Customer experience

San Francisco - Mergers and acquisitions have become the norm in the insurance industry, and two recent acquisitions prove this. More than a month after Boston-based Liberty Mutual Group announced its acquisition of Fairfield, Ohio-based Ohio Casualty Corp. for $44 per share in cash, Wells Fargo Insurance Services Inc., a subsidiary of San Francisco-based Wells Fargo & Co., announces it will acquire Universal Insurance Services Inc., Grand Rapids, Mich. The acquisition is expected to close July 1, 2007, according to Wells Fargo.

Washington - On-the-go consumers prefer to handle an increasing number of transactions themselves through self-service devices, and are more likely to do business with companies that make it easier to for them to do so, according to a new study conducted by BuzzBack Market Research for Dayton, Ohio-based NCR Corp. One exception though, according to the study, is insurance customers.

Thousand Oaks, Calif. - Blue Cross of California (BCC) introduces an enhanced Dental Blue Cost Estimator, an online tool designed to enable BCC's Dental Blue members to estimate their out-of-pocket expenses for common procedures such as cleanings, fillings and periodontal treatment. Members can access the Dental Blue Cost Estimator, through the recently launched Treatment Cost Advisor tool, to view estimated out-of-pocket costs by zip code.

Los Angeles - Farmers Insurance Group of Companies opened its second ServicePoint operation. The new call center is based in Austin, Texas and is dedicated to providing service and care to Farmers agents and their customers. The other center is in Olathe, Kansas.

Minneapolis - Unitrin Direct a Chicago supplier of direct-to-consumer automobile insurance and its business partner, State College, Pa.-based Optical Image Technology, Inc., have received the Insurance Accounting and Systems Association's (IASA) 2007 Tech Award, the companies announced. This award was presented during the IASA 2007 Educational Conference and Business Show this week.Ian Zimmerman, Unitrin Direct’s director of underwriting, and OIT’s vice president of sales and marketing, James Thumma, were on hand to accept the award during IASA’s annual business luncheon. Unitrin Direct was looking to support its overall goal of becoming a leading direct auto insurer by scaling processes and optimizing support functions. The joint project between OIT and Unitrin Direct was to implement an enterprise-wide digital organization of their corporate information and to re-engineer their business processes by using workflow to horizontally align disparate silos of information stored within a variety of departments. Unitrin Direct is now equipped to push documents through automated workflows for approvals, signatures, customized letters, and calls as well as implement business processes that will automatically direct actions that need to take place. In addition, multiple technologies and departments such as underwriting, claims, and customer service were connected in order to process more work faster, with fewer human resources. Unitrin implemented Optical Image's DocFinity Workflow product to connect the company's policy administration system, and third-party applications, including their automated call system and capture, indexing, and barcode reading along with other DocFinity components such as an electronic repository. The technology, which includes over 24 separate automated workflows, is expected to continue to enhance Unitrin Direct’s position in a highly competitive insurance market as well as put them in a strong position for future growth, said the companies. Source: Optical Image Technology Inc.

New York - The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America introduced a debit card and Web tools as part of its FlexPlan Flexible Spending Account program, which enables clients to access and manage FSA accounts easily.Guardian's FlexPlan offers employees point of service access to money they set aside in their FSA, minimizing steps of substantiating claims with receipts and waiting for FSA reimbursements via mail. Clients can pay for co-payments, deductibles, prescriptions, eyeglasses and other eligible healthcare expenses with just one swipe of a Benny Pre-paid MasterCard card.

Basic data integration, the act of extracting, transforming and loading (ETL) structured data from disparate systems into a single data store so it can be manipulated and evaluated, carries with it certain logical elements and processes.In today's insurance IT department, however, the vast amount (approximately 80% according to experts) of new data being generated is unstructured, (Web, VoIP, IM and e-mail) and being lopped into data silos that are growing exponentially. Integrating structured and unstructured data brings with it yet another layer of complexity.

With consumers now paying more premiums online than by paper check, insurance carriers need to present electronic bills effectively enough to leave a lasting good impression.Take a look at the numbers. Online bill payments accounted for 39% of bill payments among online households last year, an increase of 4% over the previous year, according to The 2007 Consumer Bill Payment Survey, a study by Rochester, N.Y.-based Harris Interactive Inc. and The Marketing Workshop Inc. Norcross, Ga. In contrast, the volume of checks sent by mail fell 4%, accounting for 34% of the volume.

U.S. CONSUMERS WANT CONTROL OF E-HEALTH RECORDSAmericans show a strong interest in controlling their own electronic medical records, according to a national survey released at a health IT conference.

ARCOT SYSTEMS AND ADOBE WORK ON DIGITAL SIGNINGSunnyvale, Calif.-based Arcot Systems Inc. has collaborated with San Jose, Calif.-based Adobe Systems Inc. to create a new option for digital signing in Adobe Acrobat software and Adobe Reader software using "Roaming Digital IDs."