants to double its field sales force over the next few years. The company sought to make the agent experience as productive and streamlined as possible. Working with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner VUE Software, Insphere implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM in integration with VUE IncentivePoint and VUE Compensation Management. Now, Insphere provides an extremely efficient field-selling environment, drives more productive agent activities, and gives managers visibility into agent activities. The unified software environment is a key component of the company’s value proposition for retaining and recruiting agents.

Nationale Suisse Belgium is a subsidiary of international Swiss insurance group Nationale Suisse. In Belgium, it has a network of around 450 active credit brokers selling its life insurance products and 1,800 brokers selling its non-life products. To maintain competitive advantage, the insurer needed to modernise the way it managed its broker network and automate manual and paper-based processes.

Financial services company Northwestern Mutual wanted to present a more refined and competitive online presence. Working with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Infosys Technologies, Northwestern Mutual chose Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as its new website platform. Now, the company provides a more engaging experience and fresher content to its users through a more polished online presence, enhanced search, and improved content management.

Founded in 1984, Syarikat Takaful Malaysia is Malaysia’s leading provider of Islamic insurance with 955 employees, managing over MYR 4.67 billion (U.S.$1.9 billion) in assets. As part of a company-wide business revamp, Takaful Malaysia wanted to deploy hosted email services for its top insurance agents in the shortest timeframe possible. To reduce implementation time, the organization deployed Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS) to establish remote access and email accounts for 200 of its top agents in less than two weeks, and at a lower cost than traditional email.

Zurich Financial Services boasts an impressive Risk Engineering operation spanning 35 countries and employing nearly 1,000 risk specialists in various disciplines. However, the company relied on disparate regional systems to collect customer data, making it difficult to derive insights across geographies and industries. To help ensure consistent data collection and analysis, Zurich built a Global Risk Engineering Workstation (GREW) based on the xRM application development framework in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The Risk Engineering team at Zurich used xRM to simplify the development process and complete a significant portion of the application without the help of outside developers. The Risk Engineering team now adds greater value to the overall organization, especially by helping the policy-underwriting group and customers better understand risk exposure and identify potential solutions.