CRM in Insurance: Capitalizing on the Customer Service Opportunity
Understanding the CRM Landscape
But with so many CRM products to choose from, it can be tough to sort them all out, let alone understand which ones are best for customer service applications. And the CRM market landscape seems to be changing almost daily, with all sorts of recent merger and acquisition activity.
For example, Janna was recently acquired by Siebel Systems, ServiceSoft was just bought out by Broadbase, and Avaya recently acquired Quintus. These moves follow Nortel Networks' acquisition of Clarify last year. Other vendors, such as Cisco, are focusing on acquisitions as a means of adding new capabilities to their products to support contact centers. At Doculabs, we expect the consolidation to continue as vendors extend their products' functionality to personalization and content management, or target selected vertical industries.
At the same time, CRM is gaining favor not just as a stand-alone technology category, but as one of the strategic infrastructure layers needed for successful e-business. Thus, CRM software will continue to evolve from specialty solutions into the primary layer for supporting the business, just as ERP systems have evolved into primary layers for back-office applications. We're already seeing some convergence in the CRM and ERP arenas, as PeopleSoft and Oracle have added offerings to their ERP suites.
Finally, we're already seeing e-commerce software vendors such as Intershop and Blue Martini extend their platforms by incorporating CRM capabilities. This is likely to blur the lines among different software categories—the capabilities of CRM will still be critical, but you may be able to use a variety of different systems in order to get them.
For insurance companies looking at CRM tools for their customer service applications, the key is to get a firm grasp of the business needs. Do you simply want to capture customer contact information from multiple channels? If channel capture is the priority, most CRM products can handle it. However, such an approach will limit the company's ability to provide its customers with more value through content access and self-service.
Are you looking for more advanced capabilities, such as content publishing, personalized presentation, and the ability to give users self-service access to a common repository with library services? If so, plan on integrating a third-party content management solution with your CRM product. Today, most CRM products don't offer the level of sophistication offered by leading content management products. This is understandable, as the CRM vendors have been more focused on adding support for new channels, such as wireless, than on content management.
But as insurers focus on their customer service initiatives, they should keep their ""big-picture"" e-business strategies in mind. Realize that a customer service application is one of many applications in which the same content and data can be leveraged to serve customer needs. Many organizations are not yet looking at customer service together in the context of their overall e-business strategies, and they should.
In the short term, if a carrier is serious about integrating customer service into its e-business strategy, it should be prepared to integrate separate technologies with its CRM solution. For example, e-commerce systems, content management systems, and enterprise application integration (EAI) technologies all represent important pieces of an e-business architecture. While CRM packages do not provide this range of capabilities, many are beefing up their functions in these areas. Over the next 18 months, the result will be an e-business technology market that grows even more crowded before the winners emerge.
Frank Meister is a senior analyst, Bill Chambers is a principal analyst, and Joe Fenner is a senior technical editor with Doculabs, an independent research and advisory firm that helps companies choose the right technologies and strategies for e-business.
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