Alfa Insurance Increases Agility and Customer Satisfaction with Consolidated Processing System

Alfa Insurance Company and its affiliates — eight property and casualty companies, one life company, four agency operations and four non-insurance companies — provide insurance and other financial services in 12 states.

Based in Montgomery, Alabama, Alfa services more than 1 million property and casualty policies in its home state as well as Mississippi and Georgia. Its operations include 400 service centers staffed by 2,500 people dedicated to serving customer needs.

The regional carrier was working with nine different property and casualty systems it had written over time, including several automobile systems and a number of property systems. They were all, essentially, single-state systems originally built for Alabama.

“It became increasingly evident to us, as we decided to expand into other states, that having a single-state system wasn’t going to provide us with the growth opportunity that we needed,” said John Jung, chief information officer and senior vice president of Alfa Insurance.

Alfa’s IT team looked at different vendors around the marketplace. They also looked into building a new system in-house. Neither path was quite right, so they opted to work with CSC to develop a modern policy administration system for large insurance companies.

Improving Customer Service and Billing

In the past, with Alfa’s legacy systems, almost all of the data collection, input and underwriting was done at the home office. That data capture is now instant, and underwriting decisions are made quickly at the service center with the CSR agent. Alfa’s CSRs bind customers and send their bills immediately. Since the system has been in place, customer retention has increased by 5 percent.

Because the new system is flexible and easy to understand, Alfa’s team has been able to make significant modifications based on field input. All of the single policies have been consolidated into a single billing system, for example. Alfa has sent out 3 million bills since rolling the software out to Mississippi.

“One of the things that we’ve heard is that the customers really understand their bills.” Jung said. “Since we’ve consolidated them, they’re easily understood, flexible and effective.”

Rate changes in three states were always a challenge to Alfa’s multiple systems. “We could do rate changes in a single state,” Jung recalled, “but now, the actuaries can handle all of it and IT is out of the mix. Within several weeks to a month, we have a new rate change if that’s what the business orders.”

Extending into New States

Now, with so many hurdles removed by the new system, Alfa is free to expand into new states and achieve its growth goals. “The software we’re using really allows us to get into new states much more efficiently. It’s much faster than anything we were able to do with our legacy systems,” said Jung.

In addition to that speed, Alfa is discovering the power of its data with an ongoing, far-reaching business intelligence initiative to convert its transaction systems to a data warehouse. So far, the data is richer than expected. It’s revealing things that management never knew before about customers and about Alfa’s products. Insight from this data promises to improve Alfa’s customer retention even more.

Turning Competition into Community

As a primary result of putting the new system in place, Alfa eliminated the complexity of dealing with multiple legacy systems, and found that it could move into new states much faster than before. Billing was simplified and rating changes became easier. And Alfa’s agents and employees now provide immediate service for new business, billing and claims.

Today, the software meets the needs of Alfa’s agents and customer service representatives, and the needs of other large carriers across the country.

“Working with CSC has given us some insight, and it’s given us some courage,” Jung said. “We see larger companies that we admire and compete with collaborating with CSC just as we do, and we know we are on the right path. We’ve been exposed to some pretty innovative thinking from other members of the client community, and we continue to be impressed by the quality of the entire organization.”