Digital-first strategies across insurance operations – for many years seen as an insurers Achilles’ heel – is now becoming a necessity, prompting the need for insurers to act at an accelerated rate as the insurance landscape continues to evolve. To remain competitive, insurance executives need to revisit business and IT operating models and build a more decisive approach to becoming a more customer-centric organization.
Today’s consumers expect two-way, interactive conversations – a far cry from the one-way, transactional communications of the past. Insurers must implement a digital-first strategy to optimize the customer’s end-to-end journey and provide SMARTER ways of engagement.
To do so, the customer experience must have digital tools that support hyper-personalization and two-way customer conversations, offer easy-to-use interfaces, and seamlessly deliver information across customers’ preferred channels and devices.
When Mountain West Farm Bureau Insurance looked at the market, they understood that everything was speeding up and consumers were increasingly expecting faster service speeds. The old world of snail mail and phone communication was falling by the wayside. They took this on as a challenge to digitize operations and made the decision to go fast.
In this session you will learn:
- How Insurers can respond to the new range of expectations being set by digital savvy customers
- Increasing engagement levels across the customer life cycle to drive improved customer satisfaction
- Enabling effective, two-way conversations across the Insureds preferred channels and in real-time
- Leverage digital innovation to improve the customer experience while driving down costs
- Why develop Cloud-First strategies to enable agility and speed in IT execution
Ruth Fisk: (
Good afternoon, New Orleans. Woo. Hello. My name is Ruth Fisk. I'm the Vice President of Strategy at Smart Communications. And we are so excited to have you in today's track. We are all aware that the insurance industry has suffered a greater erosion and trust than any other sector. Due to our inability to deliver the digital experiences. Consumers have come to expect. This track will explore ways. Insurers can achieve digital transformation rapidly. We all live in a society where speed equals success. If any of you recently attended the Indy 500 you'll know those cars went 295 miles per hour to reach the goal to be the winner, or if you watch the surprising results of the Kentucky Derby win fast track won unexpectedly a 70 to one odd. It was speed that brought that success. Or if you've seen the new top gun movie where Tom cruise has a need for speed, you'll understand why it's so important for him to be successful and not smash into the canyons when he's flying those, uh, jet violets. Our first speaker also understood it was speed that would be an essential component of their digital strategy. Please. I am pleased to introduce Tim Hayes. He's the vice president and CIO of Mountain West Farm Bureau & 360 Insurance. When he now tells your, his story of how he accelerated their digital transformation to really meet the needs of their consumers.
Tim Hays: (
Good afternoon, I get you after your food coma and before your afternoon coffee or a caffeine kicks in, I wanna talk a little bit about this title. It seems kinda like a no brainer, but the Genesis of this was the executive team was working on our vision, which incorporates the idea of earning trust in all of our relationships and every interaction. And so we were brainstorming what creates an environment of trust and the ideas were all over the place. And then somebody said, well, what erodes trust or what eliminates trust or what violates trust? And there was an immediate alignment around, oh yeah. If you don't do what you say you're gonna do, if you're not trustworthy, all of those things erode trust. And so it occurred to me that we could flip things to solve problems. And so a little bit later, Ruth was interviewing me about some of the projects we've worked on in the speed at which we've garnish as well.
Tim Hays: (
How do you go fast? And I said, well, stop being slow. And she laughed. And I said, no, I'm serious. If you eliminate the things that make you go slow, you will find yourself going fast. And it seems to work in a lot of other ways. If you want business continuity, eliminate the things that make you have to have business continuity and you don't need it. If you want to figure out how to grow your business, eliminate the things that are keeping you from growing and you can grow your business. So let's take away. Number one, when you face a problem, flip it, solving it for the opposite might be the easier way to solve the original problem. Over the past day and a half, I've listened to several presentations on a lot of really good ideas. Things that you should go do fill in the blank, but I haven't heard a lot of people talking about, well, how do you execute on that? How do you go do everything that we just talked about? This presentation is about doing that.
Tim Hays: (
So why me? Why I'm up here today? Why not someone else in this audience I've been in insurance industry now 18 months, I've never put in smart communications, never put in Guidewire before, never put in an insurance suite before. So why me? There's probably a lot more of you that are qualified to talk about insurance than me. Well, for the past 20 years, nearly every day of my life, I've been putting in an E R P system. This is my 30th full cycle, E R P go live. I've seen a lot of patterns, a lot of seen things that don't work. And I've seen some things that do work prior to mountain west. I was working as a consultant doing private equity carve outs, the phone call comes, we sold your division. You can no longer be on the corporate it system. You need to have new it systems in 90 days.
Tim Hays: (
Good luck. And so that was my job to come in and figure out, how are we gonna carve out your business out of SAP, Oracle, JD Edwards, and stand up everything else that goes with it. So we did several of them in less than a hundred days. Reimplemented Santa America on SAP in 18 weeks. So when a was interviewing for mountain west CIO job, and they said, putting in, Guidewire's gonna take you five years. I said, really? I don't know. That seems like a long time. I don't know why it has to take that amount of time.
Tim Hays: (
So do you know what the difference is? The difference is war stories. Anybody know the difference between a fairytale and a war story. Fairytale begins once upon a time a war story begins there. I was, and I got a lot of there. I was stories to share mountain west great company. I love working for this company. The farm bureau, family of companies has a great culture a long tenure of taking care of customers and a culture of care that I appreciate. And like being a part of we're a three straight property and casualty company, mountain west was stuck in the past, stuck with some legacy systems. And they asked me to join their team to fix that. I have a phenomenal boss who has given me a lot of freedom to push the envelope and try some things that they'd never seen before. And a lot of people on the team had never seen before. And I think it paid off, we just went live Guidewire cloud in 12 months. So we're gonna talk a little bit about that. So what was the problem?
Tim Hays: (
Here we go. The problem was the core system been in for 30 years. Probably not dissimilar to stories you've heard before. In addition, there was 150 applications that were required to run it, to augment it, things that it didn't do. It was a completely outdated customer and agent experience. They'd attempted to replace it four times and failed and they didn't, they weren't gonna get a fifth. And so how are we gonna do this? Do it right. They had some plans on the drawing board. I came in and I said, let's scratch all of those. We're gonna go to the cloud and we're gonna do it at speed. You've never seen before.
Tim Hays: (
So they hired me and now I've got the job. So I'm staring at this eight foot whiteboard in my new office. And I said, there's a lot to do. How am I gonna focus my time and attention on getting this company transitioned to the future? All right. Number one, application rationalization. We've gotta get rid of some of the applications that we're supporting in this it department. We gotta make decisions based on data. We gotta transform the experience of our agents and our customers information security. It's got to be part of the program and we're gonna focus on productivity tools. And I use this as a framework to say, like, if you want to talk about anything, that's not one of these five things. I don't have time for you come back in a year or two or five, but we're gonna work on these five things.
Tim Hays: (
So we can't run 150 applications anymore. It's not gonna work. We picked Guidewire cloud solution, okay. That becomes the center of the universe. Everything else becomes error, data driven decisions. We need data Mart. We need all of these systems talking to each other. Data warehouse, new experience for the agent meant fixing some of the things that we already had in place, information, security, no brainer, and then focus on productivity tools. I had someone tell me the other day. I can't remember the last time I used my desk phone. I mean, we have effectively transitioned away from the phone to teams, calls, zoom calls etc., To have a more video friendly, instant messaging environment. So successful in terms of focusing on those five things. In the first week of my employment, I put this triangle up on the board for my team to see. I said, this is what we're gonna do. This is our new mission. We are gonna provide outstanding service in it. Department had not such a good reputation, but I said, every interaction will leave somebody with a positive wake that they enjoyed the experience with us. And one of the ways we're gonna do that is we're gonna be fanatical on the execution of our projects.
Tim Hays: (
Thank you.
Tim Hays: (
We're gonna be fanatical on the execution of our projects. We're gonna be data driven in all of our decisions and that will lead to an amazing experience. So enabling the digital transformation involves three things. In my opinion, cloud is the enabler data is the driver and augmented intelligence is the differentiator. Why is cloud an enabler? Let me tell you a story. We are putting in a new image management system. It's gonna be moved to the cloud. The vendor comes in, says, we're gonna install it in your new cloud infrastructure. Great install. The software takes 30 seconds. Guy says can't be right. Never installed that fast before. No, I'm pretty sure all the files are there. Okay. We'll keep going. They continu down the installation path for a little while and I says, man, we've messed up. We're gonna need another four terabytes of storage minimum. How long is that gonna take you to stand up? You want to come back together in a couple weeks? And my guy says not gimme a minute.
Tim Hays: (
Okay. It's there? No way. Yeah. Cloud enablement infrastructure is a service. Security is a service platform is a service software is a service cloud is the enabler of the digital transformation. Data is the driver. We must be very good at signals intelligence. It allows us to never ask a question that we should already know the answer to and allows us to make decisions based on facts and information and not tradition and emotion, augmented intelligence. I don't like calling it artificial intelligence, but I like augmented intelligence. I think the idea that replacing human behavior with a computer is not such a great idea. Cause I think a lot of human behavior is not very good. Don't replace me as a thinker, help me think better. So that's why I like the idea of augmented intelligence. And we can put that everywhere, put it in my house, put it in my car. Think Jarvis from Ironman, help me be better. Don't try to replace me, help me be better. And we need to embed this augmented intelligence into everything. Think antilock breaks, its breaks just better, everything better through machine learning and human augmentation through intelligence.
Tim Hays: (
So how do you transform quickly? I think it's four things. It means that we're specialized means excellence best cost and meets the new pace of business. Jack of all trades is not fast. Think sports team, you have a job to do. You have a job to do. You don't play every position. You play that position. You're a specialist. Are you really good at that position? The coach will decide the fans will decide the results will decide whether you're excellent in that position, but you're specialized. You're specialized. And then you, you move towards excellence. Sometimes you have to change your position on the team, cuz you're not actually that good at one position, but you might be good at something else, but not specializing is not fast and not having excellence is not fast. We see this in a lot of our relationships. Auto mechanic could be the same price.
Tim Hays: (
One person can do it in two hours. Another person can do it in a week, maybe an extreme example, but it often comes down to rate as well, right? I pay this person 200 bucks an hour. This person will do it for $50 an hour, but this person does it eight times faster. You know, which do you want, which leads to best cost. This is even more extreme in software development. There are just some brains that are wired this way and they can see the solution to the problem. And we know this in software development, cuz this person can do it 10 times faster than this person.
Tim Hays: (
So speed means specialization excellence and it leads to best cost best value. It doesn't mean cheapest rate faster, better and cheaper usually means pick two. But I think if you have speed, you can get faster, better and cheaper. We'll talk about it. And finally, it's speed. That's gonna help us meet the pace of business change. I don't think anybody is able to say that business is going to slow down. I've never had anybody say that system is too fast. The internet is working too fast. Slow it down. Being able to react is the new DNA of our experience economy.
Tim Hays: (
Our digital transformation was a journey that started with the idea that starting over would be faster than rebuilding. I think old house. I can look at my old house with the leaky roof and windows that don't close very tight and the door that doesn't have security and the plumbing that's outdated, an electrical that's not up to code. And I can spend a dump truck of money in an army with an army of people and be inconvenienced for a long period of time. While I remodel that house or I can start over, honey, I'm gonna write a check. We're gonna scrape, send dirt over here. And we're getting a new house. And that's the approach that we took the idea of a startup. I told my team, you are now working for the best funded startup on the planet. We are gonna move fast. Then we're gonna start from ground zero.
Tim Hays: (
We are gonna start over. I told the mountain west business teams, I don't care what you don't like about the new system. I don't care. What's different. I do care a lot about what you, what won't work and that we can talk about, but we are getting a new house and we're gonna build it with security from the ground up. And we're gonna build it with the best features that we can afford. Second thing we gotta do is eliminate all the hurdles to productivity. It's the, how do you go fast? Don't be slow. Anything that slows you down has to be eliminated. Any kind of barrier to communication has to be eliminated. Enable the digital engagements that are high touch and high experience lead to delight. We are living in an experience economy. It's my position that every thing we do must delight someone, somebody at the service desk, someone at the front desk, somebody who receives something from us in the mail, an interaction online.
Tim Hays: (
If it doesn't lead to delight it's error and we have to eliminate that error in every experience that we have and finally to create automated workflows for our agents and customers. We are technologists who should be eliminating the mundane of any business. We need to get the process out of the way. We talk a lot about automation in the fact that automating a bad process rarely makes it better. You have to start with the process, perfect the process, and then you can automate it and you can go at speed at mountain west, we did everything simultaneously. We put in policy center, billing center, claims center, digital track for producer engage. We redid over a thousand documents on smart communications and did 45 integrations. Why faster? And I can test it end to end. I know it works. I don't do a piece. Then come back and do another piece and do another piece and have somebody in the sales team say, I've got this integration layer. That's gonna work and make it all work together. I've done this 30 times. Never seen that approach, work, people that wanted to put in SAP and say, well, I'll put it. I want, I love my financial system. So we're gonna keep that never works. You have to have an end to end solution. My opinion and it's much faster.
Tim Hays: (
So how did we enable this truly personalized experience? As I started to engage with the agents in the field, I kept hearing, we need a CRM. We need a CRM. Okay. What do you need a CRM for? Well activity management in our office. That's not a CRM. I can give you activity management in producer engage or some other tool. What else do you need CRM for? I need a CRM for statuses of policies. Now that's an information system. I can give you an information system. You don't need a CRM for that birthdays. We want to be able to send birthday cards. We need a list of birth dates so that we can send birthday cards. You don't need a CRM for birthday cards. Here's what we could do. We know the birth date of the person. You wanna send a birthday card to.
Tim Hays: (
We could give you that birth date and you could go do whatever you wanted to do. Or we could say there's a birthday coming up. We're gonna pre a birthday card for you. It's gonna show up in a work stream. You click on it, personalize it. Hey, saw your kids score 10 goals last night. That was amazing. Happy birthday. And then based on the customer's preference, ship it to 'em print, email, text notification, Hey, you've got a message waiting for you. That is a far better experience for everybody and starts to enable the layers on the cake that we're gonna build to delight our, our customers.
Tim Hays: (
I've heard stories of it taking up to eight weeks months to change a signature on a document. Take it completely out of that process. You wanna change a signature log into the document library. If you have authorization, change the signature, this idea of Friday letters. Why do we have Friday letters? Well, we always print 'em on Friday. These are things like good student discount miles. Okay. Who's honest about those miles letters anyway. I mean, why do we send them? But different story. The point is that's a terrible interaction with the client. They don't really want to give you that stuff in the first place. And it's certainly not a good experience. If you're asking 'em to mail it back myself, I can't tell you I don't own any stamps, right? If I have to mail something, I gotta go to the post office. I gotta buy a stamp.
Tim Hays: (
So we have to do better. We have to enable a process where we should never ask a question that we should already know the answer to in the first place. Number one, number two, if we have to answer the question, let's do it in a way that delights and says, I really need some information from you that I can't get in any other way. How would you like to communicate? Would you like to take a picture of the grades and send them to me? That would be ideal and we need to be able to react to that. And that's what we're building currently to make all of that happen. Slide missing. So I believe that we're becoming an industry heavyweight and using Guidewire and smart communications allows us to punch above our weight.
Tim Hays: (
We're building things that scale a few years back had the opportunity to grow a company from 200 million to 2 billion. I can tell you that 200 million to 500 million was the biggest challenge. Once we got to 500 million economies of scale kicked in, it was easier to do things. We had grown our company to 750 million while putting in SAP. And my CEO comes to me and says, we're gonna buy our largest competitor. We're gonna double those size of the company overnight. And he says, what are you gonna need in it? I said a few bucks. We've been working on this since the beginning. Everything we've built scales. It's gonna take a few more licenses, but it's just gonna take a few more bucks. So what we're building at mountain west, same answer. What we've built for a much smaller company will take a few bucks to be a multi-billion dollar company.
Tim Hays: (
Cuz everything we build is built to scale. It's built in the cloud. It is built to grow as we grow. We don't, we're not in the infrastructure business anymore. Like the story I told you want additional server capacity click it's done. We have 24 by seven security monitoring. It's built by the same people that protect no at, could we afford that sitting in Laramie, Wyoming, if we were trying to do that ourself. Heck no. So the enabler, the enabling the enablement of the cloud to be able to consume service, allows us to punch above our weight.
Tim Hays: (
Let's talk a little bit about what we've accomplished. There we go on Guidewire. We did five lines of business for three states in 275 days, I was told that would take five years. We beat that by a little bit of a margin. We went live with 0.3% errors. How do I get that? After a month of running it we've tracked 11 errors out of 3,500 cards. So that's a 99.7% success rate on the delivery. I'd say that quality is pretty high. Agile textbook says an error rate of 5% is pretty good. So I think we beat that. Proud of the accomplishment, quite frankly. I'd never done Guidewire before. What's my point in that it's about a program and that program works and speed works. If you go fast, you can eliminate a lot of churn. And a lot of error. One of our product owners had put in claim center once before.
Tim Hays: (
And at some point in the projects is we're just going so fast, but you know what makes it apparent that we're gonna be successful? I have to focus on it everyday. I don't get a chance to think about anything else. Had a board member who audience like this. We were talking about the Guidewire project status and says Tim, some people think we're just going too fast. What do you think? I said, sir, let's assume this project costs you a million dollars a month. Would you like it to take 12 months or 24? Oh, keep going Tim , but it starts with a vision to go fast. If you don't think you can do something you're right. So you have to a vision that we can in fact go faster than what I've observed. A lot of projects in this industry seem to take, it takes an executive support. It's not an it project. It's our project. It's the executive steering committee's project. It's the CEO's project. And if he doesn't know or she what's going on every day, the focus is wrong because these projects are hard. They're extremely hard. The transformation that it takes to put these projects in requires a top down approach, not a bottom up talent dialysis. You cannot win a sports franchise championship without the right talent. So you have to work through evaluating the talent. 50% of my staff didn't make it to the finish line.
Tim Hays: (
They had to make other career choices, solution alignment. This is what we're gonna do. We're doing it as a company and we're putting it in rapid decision making. We make decisions that stick and we make 'em quickly because the fastest way to slow down a project is to slow down the decision making process. So if you don't have the right people on your project team, the people that can actually make a decision and make it stick. You've got the wrong people on the project. When I would come into companies, I would say, if the people that you have on your project team are not painful to remove from the business. You've picked the wrong people. You have to put the people on the project that can make decisions and go solution rationalization, everything you need and nothing you don't. The plane has to take off.
Tim Hays: (
It has to land, but the latest GPS unit, as long as you put a spot for it, you can put that in later. So do everything you have to do. None of the things you want to do and everything that you have to do to land that plane, and you will be successful and you will go much faster. And years of practice has said, most of the things that you said are nice to have, but not want to have, but I want to do now. You don't want later. You don't want 'em later because you run the software for the first time you go, oh, I don't really need that anymore. You're trying to repave the cow path. So stop doing that. Fanatical execution. My team hears me say often, no story, no work, no ticket, no work. If it's not tracked, we're not doing it. If it's not approved, you can't do it. You have to be fanatical in all the execution that you do.
Tim Hays: (
This sign on the left. That's attributed to Mario Andrei sits on my office and everybody has to walk in by that sees me. If everything seems under your control, you're just not going fast enough. We did an all in implementation. I think they're faster. It's difficult, but it's the way to go. Having put in 30 systems, I can tell you that if you can't test it end to end, something's gonna break. Something will be missed and going all in is the way to go evaluating your talent. You can't win a sports franchise championship without the right talent.
Tim Hays: (
Vendor talent is just as important. We put in smart communications. In one year I fired the first three vendors that helped us do that. Didn't cut it. And it took me about 10 days to make that decision. You're not going to make it to the finish line. Third partner made it to the finish line and we did over a thousand documents in 12 months. Again, Fanan fanatical program management. You cannot do it. We've got some great tools. We have got fantastic program management tools, but seems like we choose to ignore 'em, don't do that. And Revo avoid rework at all costs. So demo early demo. Often get the people that can make decisions involved in the decision making process. We don't have a Guidewire led implementation. We don't have a smart communications led implementation. We have a mountain west led implementation.
Tim Hays: (
We make the decisions and it's not the vendor's fault if we fail. It's our fault. If we fail, it's my fault. If we fail, it's an attitude change, but it allows us to go fast and allows us to avoid all of the rework because the people who are gonna have to live with the decision are making the decision in every meeting and every session, the people that are making those decisions also get to sign off on the work on every card. Somebody from our business who is in a decision making position signed off on every one of those 3,500 story cards and 4,000 integration tests that was not a vendor was not a contractor. It was someone who was gonna have to live with it that allows us to avoid rework, demoing it early. These projects where you do the work of defining what it is. And then somebody runs off and builds it for six months and then comes back and says, here's what I did never works. You need to show your work every week. You need to show your work at a minimum every four weeks to everyone to make sure that you're on the right track.
Tim Hays: (
The next thing is change management change management is the job of the CIO today. I believe it is the fundamental job that we have to do, but it's hard. But I think this little tool is a good reminder of how it can be unheard. So to go with complex change quickly, you have to have a, a sense of urgency. You have to have a guiding coalition, a vision, information, skills, incentives, resources, and goals. We've talked about some of these, but I wanna break it down and show you how to use this tool. I want change. What I've got is the status quo. All right, go to the left. The missing thing is a sense of urgency. Why do we need to make change? If you don't think we need to make change, it's pretty hard to get somebody to want to engage you in change. If you there's confusion, go to the left empty box, no vision. Somebody's gotta articulate what we're trying to do. If you're confused, speak about it. Resistance, give information, anxiety skills got trained. People fatigue missing from our project. People are worn out incentives, incentive program. Here's why we're doing this and we're gonna reward you for getting it done.
Tim Hays: (
My favorite is the no buyin. The TTS P is the, this two shall pass. It's the person who comes onto the project. Who's supposed to be engaged on the project and says, those guys never finish what they start. I'll just hang out here for a while and we'll go back to doing things the way we've always wanted to do no buy in guiding coalition. The people in the business that need this change need to guide the coalition to get it right, to define the requirements and move it to completion frustration. Maybe you've tried to undersize it. Add some resources and finally false starts, bad program management, set some new goals and restart, fail fast, fail forward, and fail in a direction of success. Don't just quit. You are every project runs into, forgot. We didn't think about it or what we tried. Doesn't work same with vendors. Same with talent, fail fast.
Tim Hays: (
We've been talking about innovation a lot over the last day and a half. And I think it all sits on a curve. The first time somebody thinks of these crazy ideas. They're exactly that crazy. We heard Linda say, we need more crazy people. We need people crazy enough to think about new stuff. Well, how does that plot out on our technology curve? Well, at first it's crazy. And then it's kind of exciting, but then it's normal. And where you fit on that curve determines whether you're on offense or you're on defense. My 82 year old grandma asked for help on how she could do her Walmart order on her phone.
Tim Hays: (
If lots of people are like her and you're in that business and you don't have pickup service, are you on offense or are you on defense? You are definitely on defense and C has accelerated any digital plan that we might have ever had. It has pushed it to the right and it's no longer crazy. I propose that we are not judged against our competitors. We are judged against a person's last best experience. Amazon sets the bar for eCommerce and they have done it for a long time. And if you can't deliver the Amazon type experience, you are on defense.
Tim Hays: (
The cab services did nothing wrong. Uber changes the experience. It was crazy. It was exciting. And now it's normal. And ridership of cabs is off by 85%. So we all have an Uber moment that we're in danger of embracing or running from. And we can either look at those Uber moments as the most scary thing available to us or the best opportunity that we have had in a long time. I choose the latter that these scary times, these scary moments of embedding insurance products and changing the way we're thinking about insurance is an opportunity because we're gonna be a ship with a fast rudder and a fast prop and not a big ship with a small rudder that can't make the curve. And a bend in the road is only a curve unless you fail to make the turn. So recognize where are you at? Think crazy. I give my staff 1% of their time to think crazy.
Tim Hays: (
Come up with the craziest idea you've ever heard. 99 out of a hundred may not work, but that one, that one idea that was crazy might be a game changer. Everybody on the planet said, I was crazy that Guidewire, including Guidewire, couldn't go in in 12 months, we just went live after 275 days. So I guess I'm happy to be crazy with smart communications. We had a, a situation where it was, call walk, run, get on first base, lots of static forms. Some of 'em have been updated in a long time. We went through and we redid every document, touched every document approved. Every document made all of the trigger actions within smart communications to send the document automated the workflow from actuary, from underwriting claims. And now we're working on customer experience. That's phase two phase three that we're planning for will allow us to digitalize all of those experience.
Tim Hays: (
We wanna eliminate paper from our process. We wanna eliminate postage from our process where possible again, ask the customer, what do you want? If you want a piece of paper, we'll send it to you, but I'd prefer that you not get it there. But the prerequisite of that is I have to have the ability to do that. I don't know how to send 10,000 text messages a week, but smart communications does. So we're able to punch above our weight with Guidewire and smart communications because we're allowing our partners to go do what they're best at. I have a three person infrastructure team today. I have a 20 person it shop. We can punch above our weight because we allow people to go do what they're good at. And then we manage 'em really, really well.
Tim Hays: (
So far with smart communications, we have reduced our template maintenance by 95%. As I mentioned, we touched a thousand documents. We've reduced the it reliance. It's no longer an it cycle to update a document. It's no longer an it cycle to update a rate that is all handled either with actuary or our word processing group. We're down from five tools to manage documents to one next up is we're gonna eliminate the physical print shop. We'll build a customer communication portal that allows the customer to self-serve on all of these documents so that we can complete the conversation cloud journey with smart communications
Tim Hays: (
At mountain west. We focus a lot on this idea of earning trust and earning trust means doing the things that eliminate or erode trust to stop doing those things. We're leading with a digital first mindset, a radical shift from the past to do things fast, to do things in the cloud, to do things that are data driven, to look for specialization, to look for expertise. And we believe that that's gonna be an enabler for speed. And finally, the last piece is my boss asked me once what's gonna be different under your leadership at mountain west, I said, we're gonna be software defined. We're gonna be smaller. We're gonna be smarter. We're gonna be virtual. And we're gonna be a non-issue. What do you mean by that? I said we are gonna take technology off the table. As a reason, you can't do anything that you dream up. I have time for a single question.
Audience Member 1: (
So two applications. How many applications reduce from initial one?
Tim Hays: (
How many applications did we reduce? Yeah, you initially told you had one 50 applications. They're still all running all running. Okay. Haven't achieved that yet. Okay. Yeah, but, okay. Thank you very much.