Symetra Adopts Onyx Employee Portal

Seeking to increase productivity of its field sales team, Symetra Financial has become an early adopter of Onyx Software's (Bellevue, Wash.) new mobile CRM solution, the Onyx Employee Portal for Blackberry. The solution is designed for use with the Blackberry wireless platform on the Blackberry PDA device, developed by Research In Motion (RIM, Waterloo, Ontario).

Symetra's (Redmond, Wash., formerly Safeco Life & Investments) choice of the Onyx solution can be traced to their track record with the software provider: "We've been a long-time customer of Onyx and have used it successfully to streamline processes, unify customer information assets and increase productivity within the walls of our offices," says Lisa Gardner, IT manager, Symetra Financial. "With the Blackberry edition of Onyx CRM, our field sales staff can now access client information, make changes and assign follow-up actions, keeping them completely in sync with corporate." The Onyx Employee Portal for Blackberry is a new addition to the Onyx Portable CRM product family which includes products for offline laptop access with data synchronization and wireless access for PDA devices like the Blackberry and other handheld devices.

Field sales people can now use the Blackberry to access critical client data, service information, and high priority tasks maintained for them in the Onyx CRM application. It provides wireless access to the data and makes them available for immediate contact with the office and customers, making it easy to quickly trigger support activities, according to the vendor.

"Our field sales staff will be more effective because they have direct access to customer contact information and the latest updates on their accounts. And, at corporate, we are able to know what's going on in the field every day instead of waiting for them to get back to the office," relates Gardner. Ideally the application provides a powerful way for the insurer to optimize the convenience of the Blackberry platform.