Salesforce CRM Gives Allianz the Edge in Selling Business Insurance

Profitable growth is the watchword at Allianz Commercial, the business insurance division of Allianz Insurance plc—one of the largest general insurers in the UK. But that’s a steep hill to climb when your underwriters and business development sales people are all using separate, fragmented sales systems.  In fact, one particular company workshop identified up to 24 separate types of spreadsheets for sales and customer analyses in use at any one time.  And bearing in mind there are 12 UK sales offices, there could potentially have been almost 300 different systems tracking everything from broker information to underwriting new business.

According to Phill Spalding, Broker Development Manager, Allianz Commercial, there was a determined drive to increase sales effectiveness.  "A global sales effectiveness program identified that our processes needed to change, particularly in the way we approached new business," he says.  "Until recently, relationships with the universe of 2,000 brokers were managed at a local level: with each Business Developer sales person and regional office adopting a unique approach to broker relationship management.  Some information—such as legal agreements— was stored centrally, but the company broadly relied on a patchwork of systems."
 

Challenged to integrate all this dispersed information and create a single view of each broker relationship, Allianz Commercial turned to technology.  Spalding continues, "Given the issues we faced, there was a need to streamline our operations to make better use of the sales resources.   We could have adopted a client/server CRM system or developed a standalone system, but our preferred alternative was an on-demand CRM service, offering all the benefits of a conventional client/server model, at a fraction of the cost and risk."

Salesforce.com fitted these requirements like a glove.  Easy to use, quick and easy to implement, the customizable enterprise applications offer Allianz Commercial the flexibility it craved.  "Our requirements were urgent and with salesforce.com we could be productive almost from the start on a highly effective sales management solution.  The people we dealt with at salesforce.com were also very professional and understood exactly what we were trying to achieve."

Deployed in six weeks to 12 offices and 350 users

Following a highly successful six weeks roll-out to 12 offices and 350 users in the UK, Salesforce is being used across a number of key disciplines, including Broker Relationship Management, Quote New Business, and Development Management.  In terms of managing broker relations, staff  now  have a real-time broker relationship dashboard spanning key topics such as call planning, meeting minutes, actions, the status on large cases, and new business prospects.  They can instantly access monthly broker performance statistics, broker profiles, contacts, and competitor activity.
 

On the Quote New Business side, Allianz used the skills and insight of salesforce.com expert services to create a customized dashboard to highlight in real-time issues such as quote allocation, quotes in the market, won cases, net and gross strike rates (the opportunity conversion rate), large cases, and the status on prospects.  Like Broker Relationship Management, they too share contacts information—meeting history, task history, individual quote activity, prospects identified, organization structure—and profiles of each and every broker.  In fact, this customization has been one of the real success stories of the implementation.  Using the salesforce.com platform, applications are available in a fraction of the time and at less cost compared to traditional development platforms.  Plus, it ensures the Allianz team focus on innovating services, as opposed to the infrastructure.

Using Salesforce, the company’s Development Managers have the information at their fingertips to make faster decisions and generally steer the business towards improved sales effectiveness.  Among many integrated tasks, they can score data quality, understand the extent to which the right brokers or contacts are being visited, and the degree to which contacts are being related to opportunities.  Moreover, Development Managers can make a relative comparison of all locations sales pipeline, sales activities—and sales results.

Salesforce.com Successforce Consulting has played a vital role in this large-scale program.  The team undertook a wide range of consulting services, including best practice design and configuration.  "We were able to tap into the vast knowledge, experience and skills of the Salesforce.com Consulting team.  They were on hand regularly to provide hints and tips on how to get the most out of Salesforce and the platform—and to help configure the system to be more effective," says Spalding. 

Live for almost two years, Salesforce is delivering results where it matters most: making Allianz Commercial more agile, more focused, and more effective.  And the statistics back up this claim.  Since using Salesforce, the net strike rate for underwriters has risen by 17.4% compared to what it was the year before.  The gross strike rate for Business Developers is also a 10% improvement on 12 months ago.  

A stronger focus on priority opportunities is paying dividends too.  Here, ‘Priority 1’ opportunities have achieved a gross strike rate of 22.4%, which is twice the business average.  And the volume of Priority 1 opportunities that have been closed has increased by 108 per month.  "The most valuable figure of all is that these figures are on an upward facing curve, "says Spalding.  "We can still do a lot more with Salesforce, but already it’s delivering real, quantified value."

 

Near real-time Dashboard View of Each Sales Situation

On a qualitative basis, Salesforce is also making a difference.  Allianz Commercial polls customers using a bottom-up Net Promoter Scoring (NPS) system.  Historically, this canvassing of customers was undertaken locally, with each UK office producing its own separate customer satisfaction ratings.  Generating a rolled-up customer satisfaction score covering the UK business was a struggle.  Salesforce.com Successforce Consulting was brought in to implement an NPS system—integrated with Salesforce—which provides a single view of customer satisfaction.  Designed, deployed and configured in only six weeks, it means the Allianz team has drill down access into customer satisfaction interviews conducted by the call center, with Salesforce collecting the data and providing a near real-time dashboard view of the situation across all 12 locations. 
 

Customers that express a strong degree of satisfaction or dissatisfaction are highlighted and flagged to managers for a follow-up call and reporting.  The seamless integration of the NPS system with Salesforce, including the custom forms solution Clicktools accelerates management decision-making.  Moreover, it also enables the company to more rapidly execute change management programs, geared to delivering an even more rewarding customer experience at the 'moment of truth'—that crucial point at which the underwriters and Business Developers come together to close business.  "It used to take weeks to generate this sort of information, but now we just need to run the report," he adds.

A 90 percent log-in rate also reflects the popularity and importance of the system.  Equally, the system demands a high degree of bespoke functionality, and the team has implemented scores of unique field, tabs and custom objects, largely themselves without support from the technical department. "This was a business-led project because Salesforce can be deployed and adapted so quickly by non-technical staff," says Spalding.

Spalding concludes, "It’s all about creating a profitable, customer-centric experience.  Using salesforce.com, we can get the prices and the level of profit we want from the right type of partners.  Salesforce also makes our staff much more efficient in their day-to-day activities, while simultaneously helping managers to manage and underwriters to underwrite. I wouldn’t have supported salesforce.com if I thought it would make life difficult for the team".

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