Getting in Harmony with Customers

CUSTOMER INTEGRITY SOFTWARE | When the primary intent of every piece of work you undertake is delivering improved services to your customer, it really isn’t good enough for your end-to-end view of that customer to be a hit and miss affair.

So when the country’s fourth largest general insurer, Allianz Australia Insurance, recognised it needed to shift from its historical product focus to a razor sharp focus on customers, things just had to change.

“It wasn’t that we weren’t getting any customer information across the end-to-end relationship; it was just hit and miss, and we were relying on call centre operators checking through different screens rather than it being controlled,” says Steve Coles, chief general manager, information technology for Allianz. “So while we could get an end-to-end view, it was clumsier than we would’ve liked.”

“As an insurance company we came from a history of being highly product focused, and that was reflected in our systems environment,” says Coles. “The key impetus for change was a shift in our environment from being more product-focused to having a total focus on the customer.”

The obvious way to support the new strategic focus was to push for a single customer view, that much sought after, yet highly elusive, Holy Grail of the software industry. Allianz now says it has achieved just that after turning to an SOA-based customer information integrity software solution, called Harmony, from Australian enterprise software developer Mastersoft. Allianz’s new Web site supporting a single portfolio view, My Allianz, went live in May.

Giving Customers Control

With more than two-million policyholders, Allianz Australia Limited is a multichannel insurance provider with an international network of brands. The group brings together the expertise of specialists in property and casualty insurance, life and health insurance, asset management and banking.

Allianz offers a wide range of insurance and risk management products and services through its subsidiaries, including personal insurance; industrial and commercial insurance; corporate insurance; public and products liability; workers’ compensation; and loss control and risk management strategies. It operates throughout Australia and New Zealand and employs about 3300 staff.

“Allianz is a mature multichannel insurance service provider and from that perspective it’s really important that we offer choice across the different channels that we offer, including our direct channel partnerships with other players such as National Australia Bank, where we partner for insurance delivery to their customers, as well as our broker channel, which is very important to us,” Coles says. “Ultimately the goal we have is to make it as easy as possible for customers to access our products and services and to try and offer self-service solutions as much as possible so that we can give the customer the end control.”

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Coles says Allianz’s single customer view project has improved customer service levels and enhanced communications with its customers. Next it plans to use the software to promote brand loyalty and improve its options for cross-selling its products.

“In this day and age where customer service is paramount, we need to have a single customer view,” Coles says “When a customer contacts our service centre or needs to view their portfolio online, they can do so in one place. Ensuring accurate and consolidated client information is key to achieving this view.”

“We have now been able to improve customer service levels significantly; that was one of the main drivers,” Coles says. “Previously, we could have customers duplicated within our system. Harmony’s consolidation capability allows us to look at the customer database and eliminate multiple client identities where there should be one.”

Elusive Goal

Plenty of companies aspire to achieve a single customer view, but relatively few outside the banking industry have reached this goal. Gartner analyst John Radcliffe says while CEOs around the world are demanding the single customer view to enable their organisations’ customer-centric growth strategies, CIOs typically find the task rarely as simple as the directive.

“To successfully target, acquire, develop and retain customers, organisations rely on accurate, comprehensive, up-to-date customer information and insight,” Radcliffe writes. “However, the subject of the single view usually varies as widely as the customers. Companies may target a consumer, a business, a citizen, a taxpayer, a physician, a patient or even intermediaries, such as insurance agents. Adding to this complexity, creating the single customer view can be hindered by dozens of internal barriers. Internal politics, organisational ‘silos’, lacklustre executive sponsorship, mergers and acquisitions, data-quality problems, heterogeneity of operational IT systems, lack of closed loop integration between operational and analytic systems, and the inability to generate and leverage customer insight all contribute to project complexity.”

Radcliffe says while organisations can finally tackle the major technical barriers to the single customer view with a relatively new range of technology, processes and services which fit under the umbrella of customer data integration (CDI), the biggest obstacles — the political and organisational barriers — remain. Nonetheless he predicts creation of an accurate, timely and rich single view of the customer across channels and lines of business will be a key enabler for reducing costs, managing risk, and increasing revenue and profitability in customer-centric organisations throughout 2008.

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The challenges of single customer views and managing a master record of customer information are not new issues. Although the introduction of enterprise and CRM suites greatly improved the available data, functionality and processes, it did not totally solve the problem of a single view of the customer. Most enterprises have heterogeneous environments extending well beyond the capability of a single vendor. The need for integration of customer information remains.

Clean Data

For Allianz the business case for the single customer view project revolved around the ability to improve customer service levels and promote brand loyalty, while also enabling Allianz to cross-sell its products and communicate with its customers based on a true understanding of their needs.

To achieve that goal Allianz integrated Harmony with its main insurance application, CSC’s Polisy. Unlike traditional data cleansing solutions, Harmony ensures that Allianz can maintain its single customer view without duplicate identities creeping back in.

“The benefits that Harmony provides us are threefold,” Coles says. “Firstly, there is the ability to cleanse our existing customer information. Secondly, Harmony facilitates the identification of customer duplication before consolidation occurs. And, thirdly, Harmony provides a mechanism to assist in maintaining data accuracy. This is where inconsistencies arise, particularly when you have as many different sources of customer information as we do.

“We also wanted to be smarter at marketing and campaign management, so that we could use the information about our relationship with customers better in order to target-market particular products aligned to their needs,” Coles says.

Coles says Allianz took a significant risk in leading the charge on implementing the new version of the Harmony software, but was pleasantly surprised that a software product it had expected to be immature was able to be implemented so smoothly. “In fact, when I asked the implementation team if they would have done anything different in the light of hindsight, they reported they had found implementation fairly mechanical,” Coles says.

“The big challenge we had — and we were pleasantly surprised that there were so few challenges overall — was more from a business perspective in really being clear about the business rules because we needed to mechanically cleanse the data.

“The issues we had didn’t involve the technology itself, or the quality of the data, the issues were around being absolutely crystal clear about the business rules for cleansing and matching data, and then testing those to the utmost degree. It wasn’t something that we wanted to get wrong.”