Chubb Pursues Collaboration As A Disruptive Force

Rapid Response

Those "old static tools" also required considerable IT support -- not so with the social platform, according to Bidwell. "Today you're looking at a class of software tools where the IT footprint is extremely light," he says. "The real game changer is the ease and lack of resource intensity to operate these systems. You only have a few IT people running a global platform; when a business need arises" -- a new product or a project for an underwriting team, for example -- "you literally can stand these groups up, design them, architect them, and start to populate them with information and numbers within a couple of hours. It really doesn't require a lot, so you can really be responsive when a business need comes up or a project team needs to get together, or we need to get some people working on designing a new product or service. The ability to react to demand is very rapid."

Another success factor is that, rather than simply installing a management support system that professionals are expected to use, "we let our employees define the need and build around that need," Bidwell says. And because it's all happening via social media, things tend to "go viral. People see what other practices are doing." But there's no need to reinvent the wheel for each group or project. "We're replicating a lot of things, the same solutions template, over and over and over again, because we've figured it out with one or two underwriting practices or areas of IT expertise," he adds. "Now we simply build them over again."

Despite the relative ease of implementation, it's critical to have senior management support for a social collaboration initiative, Bidwell emphasizes. "If you don't have it you are not going to succeed," he states. Chubb's general counsel, as well as its data and privacy experts, also were looped in early on, "to help us follow up at the outset with the rules and regulations of how to use it." And Bidwell reiterates that, despite the leading-edge technology platform, it's not an IT implementation.

"One of things we did at the outset was put together a cross-functional team from across the organization," he relates. "We formed a governance group because we didn't know what use cases would work, and which ones wouldn't. Our intent from the get go was to try to spread our bets" by testing the platform with a variety of groups, such as underwriting, field distribution and marketing. "We wanted to spread our bets so we could see in the first dozen groups we set up what worked and what didn't. Then we could figure out where we would double down or triple down our bets, or where we would deemphasize."

The biggest successes have been "when we had groups of people who are not collocated, where there was a tremendous reliance on dispersed expertise," Bidwell reports. For example, loss control engineers tend to be very specialized, but are dispersed across different locations. "They are always working in the field and remote from one another. They are one of our most intense groups within the platform because they do need to tap into the [specialized] expertise when they come across odd sort of risk," he adds. "When we had a group of people all collocated with each other -- in an underwriting center for example – [the social platform] tended to be less successful, because they could poke their head around the cubicle and get the answer."

The process of deploying new products also has been enhanced thanks to the improved collaboration capabilities, Bidwell says, citing as an example creation of a new professional liability product, "a first of its kind in the marketplace.

"When you do a first of a kind, you're probably wrong 80% of the time" he notes. "We use tools like this to actually put together the 24 underwriters selling it, the field tech people training the agents how to use it, the e-business and IT folks designing iterations of it, and the product managers sitting in Warren." This way, once a new product or update is presented to distributors, the support teams get feedback right away -- an application of the social platforms that is providing what Bidwell calls "a real return. You speed a process that used to be dependent on email chains, conference calls and PowerPoints," Bidwell says. "You're actually watching things evolving real time."

The next step for Chubb's development of social collaboration platforms will involve using them to improve external interactions with distributors and large customers. "One experiment underway now is with a large distribution partner," Bidwell reports. "We put a team of their senior managers and some of our senior managers onto our external Jive [platform]. We have a very successful business relationship with this firm and are tasked with trying to figure out how to develop and implement ideas to get organic growth for both firms -- to bring new customers into the distributor and into Chubb." Essentially, the partners are aiming to take what has been an annual or quarterly planning process and "trying to shift that to real time."

A similar approach could be adopted with big commercial accounts, he adds. "They would come in [to the social platform] and get access to their service team at Chubb -- underwriting, loss control, claims -- and get access to documentation, questions and answers in way that is much faster and more transparent than it was in the old email and mail documents world. I think that's the next big thing."

Katherine Burger is Editorial Director of Bank Systems & Technology and Insurance & Technology, members of UBM TechWeb's InformationWeek Financial Services. She assumed leadership of Bank Systems & Technology in 2003 and of Insurance & Technology in 1991. In addition to ... View Full Bio

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