Agent/broker services for the insurance industry
Attracting and retaining customers, managing multiple channels, enabling higher throughput, and gaining deeper sales insight is paramount in the insurance industry. Your people need business intelligence that lets them anticipate and accommodate customer needs and expectations before your competitors do.
Global and industry standards-based solutions from Microsoft and its partners empower your people to implement an integrated set of applications and workflow processes. Take advantage of tools that your people already use to create a smooth link between your producers and customers. These solutions offer multi-channel sales and service capability with a single view of the customer and analytics to enhance their interaction, regardless of channel.
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Business challenges
In today's competitive market, there are a number of challenges associated with channel sales and service. Two key themes consistently surface with industry analysts and insurance executives: straight-through processing and driving an easy-to-use business environment for your producers while reducing costs throughout the enterprise.
Insurers face additional challenges, such as:
| • | Increasingly dynamic environments, both within the enterprise, where business strategies shift, and outside the enterprise, where unanticipated opportunities and threats are constantly emerging. |
| • | The proliferation of channels and the difficulty of implementing channel-spanning processes that facilitate a single view of all channels. |
| • | Information silos, and the lack of system integration and consistency. |
| • | Complex partnering arrangements and workflows. |
| • | The ability to attract and retain customers in a profitable manner. |
| • | High costs associated with legacy systems. |
| • | The need for compliance with increasingly complex regulatory requirements. |
| • | New entrants and competition. |
Solutions
Solutions from Microsoft and its partners—a concept we call the Insurance Value Chain (IVC)—help align business and IT to enable a 360-degree view of your customers, including their sales and service needs. Using technologies such as Microsoft Dynamics Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and the 2007 Microsoft Office system, as well as partner solutions, helps create unique ways to manage channels, build connections, assist and reward best producers, and provide high levels of customer service.
These solutions empower your people to respond to an era of independent, direct, and affiliated channels, such as bancassurance, where a flexible yet integrated approach to managing the producer channel is the key to success.
Your people will be able to improve operations by using global and industry standards-based solutions as part of the IVC to help reduce the overall cost of deploying, modifying, and maintaining business processes, while linking disconnected systems and uutlilizing legacy IT investments better.
In addition, these solutions ensure that all customer interactions are handled in compliance with the enterprise's business standards and those of the prevailing regulatory authorities.
Case studies
Insurance carriers around the world have implemented solutions based on Microsoft technologies in their channel sales and service environments. Many of the benefits are shown in the following case studies.
Allstate Insurance Company
Using the Microsoft platform, Allstate created an intranet site that enables people to research Allstate products and, in some states, request or obtain a quote, purchase insurance online, and manage their existing policies 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Oxygen
Oxygen deployed a solution built on the Microsoft Office system and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services that helps automate processes that ensure compliance best practices are followed by employees. It helps financial organizations adapt to new business dynamics and sweeping regulatory changes imposed by the Financial Services Authority (FSA).
Pacific Life
Pacific Life employees needed a more efficient way to access documents and collaborate on joint projects, and IT executives sought a more secure environment. The executives migrated 1,400 users to the Windows Vista operating system, deployed a collaboration portal based on the 2007 Microsoft Office system, and implemented a messaging environment based on Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. Pacific Life anticipates significant improvements in user productivity, security, and IT efficiency.
The Progressive Group
As Progressive Group prepared to replace its mainframe-based policy management application, it needed enterprise-grade technology that would scale and provide the flexibility to easily deploy new solutions. Progressive is creating its new policy management application using Microsoft technologies. It will enable the company's 45,000 agents to access policy data through Web-based access.
PT Asuransi Allianz Utama Indonesia
Allianz Utama deployed Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0, a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database, and Visual Studio .NET to create a solution that integrates smoothly with the company's existing e-insurance application. The new solution provided visibility, timely and accurate reporting, shorter response times, and streamlined business processes.
SNS REAAL
Acquisitions gave the company's fast-growing insurance unit five disparate CRM solutions. Information was difficult to access and share, hampering customer service efforts. The company deployed Microsoft Dynamics CRM to intergrate and combine its CRM solution.
H&R Block
Microsoft Dynamics CRM is enabling H&R Block to broaden and deepen its relationship with more than 20 million clients in 11,000 offices across the United States. They turned to Microsoft Dynamics CRM to create the Benefits Enrollment Network, which enables H&R Block tax professionals to assist customers.
Business benefits
Insurers are innovating and positioning for growth by knowing what to strive for and which customers to target in a very competitive landscape. By implementing Channel Sales and Service solutions from Microsoft and its partners, you and your people can realize the following benefits:
Support stronger connections
Microsoft and its partners support global and industry standards to create a pre-installed capability that more easily integrates solutions within the Insurance Value Chain, better connecting organizations internally, as well as externally with partners, suppliers, and channel distribution networks.
Improve operations
Achieve a higher level of integration and software stability, centralize data management and analysis, significantly improve processing time, and simultaneously lower implementation and maintenance costs. By providing global and industry standards-based solutions, Microsoft and its partners can help your people reduce the overall cost of deploying, modifying, and maintaining business processes while linking disconnected systems and making better use of legacy IT investments.
Manage channels better
Connect multiple stakeholders along the carrier-to-customer value chain via multiple direct and indirect channels, create a single view of all sales channels, and develop a sales channel infrastructure that can evolve and change as business and customer needs and expectations change. Predictive analysis capabilities delivered by straight-through processing empower your people to respond directly to customers or through intermediaries.
Achieve higher throughput
Streamlined and integrated systems supporting a transformed business lead to greater efficiencies and cost reductions. Industry analysts believe that organizations can reduce costs by 20 to 25 percent using pass-through efficiencies created by automatic exception underwriting and predictive analysis. This makes sense, since straight-through processing allows organizations to handle sales directly with the consumer or through an intermediary. However, straight-through processing also requires collaborative workflows connected to core systems. If an organization runs disconnected IT systems or relies on manual processes, straight-through processing is very difficult to implement.
Provide superior customer service
Create a single channel-spanning, self-service process that lets insureds and prospects, as well as producers, perform transactions. Superior customer service is achieved by a complete view of the customer that ensures actionable access to all available information about customer activity, history, and sales and service needs. Profitable growth for insurance organizations depends on their ability to meet customer needs no matter who the customer is, where they are, or how they need to be served. Organizations that deliver innovative, convenient sales and service options stand a better chance of retaining customers and building relationships that generate higher penetration and greater profitability.
Obtain deeper insights
Provide real-time business intelligence for effective retention of insureds and management of producers. The wealth of market data that exists in an organization or that is readily accessible elsewhere must be accessible so people cannot access, analyze, and share it across the enterprise. Up to now, the missing link has been a way to make use of the power of this raw material in order to direct and expand sales efforts, manage channel partner relationships, improve and increase service lines and product offerings, and nurture communication and idea sharing. Once they have that link in the form of robust technology, organizations can finally translate the data in their systems into the competitive advantage critical for long-term success and operating efficiency.
Overview
Technologies
