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CRM: How a Brokerage Handles a Touchy Subject

Carrie Burns April 2007

The customer relationship-it's a touchy subject. How do you make sure you're doing the right thing for each and every customer? How do you know if your follow-up on a lead wasn't duplicated by a coworker?

Cottingham & Butler Insurance Inc., a privately held Dubuque, Iowa, insurance company, encounters those dilemmas daily. It's part of the job for a firm that offers employee benefits and risk management services, including property & casualty insurance, casualty claims administration, employee benefit brokerage and consulting, benefit claims administration, medical management services, wellness and disease management, and personal insurance services.

In the past, Cottingham & Butler sales reps tried to sidestep inefficiencies by using Excel lists of leads. The lists were never cross-referenced, so clients appeared on multiple lists throughout the company. "We weren't approaching prospects as one company," says Nicole Pfeiffer, who was Cottingham & Bulter's director of marketing at the time and has since been named vice president of human resources. "We were going as many individuals."

Cottingham & Butler researched customer relationship management (CRM) systems and, because of the ability to customize, decided to implement AppExchange Professional Edition from Salesforce.com Inc. Little did they know they would soon upgrade to an Enterprise Edition to allow other groups in the company to use the technology.

THE NEW SYSTEM

Cottingham & Butler went live with the CRM system in June 2004, after taking about six months to understand it, get it ready and test it. "We consolidated information from various systems we have here," says Lori Steger, CRM/database project specialist at Cottingham & Butler. "We compiled comprehensive lists of all our accounts and used [AppExchange] to control the number of leads so we would only have one person touching [customers] at a time."

Compiling the lists and cleaning up the data took a lot of time and work, according to Pfeiffer. "There was a lot of duplication in a lot of different systems both in the prospecting side and then pulling clients out of multiple databases as well. So we had to go through a lot of de-duplication software," she says. "We had to have meetings with the [sales reps] to determine who was going to be the true owner of duplicated or owned prospects."

The Cottingham & Butler sales representatives were used to their old tracking processes, which involved a piece of paper and Excel, says Pfeiffer. "They didn't even track how the phone call went or know when they should call that person back."

So, some employees resisted CRM, but Pfeiffer forged ahead with training sessions. "We started [training] with the launch in June-we had a kick-off meeting and then we had another meeting a month later to see how things were going," she says. "We continued to have another training [session] once every month for the first four months and then we backed off to every two or three months the first year."

After that first year Pfeiffer started seeing the sales reps' attitudes change. She remembers reps expressing their pleasure at knowing when a client renews, thus giving them a chance to get their business. The system also contains records of what is said in conversations with a client. Now the sales rep knows what his or her barriers are with certain clients.

EXPANDED VERSION

Cottingham & Butler found itself researching CRM systems again in January 2005. This time it was for software to help benefits managers, who are part of the employee benefits group. They are the front line to the customer once the relationship is established; they go on calls with reps, handle incoming customer issues and prepare reports for renewals. The ability to customize convinced the company to use AppExchange again, this time picking Enterprise Edition. Once again, customization was a big factor.

"We were using a system that was created internally for our service people to manage our clients," says Pfeiffer. "And there were just so many unique fields that we had built in our own system that we needed in our bigger system."

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