The CRM Shift

The growing use of the Internet, social media and mobile devices to gather information is forcing insurers to re-evaluate their customer relationship management systems and strategies to best respond.

Insurance Networking News, February 1, 2012

Bob Violino

Insurers have used customer relationship management (CRM) systems for years to gain greater insights into their clients' preferences, so they can better serve them and uncover new marketing and sales opportunities. But with ongoing changes in customer behavior, such as the growing use of the Internet, social media and mobile devices to gather information about services and policies, companies are having to re-evaluate their CRM systems and strategies to best respond to the shifts.

"The promise of CRM was to help companies get a better view into how their customers behaved, and to generate a unified customer view across lines of business and systems," says Craig Weber, SVP at Celent, a research and consulting firm. "Insurers that have thought these issues through over the past decade probably have in place many of the tools they need. But recent behavioral shifts, such as the exploding popularity of social media and mobility tools, have put more useful data in play. So re-evaluating the tools and data sources, and taking a fresh look at behaviors, makes sense."

There are some obvious benefits to this strategy, Weber says, such as easing the friction felt by consumers when their insurer doesn't make good use of available data. "For example, insurers should be smart enough to know that customer preferences for communication for one type of product might apply to other products the customer owns," he says.

There are also more subtle benefits, such as making fine-grained analytical thinking possible. For instance, by combining data about mobile website usage, bill payment behavior and social media transactions, "carriers might be able to target certain types of users with add-on product offers or niche services," Weber says. "Ultimately, it's all about making the customer comfortable and building a better relationship."

Crump Life Insurance Services, a wholesale distributor of life insurance, in 2010 entered into a partnership with systems integrator iPipeline to build a CRM tool using the Microsoft Dynamics platform.

The idea of the new CRM tool, called CrumpCRM, is to use technology and human resources to gain insight into the behavior of customers and the value the firm can deliver to those customers, says Sherri Lindenberg, SVP of marketing at Crump, whose team has worked closely with the IT and sales departments to implement the tool.

"With an effective [CRM] strategy, we can increase revenues by profiling our customers, understanding customer needs, leveraging our data to understand customer buying patterns, maximizing sales results, offering better customer service, cross selling products more effectively, retaining existing customers and managing the onboarding of new ones," Lindenberg says.

Prior to the launch of the current system, Crump had a third-party-developed legacy application that was no longer meeting its needs from a functionality and performance standpoint. Based on its integration capabilities and ability to leverage a suite of Microsoft tools, Crump selected Microsoft Dynamics. Internal technology teams worked closely with iPipeline and Crump sales and business units to determine requirements and specifications that would support the company's objectives, Lindenberg says.

One example of how Crump is using the new CRM tool is to capture customer data through a process the company calls profiling. "Profiling enables salespeople to document key attributes about customers, reaching beyond current and historical sales data to include preferences, hobbies, business structure, etc.," Lindenberg says. "Having deeper customer knowledge at their fingertips allows sales associates to better target their messages and offers to meet specific customer needs."

It also enables Crump to develop targeted campaigns to smaller groups of customers with higher potential interest, rather than mass marketing to "uninterested producers and burning our goodwill through message overload," Lindenberg says.

With the first phase of the CRM implementation behind it, Crump is looking to launch phase two and is building a list of deliverables for phase three.

"We're in the process of tweaking the system to meet our diverse business needs, within Crump Life Insurance Services as well as in our two sister company divisions, Crump Property & Casualty Insurance Services and Ascensus," Lindenberg says. "Along with added functionality, performance enhancement and system fixes, we'll be focusing on training and communications, to accelerate the user adoption rates and learning curve."

Organizational Use

Meadowbrook Insurance Group, a Southfield, Mich., property/casualty insurer, is also benefiting from its latest CRM efforts, launching initiatives in different parts of the organization. At the corporate level, it primarily uses ACT software from Sage North America to gather useful business information based on interactions with customers.

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