Matching hardware with needs is something Michael Betts, vice president of information services at American General Life & Accident Insurance in Nashville, one of America’s largest insurers, knows all about. Recently, Betts helped design sales force automation and marketing management information system that he hopes will save millions of dollars, create new business, and transform the whole business process not only for the company's 7,000 salespeople, but also for the nearly six million customers they serve.
Like most insurance companies, many years ago American General set up more than 250 local offices to act as home offices for its national fleet of salespeople. Currently, each salesperson goes to the local office at least twice a week to attend meetings, turn in collections, and pick up forms. Even if each salesperson had to drive an average of only five miles to get to the office, two visits per week per salesperson could cost the company as much as $1 million a year in automobile reimbursements alone.
Enough is enough, said Betts. But rather than scrapping the system entirely, he peered into the future of mobile computing and put together a plan that will save the company a lot of money while providing each salesperson with a personal, virtual, paperless office. Betts' plan is based on three things: Fujitsu's Stylistic 1000, a tablet-based computer built around a 100MHz, 486 Intel chip; customized applications, which will be implemented over the life of the plan; and an ever-growing intranet.
Betts says, "We will deploy marketing and management information that can be accessed in all of our local offices. These will be tools to manage the work of the salesforce. By putting all of the information in a single server, the general manager can dial in and query the system for up-to-date information, as opposed to the weekly reports currently available, which don't provide information necessary to manage the salesforce and look into an individual salesman's productivity."
Specifically, the company has developed easy-to-use electronic customer service forms that allow new policies to be written and signed and existing policies to be edited electronically on the spot. This means that agents will be able to receive policy owner information and the signatures of both agents and customers, and then immediately display the exact document back to the policy owner, as regulations dictate.
The impact of no longer having to tote paper-based policies back to the local offices for processing will be enormous, especially since the salesforce collects about 5,000 beneficiary changes to policies every week. "This is going to allow us to speed up turnaround time on new and existing policies by 10 days," Betts predicts.
Another application slated for 1999 deployment will allow salespeople to prospect against their current customer databases. The idea is to help them bring in new sales from among the existing customer base. A third application will automatically analyze the coverage a particular customer has, based on life changes. American General is also rolling out an electronic banking service that will allow agents to send financial transactions for premiums they have collected back to the home office and deposit them into a local bank. Also, 1999 is the year American General will expand its intranet to provide all the remaining management information necessary to manage a local office and all the agents attached to it, says Betts. The company also plans to build intranet applications for the salesforce.
American General is ahead of the game in the strategic plans suggested by leading experts. In fact, Betts is already finding that this new system "completely eliminates the requirement for paper transactions from agents to the home office. It saves our customers time and improves the control of the process." Perhaps most important, he says, "it allows us to process applications faster."