Client story Transforming Field Enablement by Eliminating Paperwork
By Insight Editor / 11 Nov 2017 / Topics: Customer experience Devices
Facts at a glance
Client industry:
Insurance
Challenge:
The client wanted to improve field enablement for its agents, eliminate paperwork and capture data electronically during a site visit rather than after.
Solution:
- Windows 8 tablet app
- In-office device docking
Results
- Lower total cost of ownership over time
- Increased response to customers
- Improved data capture quality of on-site visits
- On-demand access to resources
- Significantly decreased report creation time
Solution area:
Insight’s Digital Innovation solutions help clients incorporate emerging tech into their business operations to improve the customer experience.
A global insurance company relies on site visits conducted by its agents to assist clients with coverage selection and compliance. Traditionally, the company’s field agents have toured corporate facilities, collecting relevant information and notes on paper-based forms. At the conclusion of such site evaluations, these agents record additional notes, prepare summary reports and document their recommendations.
The company realized it needed to transform this model to improve field enablement for its agents, eliminate paperwork and capture data electronically during a site visit rather than after. Enabling field personnel to perform effective site visit reporting would help identify risks and prevent loss while increasing customer satisfaction.
Buried under information and red tape
The company's insurance field personnel had been managing a large amount of paper, which proved cumbersome and unwieldy during site visits. Because field personnel didn’t have the ability to log notes and data on site in real time, they faced a high potential for losing information and decreased accuracy upon returning to the desktop to rekey the information.
In addition, the manual process of document preparation limited the number of site visits in any given day, which, in turn, limited the number of customers any field agent could support.
Gaining time to engage clients
Depending on the insured property, a site evaluation report could take anywhere from one to five hours to complete using paper-based solutions. Assuming an agent produces 60 to 100 reports per year, the reduction of just one hour in report production could yield efficiencies upward of 75,000 hours for this insurer, based on 1,000 field personnel conducting client site visits. This efficiency increase translates into more time available to engage clients or to perform additional site visits.
Driving field enablement
The insurance organization secured Insight to develop a Windows 8 tablet application to drive field enablement and productivity.
“When trying to choose vendors, the depth of experience and passion they had for these technologies made the choice simple for us,” says the insurance company’s senior director of development. “We knew we were getting a high-caliber, top-notch team to build our flagship application.”
The key goal was to allow field personnel to use a tablet device during site visits, and then dock the device in their office, providing the best of both worlds to this segment of the workforce — and freeing time to spend on other profitable activities. To achieve this goal, Indsight's Digital Innovaiton team leveraged the native features of the Windows 8 platform, along with the native features of the tablet device.
The use of a tablet and redesigned application:
- Improved data capture quality of on-site visits by field personnel
- Provided on-demand access to resources typically resident on the company laptop
- Significantly decreased report creation time
- Offered a modern platform with an attractive interface that could aid in recruiting new employees and retaining existing personnel and agents
Reaping the benefits
To maximize efficiency for field personnel, the solution leveraged the capabilities of a lightweight tablet device, including camera, cellular communications, global positioning, touch screen and stylus devices for input. An important factor was the device's ability to run disconnected from a power source for extended periods without imposing excess demands on the tablet battery.
The solution also took advantage of the unique capabilities of the Windows 8 platform to enable a seamless transition from mobile to desktop usage, providing an appropriate user experience for each setting. From the outset, it was designed like a consumer-facing application, with a simple, attractive interface that minimizes the need for training.
The result to the insurer is a high rate of adoption, lower total cost of ownership over time, increased response time to customers and a solution that exactly meets the client’s needs.
