It's every company's dream to have more business coming in than it knows what to do with-but it can also become a nightmare. More than one company's reputation has been tarnished when its answer to a complaint is along the lines of, "We're swamped. We'll get to you when we can."
InServe Corp. specialists in the workers' comp market since 1994, found itself in that position a little more than a year ago. After six years in business, it began experiencing rapid growth and saw its business expand to 18 states. The flexibility to grow and serve those expanding markets was sorely tested by the ratings and issuance software it relied on from its carriers. The mix of in-house applications, third party software, and stopgap tools meant there had to be extensive manual data entry and continual passing of the data between applications.
John Pierce, CTO of InServe, said the company needed to eliminate the manual processing. "The fewer people who handle things the better," he said.
With three carriers (now two), InServe personnel had to become proficient on three rating systems. Instead of training personnel once, the company had to train them three times; each system had different policy issuance capabilities that required users to become familiar with the different manually attached forms.
Pierce said the company knew what it wanted. "Rating and policy engines were conducive to the way we wanted to do business," he said. "But we looked at a variety of solutions." Pierce and his team of senior analysts examined four or five solutions beginning in late 1999. Over a 90-day period the group came up with the answer: Instec.
Pierce said there were two factors that sold InServe on the Instec WC5 workers' compensation policy processing system: It fulfilled the company's need for a comprehensive, stable policy processing system; and it allowed InServe to expand its Internet capabilities with a custom design service for carriers, agents, and customers.
Instec was able to accomplish the installation in 30 days with rates from InServe's two carriers. "What we do is pretty vanilla," Pierce said. "We didn't have a lot of customization. Any problems with the install were strictly ours."
The software gave InServe the ability to offer policies in all 50 states via the Internet with rating and quoting capabilities for all sizes of policies. With two carriers, InServe personnel can now differentiate the filings and eliminate the need for strict reliance on the rating/issuance system of the carriers. With just one system, training issues have been eliminated as well.
Pierce said the system was almost too successful too fast. "We were up in a month and demonstrating the system to rave reviews at a conference," he said. "It went way beyond our expectations."
The new system means that InServe's agents have quicker access to the ratings software through the company's Web site. By responding to a list of simple questions, they can obtain a quick quote, generate a proposal, and issue a policy. The information is accessed through Microsoft's DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model) through a standard Web browser; it does not require downloads of additional components to the client's machine.
Pierce believes the selection process proved to be healthy for the company because it made InServe's people understand the entire process, and provided an improved system. There is much more success to look forward to as well. "When we make it available on the Internet we are going to program the front end to do underwriting," he said.
Working with Instec has been a positive experience for InServe, according to Pierce. "The relationship is more than just working with a software vendor," he said. "The Instec staff has taken the time and effort to truly understand our business plan in order to work effectively with us as a partner."
With everything in place, InServe can go back to the business of growing. And this time it's ready for anything.
THE COMPANY: INSERVE CORP.
2000 REVENUES: $130 MILLION
WEB SITE: www.inservecorp.com
THE PRODUCT: WC5 FROM INSTEC
WEB SITE: www.instec-corp.com
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