Southern Farm Bureau Casualty Improves Services, Management Information with CSC’s Exceed

Southern Farm Bureau Casualty Insurance Co., a $2.1 billion multi-line property and casualty carrier, was looking for ways to give agents, and ultimately policyholders, immediate access to its insurance services.

The Mississippi-based carrier doing business in seven states faced a challenging technical problem. Information on more than 3.1 million policies was stored in separate systems, driving up IT costs for a variety of tasks, such as management reporting and regulatory compliance, and making them difficult to manage.

“We developed a strategy to migrate to one common system on a multi-state basis, and at the time CSC was in the early development stages of Exceed,” said Mickey Nugent, vice president of operations, Southern Farm Bureau Casualty. “We were involved from the initial planning to the final testing of the new product, so we knew we were getting state-of-the-art technology.”

Moving Policy and Claims Processing into the Field

Rather than upgrade individual functions of its legacy systems, Southern Farm Bureau chose to completely replace its system with all components of CSC’s Exceed for its personal automobile line of business.

With a browser-based system in place, the company was able to extend its back office to agency offices throughout the state of Mississippi. The new system includes 176 automated underwriting rules and provides real-time ordering of motor vehicle records, CLUE claims histories and credit reports.

The result? For the first time, Southern Farm Bureau agents can process a wide range of insurance transactions without directly involving the home office. “Our agents now have at their fingertips everything they need to answer policyholder questions, process new business, make policy changes and apply payments,” Nugent said.

Improved User Productivity

Exceed lets agents electronically capture signatures, which can then be printed out at the point of sale to give to the insured while automatically storing a copy on the system, creating a paperless transaction.

Intuitive Web design principles were incorporated throughout the system, ensuring that individual pages such as policy, application, statement and results pages have a similar look and feel, enabling easier use by customers and staff alike. “Our users learn one set of screens and one workflow for all lines of business,” said Shane Noe, state project manager for Southern Farm Bureau. “That naturally makes them more efficient.

“Exceed is highly customizable because of a feature called dynamic entitlements. Every field, link and button in the system can be viewed by or hidden from the users, depending on their needs and authorization levels. For instance, when using Exceed’s information ordering feature, the “Order Credit Report” link can be viewed by an underwriter but not by an agent.

Streamlined Claims Process

Claim handling with Exceed streamlines the process and helps companies eliminate claims leakage. In the past, adjusters reviewed paper files and paid claims with a handwritten check. The payment first went to the district claims office where a secretary manually entered the information into the old system and determined whether a district manager needed to become involved.

Now, depending on the situation, adjusters can choose to use a once-and-done process. Adjusters review the claims online and make payments that are automatically stored in the system. The system notifies district claims managers electronically if they need to review a payment.

Another fundamental benefit is the amount of information available, which enables insurers to successfully implement tiered pricing.

“I’ve never seen a system gather and process statistics better than Exceed. It is providing a great deal of useful information for our marketing, rating and underwriting functions,” Nugent said.