Brighter Business specialises in providing tailored insurance policies to meet the needs of small businesses. It has 2700 customer in a variety of sectors including retail, pubs, restaurants, surgeries, clinics, hotels, guesthouses and tradesmen, plus a variety of office and home-based businesses.
The insurer found its existing industry- specific CRM solution to be too restrictive. While it could track customer interactions and store data, it did not have all the requirements they needed to remain at a competitive advantage.
Call centres need to be able to depict an accurate picture of the businesses customer database, highlight any weaknesses and therefore enable the business to proactively rectify them to boost profit and sales.
Ian Hutchinson, chief financial officer at Brighter Business, comments, “We needed an application that could be extremely customised to meet the needs of the direct insurance business model.”
The solution
After evaluating a number of CRM vendors, including Siebel Systems, DynPro recommended SugarCRM’s commercial edition, Sugar Professional, because it has a strong price-to-performance proposition.
As Sugar Professional is open source, it enabled the much-needed heavy customisation to support Brighter Business’ operating processes.
Hutchinson says, “The insurance industry is highly competitive and customer satisfaction is a competitive advantage. We needed a CRM solution that could track customer interactions across multiple channels and provide us with an accurate picture of our customer base.”
Brighter Business leveraged DynPro to integrate and customise Sugar Professional across a number of systems. The CRM specialist’s trained consultants and developers understood the needs of Brighter Business and with this in mind, customised Sugar Professional by including enhanced security to support requirements and best practices within the financial sector.
Other customisations included:
- Support for credit card payments,
- Third party campaign execution with response tracking
- Enhanced reporting with Jasper Reports
- Custom workflows, integration with Ajax technologies to the core user interface modules
Customisation also included development of an extensive framework to allow developers to more easily create new functionality both in the user interface as well as with Web devices and services using Sugar Professional’s API.
“Due to the limitations of the previous CRM solution, end-user buy-in was gained relatively easily,” Hutchinson says. “Training of the nuts and bolt functionality was provided to the end-users early on, which was followed with a usability workshop to learn where issues lay and to highlight the improvements and customisations that should be made to support our business processes.”
Results
DynPro’s customisations enhanced and added a significant amount of functionality to the application, allowing Brighter Business to improve the company’s ability to satisfy customers as a result. Sugar Professional was integrated to the company’s Web site via Jitterbit, an open source integration solution. DynPro was then able to develop an extensive Web service API’s to integrate with Sugar’s existing Soap Services.
Leveraging Sugar’s framework with DynPro’s vertical solution also allowed Brighter Business to receive continuous updates from the website on activities including registrations, quote requests, policy sales, marketing responses and effectiveness.
Brighter Business could now link the company’s e-commerce site with the call centre. Very often a customer would first receive a quote from the website and then ring the call centre for clarification or purchase information. SugarCRM has allowed the history of the web quotation to be available to customer service reps in the call center, and Brighter Business can now synch client activities on the web with quote and policy data generated by the call centres. Data imports of lead generation data are also automatically managed and used to generate outbound call activities.
Finally, SugarCRM is also being leveraged to conduct outbound campaigns where lists of leads are imported into Sugar and then allocated to associates who are making the round robin calls. “The fact that it’s commercially open was the real paying point,” Hutchinson says. “We’re already seeing that deploying SugarCRM has taken our CRM initiatives to the next level.”
