Action Plan

Content Management

Action Plan

Farmers Insurance Group knows time is money, so the carrier decided to get information out faster for its agents to use–both to save more and earn more.

Not all of the older technology employed by insurers is inefficient, but for carriers to get the most productivity out of their independent agents, they need to connect with them in a timely and efficient manner, and that usually involves the Internet.

Farmers Insurance Group's independent agents used a green-screen network in the past. "That's great if all you want to do is punch out transactions all day," says Riko Metzroth, vice president of e-business development. "It's not so great if you want to start collecting data on those transactions. We wanted to provide our agents the ability to do their business any time, anywhere they could access the Internet."

Farmers has been using employee and agent portals for five years in areas other than data management, but in recent years, the carrier found it was moving further ahead on behalf of its agents. "We continued to build out the agency portal faster because that's the lifeline for our agencies to get access to our systems," says Metzroth.

The one thing in common between Farmers' agents and employees was access to management reports, which ranged from commission reports to a list of policies written to loss ratios. "Our business is all about statistics," says Metzroth. So, getting data to agents and business users is vital.

All reports were being run out of the company's mainframe system and then were printed and distributed. "We were sending out [reports] to roughly 14,000 agents, another 500 district managers, and about 9,000 employees," Metzroth indicates. "That's a lot of paper."

Many reports would be sent via snail mail, and that meant long delays. "Sometimes [agents] would get these reports three weeks after the end of the month," says Metzroth. "The power of data is being able to react to it quickly, not wait three weeks. This was a speed-to-market issue in terms of getting the right sales and profit information out there."

Farmers had been using software from Mobius Management Systems since 1997 on a small scale to display some hard-copy reports on the green screens so certain departments could get access to the data faster. "We figured since Mobius performed well for us on a small scale, we should include it when we did our due diligence," says Metzroth. "We wanted to display all our reports in real time and online in a fashion in which the users could slice and dice them and yet still be able to archive them."

Farmers needed a solution that worked on the Web, could be integrated with Windows and Excel, and also could integrate with the carrier's mainframe processing systems. As part of its due diligence, Farmers tested every product it was interested in. "We saw some good products, but invariably they were in some form of beta and had been in that form for quite some time," comments Metzroth. "One thing I've learned over the years is [developers] may tell you they are six months away from delivery, but inevitably they just don't get there."

Mobius, with its View Direct product, already was running with other customers. "We ran a pilot right here to see how well it would integrate with our systems," says Metzroth. "It might look pretty, but if it doesn't integrate with our particular legacy systems, it does us no good. If anything, the support costs go up because you constantly try to customize it."

Mobius won, based on performance and ease of use, according to Metzroth. Farmers did not have to customize the Mobius product, which was another benefit. "We installed it without any hiccups in the spring for our employees and in August for all of our agents," he says. "We are saving about $600,000 a year, and that is primarily in paper, ink, and postage."

Metzroth is hoping the agents take action on the data much sooner than in the past. "If we can show them trends in their books of business–maybe it's just policy runoff or something like that–they can take action and be more aggressive in communicating with their current customers before renewals come up," he says. "The reason for this project is to get the information out faster and to save on expenses. If we can get more sales out of it, that will be gravy."