Insurance.com's Cognos Dashboard

[admin]

Dashboards Drive Value for the Organization

Insurance Networking News, November 1, 2009

Pat Speer

Tucked into the tiny Cleveland, Ohio suburb of Solon, Insurance.com does a brisk business. Since their humble beginnings in 2000, the independent agency has built its online insurance business, today representing 15 top carriers in 46 states, and counts 700,000 policyholders in its ranks. Today, the company processes 1 million comparison quotes annually.

The direct-to-consumer business model is working, and consumers can purchase insurance online or speak with licensed agents.

This success did not occur in a vacuum; the company has focused on strategic improvements in top-line growth fueled largely by developing expert customer service. With 150 agents in the sales center, 80 of whom are staffed on a 24/7 basis, the call center is considered paramount to the company's success.

But Insurance.com's aptitude for customer service did not arise without its share of difficulties. Until recently, one of the internal systems used to monitor the company's call center systems was comprised of applications written in C-Sharp.

"The system was expensive to maintain, and actually started to fail," says Scott Noerr, director of IT systems at Insurance.com. "There were no alerts, so the end user had to watch to see if there were problems. When you look at our various business requirements that relate to time to market, we realized we needed to revisit this application."

The need to review its outdated call center systems led the company to start thinking about creating ways to leverage their pending investment into an even larger return. "As our systems continued to grow, so did the complexity, with multiple data sources, and we knew we needed to turn that into actionable information," Noerr says.


Scott Noerr

BOLSTERING CUSTOMER SERVICE

When the opportunity to revisit their call center technology presented itself, the Insurance.com IT team began focusing on how to use business intelligence (BI) to bolster customer service levels. The group then created a punch list of elements they felt necessary to accomplish those goals.

Continuous monitoring and feedback were high on the list, says Noerr. "In any contact system (sales center), call volume will be dynamic. We knew it was difficult to optimize the agent workflows or agent utilization, so by putting a system in place that lets us monitor various heterogeneous data streams concurrently, we've been able to optimize agent utilization."

The end result, Noerr adds, is that instead of peaks and valleys, we've level-set the agent workflow.

SETTING THE DIAL

A long-time Cognos (now IBM Cognos) client, Insurance.com had always embraced business intelligence (BI), reports Craig Bedell, director of Global Performance Management Insurance Services at IBM Cognos, and had been using the Cognos 8 platform to obtain and process routine business information. What came next meant changes to hardware and software.

A little more than a year ago, IBM Cognos NOW! was loaded into an appliance (a piece of hardware dealing with real-time data), reports Bedell. The BI solution is designed to deliver operational dashboards to continuously monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) and operational metrics from disparate data sources.

Tightly integrated with IBM Cognos 8 BI, the new system provides up-to-date, actionable intelligence for rapid, fact-based decision-making, especially key for Insurance.com's line operations, Bedell adds.

"They use that appliance for two purposes," he says. "They've hooked it into their infrastructure to follow the quoting process, page activity relative to their Web site and load times. They also use it to review and monitor errors that come from not just their system, but from any of the 15 companies for which they provide services."

The software times the various feeds coming in from quoting engines for VIN validation, etc., and the system holds set tolerances to create an alert that feeds information to a cube. Traditional business intelligence acts on that information.

Noerr explains that there are a variety of data feeds (from CRM, telephony systems, interviews, etc.) that can trigger an agent to take a call. Some of those feeds the insurer has control over; for example, how long an agent sits idle before the call center manager pushes them a lead, or if, for some reason, they were not able to finish the quote and have been requested to call the lead back.

DIAL IT UP

"Our managers will get alerts in real time, notifying them that certain agents are either overloaded or underutilized, so we will contact them through the Cognos appliance, telling them to up or down the dial," Noerr says. "When we see volume getting lower, instead of waiting 60 seconds, we will start turning the dial down to 45 seconds, so we continue to dial that down ... if volume picks up, it automatically ups the time to 90 seconds, and so on."

Future plans call for a Web service to be created to automate this functionality. For now, however, Insurance.com is capitalizing on an intelligent "pacing" of lead flow in real time. Noerr says the system has helped maximize the impact of their online marketing campaigns (responding to a local TV ad or banner campaign, for example) and streamline agent utilization to keep costs in check.

"All along, we've wanted to be more proactive in the data center," says Noerr, "and we are on the right track. When we have volume online, and we know what percentage of inbound calls end up in our sales center, we can staff up. We can change the phone load of an agent. If we know there will be a spike in call volume in California, for example, and our agents are in "chat" mode, we can change that to "inbound."

Although privately held and therefore, unwilling to reveal revenue figures, Insurance.com's Noerr confirms that both soft and hard returns on the system have been positive. One such return is in cost savings.

"With 15 different variables currently going into the agent utilization metric, we are continuing to turn the dials up and down based on tolerance," he says. "This has already helped us reduce costs."

Another return helps Insurance.com retain its competitive advantage, as external business partners obtain real-time alerts on issues such as degradation or errors from the insurer that affect the agent's ability to obtain information and close the sale.

[admin]

INSURANCE.COM WINS 'BEST PRACTICES IN BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE' AWARD FROM BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE PERSPECTIVES

Insurance.com, Posted 10/5/2009 12:00:00 AM

Summary

Leading online auto insurance agency recognized for outstanding business intelligence solutions.

CLEVELAND, Ohio (October 5, 2009) -- Insurance.com, the country's largest online independent auto insurance agency, has won the "Best Practices in Business Intelligence" award from Computerworld's Business Intelligence Perspectives, the premier conference for leaders in the business intelligence and IT management sector.

The award identifies and acknowledges excellence among users of business intelligence solutions and approaches. Winners were announced September 16 during a special awards ceremony at Business Intelligence Perspectives, at the Westin Chicago River North, Chicago, Ill.

"Everyone on the team was honored simply to be recognized for this award," says Scott Noerr, Insurance.com's director of IT Services. "To win the award only drives home the fact that we're building world class solutions to everyday problems right here in Solon."

Other team members included Harshad Kulkarni, Business Intelligence manager, and Business Intelligence developers Amith Vangala, Irina Karpov, and Mike Nowak.

"I couldn't be more proud of our team and what we're doing at Insurance.com," says Rob Klapper, CEO. "Not only is our team's solution best-in-class, it helps deliver on Insurance.com's brand promise - to make insurance companies compete, so our customers win by choosing the policy that fits them best - by building a more efficient sales force, giving them a greater opportunity to communicate with our customers and address their auto insurance needs."

To increase sales center efficiency and decrease idle time per insurance agent, Insurance.com set out to level each agent's workload. This, in turn, led to reduced operating costs and maximized potential revenue.

"We created a real time, closed loop system that looks at 15 different variables from four different source systems to determine the amount of capacity available in the sales center," explains Noerr. "It recalculates the capacity every five seconds and adjusts the amount of time an agent sits idle."

Business Intelligence Perspectives conference's annual awards program, Best Practices in Business Intelligence, identifies and acknowledges excellence among companies in the following areas:

• Creating an Agile BI Infrastructure
• Driving Process Management with BI
• Expediting Information Delivery, Retrieval, Reporting and Analysis
• Innovation and Promise in Business Intelligence

"Today's competitive economy demands that IT enterprises effectively and efficiently implement successful business intelligence strategies. Insurance.com has fully demonstrated the ability to devise and implement solutions that ensure the most efficient IT infrastructure and advancing the larger goals of the organization," said Ellen Dally, senior vice president events, IDG Enterprise.

About Insurance.com

Located in Cleveland, Ohio, Insurance.com is the top independent online auto insurance agency in the U.S., and offers comparison auto insurance quotes consumers can buy online or by phone. By linking directly to the rating systems of fifteen top insurance companies, Insurance.com provides instant, accurate comparison rates that help consumers make smarter decisions about auto insurance. For more information, visit Compare Car Insurance Quotes | Auto Insurance Quotes | Insurance.com.

About Computerworld

For 40 years, Computerworld has been the leading source of technology news and information for IT influencers worldwide. Computerworld's award-winning Web site (Computerworld.com), weekly publication, focused conference series and custom research form the hub of the world's largest global IT media network.

Computerworld's Web site and print publication have won more than 100 awards in the past five years alone. Computerworld leads the industry with an online audience of over 2 million unique monthly visitors and a print audience of more than 1.2 million readers each week.

Computerworld's conferences, with their focus on technologies and solutions, provide a rare opportunity for attendees to gain insight into the way user companies execute their strategies in the enterprise. Whether it's the prestigious Computerworld Honors Program, Computerworld's exclusive Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference or vertical industry events such as SNW, Business Intelligence Perspectives, or SaaScon, Computerworld's conferences provide the best environment for idea exchange among IT executives and IT solutions providers.

About International Data Group (IDG)

International Data Group (IDG) is the world's leading technology media, events and research company. Since its founding in 1964, IDG has been committed to helping people acquire and use technology successfully. As a result, IDG's global brands have become the trusted source for insight into the technology industry and its products around the world.

Over the past 45 years, IDG has grown into a multi-billion dollar company reaching technology audiences in more than 100 countries worldwide. In 2008, IDG had revenues of $3.2 billion and more than 13,000 employees worldwide.

IDG's diverse products and services portfolio spans six key areas: online media, events and conferences, print publishing, lead generation services, global marketing solutions and market research.

Additional information about IDG, a privately held company, is available at http://www.idg.com. Note: All product and company names are trademarks of their respective companies.