Customer Is King

Farm Bureau Insurance of Michigan is like many other insurance companies in that it has multiple policy administration systems in production. The challenge FBIM faced was improving customer service. When a customer needed service, the carrier did not have a consolidated view of the customer. "We were unable to access the customer information and seamlessly move between policy, billing, or claim information," says Sandy Dent, FBIM's director of application development and technical research. "Nor could we easily access the policyholder's documents in an integrated fashion."

The carrier also faced a second challenge: While newer applications are being written in a Web-based environment, most of FBIM's data is locked in legacy mainframe file formats.

The company did not have a relational database in place, explains Dent. "These Web-based applications needed to access the mainframe data," she says. "The method we were trying to use was cumbersome and required a lot of maintenance."

FBIM performed the typical RFP process, looking for what Dent describes as a robust screen-scraping tool that would allow the carrier to redeploy its green screens to a browser and add some enhancements. "We also needed an open data access method, and we wanted to move our company to a Web-based terminal emulation product," she says.

The carrier considered four or five companies before conducting proof-of-concept trials with a pair of vendors, including GT Software. FBIM chose two of GT's products, Ivory Visual Connect and Ivory Data Access, and the products went live in November 2006.

"Not only did GT meet our current needs, we also felt it had a better strategy in place for its products to move into Web services, an area we are interested in for the future," says Dent.

The installation of the GT Software products was excellent, according to Dent. Using the Ivory Visual Connect and Ivory Data Access products, FBIM developed its customer connect center, and in the process the carrier found GT to be both a responsive vendor and partner.

"If we ran across a feature we didn't understand or if we wished it had a bit more functionality, we were able to work those situations out," explains Dent.

FBIM's users find a lot of value in the application, according to Dent, although with more than 2,000 users in the home office and the field, there have been some performance issues. "We are in an engagement with GT right now in which we are partnering to get things ironed out," says Dent. "As far as acceptance of the application, though, our users love it."

The issues being dealt with, adds Dent, relate to FBIM's ability to performance tune the application rather than to change the functionality.

The products fit well with the carrier's business strategy, notes Dent. "We knew a screen-scraping approach, which is what Ivory Visual Connect is, was not our long-term strategy, but it enabled us to get an application such as this deployed rapidly," she says. This allowed customer service calls that were coming into the home office to be handled out in the field.

FBIM has additional plans. Dent reports the carrier has licensed a contact management application and will reuse major components of the customer center by integrating them with the new system. "We're going to be reusing 85 to 90 percent of what we developed as a hub for servicing the customer and will be adding the ability to keep electronic notes about our contacts with the customer," she says.

As FBIM moves on, Dent believes the main benefit from this product installation relates to the carrier's ability to shift to a 360-degree view of that customer.

The carrier now has a more personalized interaction with the customer. The customer center allows FBIM customer service reps and agents to see things about the carrier's relationship with the customer they couldn't see before.

"We always had the same information available to agents and the home office, but it was in different formats," says Dent. "What the agent was looking at was a whole different screen than what the home office was looking at. We wanted everyone looking at the same screens so they could communicate consistently with the customer."