Who can afford a bad investment, especially in a software system that you're going to use (or should I say "be stuck with") for years to come? ROI may be the popular term of the day, but decisions can be critical to the company's future beyond just the bottom line.
If there is a hotter term than ROI in the business world today it's CRM: customer resource management. Foremost Insurance, a specialty carrier for mobile homes, motor homes, travel trailers, and other recreational equipment, needed an improved CRM system to support its independent agent force. The company got that-along with a pretty fair ROI-when it invested in Oncontact Software's Client Management Software (CMS).
Just about anything would have been an improvement over the way Foremost kept in touch with its agents; voice mail and the U.S. Postal Service were the only tools it had. The company generated monthly premium reports for its agents that were 500 to 1,000 pages long, according to Kammi McDermott, director of agency sales. Sending these reports was costly and time consuming, but the single-page reports on each account in the territory were the only tools the agents had to work with. Without them it was impossible to examine individual territories with home-office personnel.
Foremost brought in four vendors to present their solutions. It also hired Cap Gemini as a consultant to advise it on the best path. Ed Sitz, senior technical support person for Foremost, said the straw that tipped the deal to Oncontact was its willingness to make modifications to the system that Foremost felt it needed.
The change has been a success for Foremost. Out of the darkness has come a company that now equips its agents with laptops, portable printers, and most importantly, an e-mail system that allows quicker and less expensive contact between the agents and the home office. The company also uses the iAnywhere Solutions from Sybase (www.sybase.com) — a mobile solution that allows mobile or wireless access to the company's database.
Foremost performed a skills assessment before handing out equipment. Sitz said: "We wanted to see where our people were at with technology. We found that some didn't even know how to turn on a PC."
Home-office training was completed first so company personnel could then head to the field to train the agents. "We trained them to get on the laptop first and gave them e-mail capabilities," Sitz said. "Now they can do just about everything. Training really wasn't all that difficult. Once they saw their accounts on the screen it kind of clicked for them." (No pun intended.) The company is continuing its training program with visits to the agents once or twice a year.
Foremost downloads its reports into CMS from its mainframe so agents can better use the data available to them-information both on their own territory and on the company as a whole. "It's a two-fold account management tool," said McDermott. "All the agents have the data at their fingertips. We can also see how many accounts they are working on."
Foremost's goal was efficient operation when it signed up with Oncontact, but the real benefit to the company has been the increased profits. Foremost has realized a $2 million ROI in the two and a half years it has used CMS. In addition to savings in time, postage, and paper, "we're not tripping over each other," McDermott said.
It realized those savings in the decrease in postage and faxing expenses; word processing costs were drastically cut; paper training manuals and newsletters were converted to electronic copies; travel and automobile expenses were slashed; and the company was able to make better use of its staff.
If there has been a negative, McDermott said it's that Foremost had been growing too fast. But the company has sorted that problem out and aims for an even bigger return on its investment in the coming years. With the growth of the recreational vehicle industry in this country, Foremost's growth may not be leisurely, but the profits should make company execs more restful.
THE COMPANY: Foremost Insurance Group
NET WRITTEN PREMIUM: $812 million
WEB SITE: www.foremost.com
THE PRODUCT: Client Management Software from Oncontact Software
WEB SITE: www.oncontact.com
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