Who among us has not uttered those fateful words: "If you want a job done right, do it yourself"? The question before the jury today is about the data-specifically, who's responsible for them. The customer? The carrier? And who is most likely to get it right? After more than 40 years of doing it themselves, 21st Century Insurance felt it was time to empower its customers.
If a customer wanted to check her bill, why not let her do it electronically instead of paying a customer service representative to look up the information and repeat it over the phone. For a company that has made its mark in the western U.S. by dealing directly with its customers, it made perfect sense to let the customers do some of the work themselves.
21st Century is a direct writer of auto and homeowners policies. Its presence on the Internet was mostly brochureware; there were certainly no sales or service channels for its customers, said Marina Lubinsky, assistant vice president and manager of Internet business development. "We recognized that the Internet holds great potential as a natural extension of our proven practice of direct to customer marketing."
The company's call center serviced more than 800,000 policyholders, so the decision was made to relieve some of that pressure by offering self-service to customers over the Internet.
The company knew what it wanted; it had to find the right partner to lead it there. "We understood which direction we wanted to go," Lubinsky said. "We just needed someone who could leverage our existing system. The back-end system was already there."
The carrier compiled a list of 10 Web development companies and pared it down to two. After six weeks of research, 21st Century's in-house team recommended Jacada. The insurer put together a project team to determine what was needed on the new Web site. "We did the design, as far as the look and feel," said Lubinsky. "Jacada built the application." Jacada provides a Web-to-host software infrastructure to transform a company's legacy or mainframe system into e-business and wireless solutions.
The installation went quickly because 21st Century had already completed the design work, said Bruce Millar, senior project manager for the carrier. The new Web site allows customers access to billing and payment information, to make changes in their policies, to decide on premium payments, and request claims forms.
"They can do it 24/7 from anywhere in the world," he said. By transferring 17 green screens into two HTML pages, all the policy information was consolidated and ready for the Web.
Once the system was ready to go live, the next step was a major marketing campaign. "We re-branded the image of the company," Millar said. The company Web site is www.i21.com, and the i21.com appears under the 21st Century logo on the Web site and other marketing material.
The company has been impressed with the success it has experienced in such a short time. "We had 1.7 million page views last month," said Millar. "The number has been going up each month. Our primary goal was to provide our policyholders with self-service functionality. We believe that better customer service is derived from streamlined customer service."
Allowing customers to service their own policies has eliminated backlogs in the call center and slowed the paper log. "We've had good feedback from our customers," said Lubinsky. "They want even more functionality. They tell us that this is a lot better than being on hold on the phone."
The system is still a work in progress. 21st Century wants that additional functionality as well. "We want insurance to be easy," she said. "We have to educate our customers, so we built in some educational content in an easy to use way that is both approachable and acceptable to them."
THE COMPANY: 21ST CENTURY INSURANCE
NET WRITTEN PREMIUM: $832 MILLION
WEB SITE: www.i21.com
THE PRODUCT: JACADA SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT KIT
AND JACADA FOR HTML
WEB SITE: www.jacada.com
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