Over the past few months, these pages have contained stories from the insurance carriers, agencies and brokerages that used innovation to successfully reinvent, improve or even eliminate business processes.
The finalists (see "2009 INNovators Top 10 Finalists" ) use divergent technologies to create new opportunities for growth within the industry, support enterprisewide collaboration, and increase organizational awareness of emerging technologies.
Yet, one overriding commonality among the winners is a recognition that technological innovation is best used to augment human understanding rather than supplant it.
A panel of judges, including Matthew Josefowicz from New York-based Novarica, Mark Gorman from The Gorman Group, Minneapolis, INN staff editors, as well as INN's prestigious editorial advisory board members, determined this year's winners. INN would like to thank advisory board members Eric Bulis, SVP & CIO, SBLI USA Mutual Life Insurance Co., Ursuline Foley, SVP and CIO,XL Capital/XL Global Services/XL Reinsurance; Dennis Mehmen, CIO, VP, Business Information Services, Grinnell Mutual Reinsurance Co.; Mike Murray, VP, Finance, OneBeacon Insurance Co.; Michael Romano, SVP, Risk & Administrative Services, Highmark Inc., and Anthony Sisti, Information Systems Director, Travelers Insurance, for bringing a superior peer-based review to the process.
Since innovation is indeed ongoing, INN will begin accepting nominations for the 4th annual INNovators program later this year. Until then, the stories of the first-, second- and third-place winners and runners up can be found on insurancenetworking.com.
CSR Carpe Diem
By Alex Vorro
During these difficult times in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, carriers have come to recognize that one of the keys to their continued success is keeping their customers happy. To this end, The Phoenix Cos. seized an opportunity to improve its customer service, increase efficiency and lower unit costs in its life and annuities business.
Hartford, Conn.-based Phoenix Life Insurance, which specializes in providing products to high-net-worth consumers and business owners, recognized back in the spring of 2008 that it could improve service levels for its life and annuity policyholders and distributors. After a rigorous due diligence process, the company implemented the Customer Service Accelerator (csA) from CSC, Falls Church, Va.
The csA system, which presents a consolidated view of a customer's information for customer service representatives (CSR) by integrating data from four of Phoenix's disparate policy administration systems, has enabled CSRs to work across multiple platforms without having to be a specialist on a given system.
Phoenix began a staged implementation of CSC's solution in December 2008. Initially run in pilot form for a number of months, Phoenix rolled the system out to a call center of approximately 40 people in mid-2009. During that time, Phoenix also launched a project to build out the csA's transaction capability, which was completed in fall 2009, and recently completed enhancing the system's inquiry capabilities in April of this year. Although many implementations are planned in the future, says Matt Robertson, second VP, strategic services - program manager for Phoenix, some are still stuck in the planning phase due to budgetary constraints stemming from the financial crisis. But soft returns already are on the horizon.
"The ROI is still yet to come," he says. "We have more to build out. We have constrained the budget dollars on many projects, and that slows everything down. The return is a future item for us. However, we have already seen a definite boost in terms of training timeline for CSRs. It takes much less time now to get someone up and running as a CSR using the csA tool than any of the other platforms."
Additionally, CSRs' productivity has risen since csA's implementation, and Phoenix says the reps now have greatly accelerated access to pertinent customer information, which reduces the likelihood of errors, and improved efficiency of servicing calls by 15%.
Aside from the tangible benefits for CSRs and the customers they serve, Phoenix says implementation of the system forced them to rethink how they work in all areas of the business, and not just the call center.
"We've also been able to analyze our processes in the operations area and make adjustments accordingly," says Phoenix's Brian Wert, AVP, solutions architect. "We would still be doing some things in poor, reengineering kinds of ways. Because of this project, we had an opportunity to look at a number of our business processes and ask, "Why are we doing that?"
In the end, despite the paucity of dollars in Phoenix's IT coffers, the insurer saw an opportunity to help both themselves and their customers, and is already reaping the rewards.
Workers' Ideas Shine Bright
By Alex Vorro
Have you ever had one of those "eureka" moments - you know, when a light bulb suddenly flashes into luminescence above your head the moment an idea was conjured? Now imagine you're a manager, and from across the office you see the whole room light up in an explosion of worker innovation and creativity.
Obviously light bulbs don't spontaneously appear anytime anyone gets an idea, or Thomas Edison's legacy might be in jeopardy. Yet, how companies identify and spread innovation is still important to consider.
New York-based Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. (MetLife), recognized the potential impact of a wave of innovation, and the ramifications that it might have for the company, and began leveraging its workers' creativity for the betterment of the enterprise. Through its innovateITG program, which spanned the breadth of MetLife's Information Technology Group (ITG), the life insurer was able to drive "thought campaigns" on specific topics utilizing ideas from its IT workers.
Beginning in January 2009, ITG got together and discussed what the innovation program could do and how would it work. The group utilized industry research and the ESCAPE methodology from Gartner Inc., Stamford, Conn., which details a plan for organizations on how to take ideas in, put them through a lifecycle, and then turn them into actual programs and projects that can bring value to the organization.
Using this guide, MetLife was able to devise a program designed to drive innovation from the lowest level of IT all the way up to the senior leaders.
According to Terry Luciani, innovateITG's director and AVP, Tech & Ops, what enabled MetLife to go live with the program in June 2009 was a hosted, online tool called Spigit. The tool, a sort of virtual, collaborative suggestion box, enables users to submit, comment on, tag and rank ideas.
"Spigit really brought people together," he says, "which led to new ideas being created based on ideas that already had been submitted. It also let people search across the entire idea base, and brought people together who otherwise never would have had a chance to work or collaborate with one another."
As part of ITG's lifecycle, when a worker posted an idea to the site, and it had a high enough rating to go forward, Luciani's team would create an initial assessment to determine the idea's value to the organization, and whether or not it was plausible. After passing the initial assessment, the idea was put through a business case process.
"Many associates submitted detailed diagrams, which were housed in Spigit's document storage feature," Luciani says. "People really did a lot of work to show the value of their idea. Other teams would leverage the ideas as well, and even if it didn't go through our innovation program, teams could take those ideas away and use them on for their own benefit. In some cases, business teams just decided to fund ideas on their own."
While the insurer saw savings in a number of business areas as a result of implemented ideas captured through the innovateITG program, Luciani says the major benefits were centered on improving process design across the organization. The increased knowledge sharing between workers, collaboration and leveraging of best practices was a major win, as was empowering the workers within the organization.
Insurers looking to create a similar innovation program of their own should heed this advice: "You have to expect there to be an explosion of innovation," Luciani says. "We expected at most to get 400 ideas, and within the span of two months we blew past 100, finishing the year with more than 700." The team spent a lot of time going through each idea, and personally responding to each associate who submitted one. "It wound up being a lot harder than we thought. Therefore, organizations have to make a commitment to an innovation program for the long haul, and you must have funding behind it," concludes Luciani.
