Insurance carriers have long regarded customer service as a source of competitive advantage. Yet, in recent years, the connotation of customer service in the insurance industry has become increasingly fuzzy, and now encompasses a variety of transactions over multiple platforms.
Indeed, insurers now need to accommodate everyone from a senior citizen phoning a call center to report a claim, to a member of the millennial generation expecting to pay a bill via their mobile device. As customers become increasingly comfortable using self-service features online and on mobile devices, it is creating new challenges for carriers.
One service problem that cuts across channels is latency. Slow-loading screens are a wellspring of vexation for agents, customer service representatives (CSRs) and consumers alike. One group of technologies that enables businesses to spot and mitigate service degradations and outages caused by poorly performing applications is business transaction management (BTM).
Despite extensive testing, performance glitches inevitably arise in production environments. By providing real-time monitoring to ferret out bottlenecks at the network, database and application level, BTM ensures that transactions get executed timely and successfully. Much as carriers have leveraged predictive and business analytics to improve areas such as underwriting and claims handling, BTM turns that analytic approach inward and uses business metrics and customized dashboards to pinpoint performance issues.
"This is basically business intelligence for IT, and IT needs it," says Linh Ho, director, product marketing for New York-based OpTier, a provider of business transaction management tools.
While BTM tools do resemble the application performance management tools familiar to IT professionals, they are intended to provide a more holistic view and solve business problems. To be sure, ensuring positive user experience is no longer just an issue for IT, it's a problem for business unit managers. By providing both a granular and high-level view, the goal of BTM is keep both business process owners and IT staff apprised of any potential problems. "Traditional infrastructure monitoring tools are still very siloed," Ho says. "BTM provides you end-to-end visibility into your entire infrastructure."
One ancillary benefit of having this broad, shared view is that it goes a long way to eliminate some of the internecine finger-pointing that can arise between-say the network team and server team-over where the true source of a performance issue resides, Ho says.
GETTING GRANULAR
Dallas-based GAINSCO Inc. recently opted to install business transaction tools to help the auto and specialty lines insurer cope with its rapid growth. The company chose SharePath Software from Framingham, Mass.-based Correlsense to make better sense of its transactional world.
"We wanted to have the tools in place to monitor our transaction growth so that we could effectively scale and be in position to do more with our infrastructure platform," says GAINSCO CIO Phil West, noting the company spent the last year redesigning the underlying architecture of its website. "I'm looking at data at an aggregated level, but if I wanted to, I could drill down to look at the one transaction out of 1,600 that failed to meet the SLA. It's almost like having a real-time data warehouse."
West says the tools help give people in the data center a better appreciation of what agents are seeing on their desktops. The perception that an application is "running slow" or "crashing" can now be pinned down with mathematical precision. "Now we're able to define the gap between how quickly a transaction executes in an environment I control, and account for the network latency and screen rendering to the actual browser of the user," he says. "This allows us to separate perception from reality by providing empirical data right down to the transaction level."
Oren Elias, CEO of Correlsense, says absent modern monitoring and investigative tools, carriers that have invested heavily in systems are reliant on information from the vendors or system architects to gauge performance. "The real picture is often quite different from what they thought they had," he says. "You just can't model anymore. You have to have technology that can show in real-time what changes."
Data AND SOA
The proliferation of BTM also dovetails with the rise of service-oriented architectures. Carriers can head off customer service issues long before they happen by bearing in mind the potential end uses of data when designing systems, says David Packer, principal of Farmington Hills, Mich.-based technology consultancy X by 2.
Packer says as the Web becomes more prominent-any data hygiene issues insurers may have will become more public. "Carriers used to be able to hide their data behind customer service reps and agents, now we're talking about taking data from back end systems and having it show up seconds later in a browser in front of a customer," he says.
Carriers also need to give serious consideration to how data from multiple distribution channels will interact in order to avoid consistency issues, Packer contends. "You need a well-thought-out architecture to make sure that you are providing consistent information, performance characteristics and security profiles," he says. "There also needs to be a clear separation between your back-end architecture and your presentation layer."
PROCESS CONSIDERATIONS
Mike Fitzgerald, a senior analyst at Boston-based Celent, says technology is also begetting process improvements that engender better customer service.
One trend he notices is a lesser number of customer service representatives handling individual customers who call in to call centers. "There are a lot fewer handoffs now," he says. "The problem stays with the CSR and there's a real emphasis on accountability."
Behind this trend is more information being made available to CSRs in a single presentation layer.
"It's a known and workable technology; the question is whether people are going to invest in it," Fitzgerald says. "It's more of an aggregation play than a process play. You can custom-build it."
Jill Bookman, CEO of Cherry Hill, N.J.-based American Collectors Insurance, says she emphasizes training to keep customer service levels high. Since the company specializes in insuring rare cars, this means making sure that customer service representatives are knowledgeable about the subject matter. "We do tons of training," she says. "We can't have a representative ask a caller if a Mustang is made by Ford."
Though the company keeps an eye on call length, Bookman also says the company is sure to afford their representatives the extra time needed to put callers at ease.
"Our average service call is less than four minutes, but a call that may turn into a policy is at least nine minutes," she says. "We want the customer to feel he is dealing with people who are going to protect him right way."
Bookman also dedicates agents to deal solely with inquiries generated through the Web Channel. "We have part of our team dedicated to calls, and part of our team dedicated to online service and that seems to be working, but they are cross-trained so that in times of heavy volume or flux one can help the other," she says.
The Wireless Frontier
No distribution channel signifies the shifting borders of customer service expectations more so than mobile devices.
While one's immediate inclination may be to dismiss the impact of an iPhone or an Android device on insurer's current business operations, these devices already are starting to play a role, especially in personal lines.
Several property/casualty insurers have unveiled mobile applications that enable users to access an auto accident checklist, collect and exchange driver and accident information, send accident photos to claims processors and locate approved auto repair facilities.
"Mobile operating systems have become more sophisticated, and as a result, become very real platforms," says David Packer, principal of Farmington Hills, Mich.-based technology consultancy X by 2. "There is a clear expectation from customers that they should be able to do business with on these devices.
Indeed, Wendy Aarons-Corman, President, North America for Farmington, Conn.-based edge IPK Inc., says even if carriers are not currently developing applications for a specific mobile platform they need to be cognizant of the move to open architectures such as HTML5.
"Most of the mobile technologies coming out are open architecture," she says. "Your strategic thinking now has to be very much about who your users are going to be. Not everybody is sitting in front of a computer using Internet Explorer 8.0."
Moreover, the timeframe between early adopter and laggard is less than ever, she notes. "Its less about being leading edge than keeping up with what is going on," she says. "If mobility is the new norm, it's just keeping up with the norm."
To fully exploit the potential of mobile platforms, Packer says insurers need a well-thought-out architecture. An agnostic presentation layer atop a back-end system that enables systems to interact seamlessly with a multitude of browsers also is essential, Corman says.
A commitment to mobility may also call for organizational changes. When Hartford, Conn.-based The Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. launched The Harford Mobile in May, it also announced the creation of a digital commerce division designed to ease the creation of mobile applications.
"The Hartford Mobile represents our commitment to innovative, customer-focused technology," Jonathan Bennett, EVP digital commerce & customer analytics, said in a statement at the time. "We have recently reorganized the company around customer segments, and we established an integrated digital commerce organization. These improvements will position us to more effectively identify customer needs and continue to launch new technologies."
