OUR APPROACH
THE IDEA
Improve Insurance Sales Targeting
When targeting insurance sales, underwriters and producers must work quickly and diligently to meet business goals and maximize opportunities. Technology must efficiently support relationships and highlight opportunities for partnerships. However, the legacy CRM systems of many insurers are not flexible enough to meet their changing business demands. This deficiency leads to many in the industry to turn to relying on Excel spreadsheets. While doing so addresses the flexibility issue, it creates vast issues that teams must spend time supporting.
As a result, our client was hindered in their ability to meet these priorities. With 20 underwriting platforms to manage, every task required multiple steps and workarounds. Employees were frequently bogged down with the following business inefficiencies:
•
Lack of user-friendly capabilities: The systems they used to manage sales operations were not built with the user in mind. As a result, capabilities didn’t work how employees needed them to, creating friction in reporting processes and sales flows.
•
Decentralized data: Rather than have data live in a central place, they relied on a segmented storage system. Without easy access to data, teams were unable to move quickly to report on sales goals and opportunities. They also risked having redundant and inconsistent data that challenged understanding analytics and sales accuracy.
•
Siloed communication: Employees must be able to communicate easily to foster the best outcomes and collaborate efforts. But, with siloed communications, teams often didn’t know what the other was doing or needed, which created operational gaps and lack of follow throughs.
•
Difficult agent/broker scheduling: Within the CRM, our client wasn't easily able to streamline appointment setting and task management to drive efficiencies with sales operations and reporting. This inefficiency forced challenges with sales tasks and contact management.
•
No offline capabilities: Today’s business and sales world is highly mobile — but employees were unable to keep up with tasks while traveling. Without offline capabilities, they were challenged to access valuable data and near-real-time insights. As a result, generating valuable reports and improving efficacy of meeting planning and execution remained difficult.
THE PROCESS
Design a User-Centered Solution
We knew that in order to improve how our client worked, we had to design a web application that supported all users. Without this focus, employees would continually be challenged to meet daily business goals and improve sales growth.
So, we worked side-by-side with our client and engaged them in the following process:
Focus: Discovery Session With Stakeholders
Before we developed any strategy, we sat down with our client for a discovery session. We wanted to hear directly from the stakeholder responsible for delivering the solution and those that were using it daily in the field. We listened to their challenges. We asked questions about how they worked. And we encouraged open communication between teams.
By doing so, we could manage the expectations and needs of various sales groups, and bridge information gaps while giving all users a voice at the table.
Focus: Strategy Development
By understanding different workflows, we could normalize our client’s data to ensure similar fields and records across users. We also could build a solution that allowed employees to customize reports for their specific criteria. Ultimately, from the very beginning of our support, we could make sure that every design step supported a solution that works for every business case.
During this step, we supported them with the following key elements:
•
Ongoing Communication and Feedback: While building their solution, we maintained open communication with our client and business users. This allowed us to share in real time any project updates, challenges that emerged, and solution priorities.
•
Prototype Development: To ensure we designed a quality tool to meet all business needs, we prototyped the application to bring the business vision to life. This focus allowed us to test our feature requests and user actions, and make any necessary tweaks before going live with their solution.
•
Future Case Needs: Further, we knew the web application needed to support future needs. Closely engaging with all teams allowed us to identify their forward-looking priorities and ensure we were building an adaptable solution.
THE IMPACT
Today, our client has an industry-leading web application that has empowered associates to drive business growth through new accounts and retain profitable relationships. Where reports were once a laborious task, now, each user can search and report elements critical to a project’s success. They have workflows accounting for agency relationships management, profit-sharing plans, and sales scorecards. Data that was segmented across Excel sheets are now warehoused centrally for easy use and more accurate reporting. Employees can also see correspondence history with an integrated calendar tool. Everyone can view sales trends and figures at a glance, and proactively work. And users can share documents, send emails, and generate reports whether they’re at their desk or traveling to client sites. Across their sale ecosystems, they have a scalable, robust tool that meets everyone’s needs — and sets them up for success.
