Indiana Farm Bureau Ramps Up Agency, Policyholder Service

Indiana Farm Bureau Insurance, the second largest property and casualty insurance company in the state of Indiana offering auto, homeowners, commercial, farm and life coverage, needed to modernize its software and infrastructure. The company maintained a patchwork of policy administration, client, claims and billing systems that was difficult for users to manage, often resulting in numerous manual steps in the process. The underlying systems were difficult to upgrade and lacked configurability. For example, they couldn’t support multiple rating tiers and other new product attributes.

“We had seven different billing systems,” said Greg Clancy, senior vice president and CIO at Indiana Farm Bureau Insurance. “There is no reason to have that kind of situation. We were spending a lot of money in IT and getting very little business value in terms of innovation. Our main priority in updating our systems was consolidation. The challenge was to find the right technology that would enable us to integrate our multiple systems to improve customer service, process business faster and introduce new products sooner.”

Rolling Out Over a Weekend

The company reviewed a number of systems on the market. “We talked informally to a lot of other CIOs to hear their opinions about the alternatives available and how they had worked out. The picture wasn’t really very pretty,” Clancy recalled. “There were a lot more failures to choose from than success stories.”

Building on a long-term relationship, the company talked to CSC about its latest fully integrated software, CSC’s POINT IN, for its farm and commercial portfolios and CSC’s Exceed for personal lines.

The farm portfolio was converted to POINT IN in early 2007 but the largest share of the company’s base of about 1 million policies was in auto and homeowners. Rather than implementing each component of homeowners separately, the company chose a “vertical slice” implementation of its client, billing, homeowners and claims components simultaneously. The system was implemented over Thanksgiving weekend 2007 without a hitch.

"Everyone had to be up and ready to use the new system when it went live that Monday,” said Clancy. “Because of the extensive training we provided to our CSRs and agents prior to implementing the system, everyone was able to do that. The initial surge of help desk calls was manageable, and one month after implementation we actually had fewer daily issues reported to the help desk than with our legacy system.”

Transforming the Customer Experience

This high-profile project, affecting most of the company’s 1,200 employees and 450 agents, generated immediate improvements in the delivery of customer services. Exceed became the new real-time front end for customer service representatives in the company’s network of county offices to quote and maintain new homeowners business.

“We can make a change to a policy as close to the customer as possible — without having to send in the paperwork to home office where a subsequent person would process it,” said Philena Mead, manager of Mutual Systems, Indiana Farm Bureau. “CSRs at our county offices can complete the change and explain to our customers if there’s been any impact on their billing.”

The systems consolidation also allowed the company to centralize the billing process for its P&C lines of business in 2009. For the first time, policyholders can now get the option of an account billing program, which consolidates all of a customer’s personal and commercial policies on one bill.

“We’ve elected to use Exceed Billing as our total billing solution,” Mead said. “We are going through the process of promoting our new billing solution for our customers, so if they would like to ultimately have one invoice, they can combine all of their policies under one invoice. One of the feedback items that we get from our customers is they were getting too much mail, and this is one of the ways that we’re trying to address that.”

Increasing Internal Efficiencies

In addition, maintenance issues related to the old system are gone. Response times have improved and help desk tickets are down. “The system is much more intuitive for the users,” Clancy noted. “We now have a common look and feel across all of our policy management systems. We have enterprise-wide client and billing capabilities, improved user navigation and workflow, and we reduced training and IT costs significantly.”

Manual processes that used to take 2 or 3 days to complete are now fully automated. “Now users can perform functions in a few seconds because the Exceed system automates the entire workflow from end to end. Exceed also enables us to use multiple tiers in terms of how we do our product rating, and we would not have been able to do that with the old system,” Clancy said.

Indiana Farm Bureau Insurance is currently working to complete its consolidation by migrating its auto portfolio onto Exceed, and it is working with CSC’s customer community to continually enhance the software.

One key advantage in working with CSC, according to Clancy, is the ability to collaborate with other leading P&C companies using the same software. “I like the idea of being able to take advantage of the thought processes of the GEICOs and the Progressives and that we would get the benefits of some of their critical thinking and what they’re putting into their application systems,” Clancy said.

“We’ve really created a partnership between our business owners and IT that allows more buy-in and commitment of resources from the business side,” Clancy said. “By working together, the company as a whole has moved forward from both a technological and business standpoint”