The Last Words on Innovation?
Insurance Networking News, 05/01/2010
Over the past few months, these pages have contained stories from the insurance carriers, agencies and brokerages that used innovation to successfully reinvent, improve or even eliminate business processes.
The finalists (see "2009 INNovators Top 10 Finalists" ) use divergent technologies to create new opportunities for growth within the industry, support enterprisewide collaboration, and increase organizational awareness of emerging technologies.
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Yet, one overriding commonality among the winners is a recognition that technological innovation is best used to augment human understanding rather than supplant it.
A panel of judges, including Matthew Josefowicz from New York-based Novarica, Mark Gorman from The Gorman Group, Minneapolis, INN staff editors, as well as INN's prestigious editorial advisory board members, determined this year's winners. INN would like to thank advisory board members Eric Bulis, SVP & CIO, SBLI USA Mutual Life Insurance Co., Ursuline Foley, SVP and CIO,XL Capital/XL Global Services/XL Reinsurance; Dennis Mehmen, CIO, VP, Business Information Services, Grinnell Mutual Reinsurance Co.; Mike Murray, VP, Finance, OneBeacon Insurance Co.; Michael Romano, SVP, Risk & Administrative Services, Highmark Inc., and Anthony Sisti, Information Systems Director, Travelers Insurance, for bringing a superior peer-based review to the process.
Since innovation is indeed ongoing, INN will begin accepting nominations for the 4th annual INNovators program later this year. Until then, the stories of the first-, second- and third-place winners and runners up can be found on insurancenetworking.com.
CSR Carpe Diem
By Alex Vorro
During these difficult times in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, carriers have come to recognize that one of the keys to their continued success is keeping their customers happy. To this end, The Phoenix Cos. seized an opportunity to improve its customer service, increase efficiency and lower unit costs in its life and annuities business.
Hartford, Conn.-based Phoenix Life Insurance, which specializes in providing products to high-net-worth consumers and business owners, recognized back in the spring of 2008 that it could improve service levels for its life and annuity policyholders and distributors. After a rigorous due diligence process, the company implemented the Customer Service Accelerator (csA) from CSC, Falls Church, Va.
The csA system, which presents a consolidated view of a customer's information for customer service representatives (CSR) by integrating data from four of Phoenix's disparate policy administration systems, has enabled CSRs to work across multiple platforms without having to be a specialist on a given system.
Phoenix began a staged implementation of CSC's solution in December 2008. Initially run in pilot form for a number of months, Phoenix rolled the system out to a call center of approximately 40 people in mid-2009. During that time, Phoenix also launched a project to build out the csA's transaction capability, which was completed in fall 2009, and recently completed enhancing the system's inquiry capabilities in April of this year. Although many implementations are planned in the future, says Matt Robertson, second VP, strategic services - program manager for Phoenix, some are still stuck in the planning phase due to budgetary constraints stemming from the financial crisis. But soft returns already are on the horizon.
"The ROI is still yet to come," he says. "We have more to build out. We have constrained the budget dollars on many projects, and that slows everything down. The return is a future item for us. However, we have already seen a definite boost in terms of training timeline for CSRs. It takes much less time now to get someone up and running as a CSR using the csA tool than any of the other platforms."
Additionally, CSRs' productivity has risen since csA's implementation, and Phoenix says the reps now have greatly accelerated access to pertinent customer information, which reduces the likelihood of errors, and improved efficiency of servicing calls by 15%.
Aside from the tangible benefits for CSRs and the customers they serve, Phoenix says implementation of the system forced them to rethink how they work in all areas of the business, and not just the call center.
"We've also been able to analyze our processes in the operations area and make adjustments accordingly," says Phoenix's Brian Wert, AVP, solutions architect. "We would still be doing some things in poor, reengineering kinds of ways. Because of this project, we had an opportunity to look at a number of our business processes and ask, "Why are we doing that?"
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