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Case Study: Insurance and Financial Products Sales

April 10, 2008 – 5:57 pm

Ace Money is part of a group of 3 companies, with approximately 50 offices across Maharashtra and approximately 500 employees. They provide various value added services in the financial and insurance sector including credit cards, general insurance, home loans & personal loans.

Anand Shrikhande is the owner, who wants to expand his business & wants to have a
professional setup for his general insurance business. He expects that once he’s successful in implementing this with general insurance business, then he’ll expand it to his other businesses.

Ace Money has a team of tele-sales executives who make calls to customers when their insurance is due to expire, and then give them options of various Insurance products just in time to consider new and better options. If the customer decides to opt for any of the proposals, then they send a field sales executive to complete the transaction.

So far in On2Biz, we have handled primarily field sales operations. This was a new and interesting case that would challenge the SaaS model, and we were keen to rise up to the challenge.

Expected Challenges

When our consulting partner, Arun from Solution Enterprises referred the case to us, we were concerned about the following challenges:

1. Transaction Load - So far in On2Biz, we have been handling companies who primarily have field sales executives. Even there are tele-sales executives, there are very few calls made per day. In this case, the tele-sales executives make an average of 20 calls per hour! We were concerned about how our system could handle such a large load and continue to serve existing users without affecting response time.
2. Connectivity - The company in question has multiple offices spread across A and B-level cities. We were concerned about whether we could manage enough last mile connectivity at all locations.
3. Leads Data Importing - Leads were to be captured from various source databases. This included purchased leads, external databases and spreadsheets.
4. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) - Previously, the tele-sales team operated on a manually recorded spreadsheet, and with rented computers. They were now planning to purchase new computers - in fact, they planned to purchase laptops for each user. Hence in addition to the monthly usage charges of On2Biz, the TCO would include the cost of the hardware, networking, Internet connectivity, and software for the operating system, web browser and for managing office documents.

Following our standard implementation process, our first step was to map the sales process into our workflow template.

The Current Process

The tele-sales team’s current working procedure was as follows:

1. Open the call sheet (spreadsheet). Check whether there are any follow-up calls to be done
2. If no follow-up call is due at that time, look at the list of fresh calls
3. Look up the phone number of the customer to be called from the contacts sheet
4. Call the customer
5. Discuss the offer (as per call script)
6. Capture data about the vehicle, such as the age, cubic capacity, seating capacity etc. and record into call sheet
7. Look up a Insurance premium calculation sheets (one for each option)
8. Prepare premium quotation using the calculators. If necessary, offer more than one insurance package for comparison
9. If any follow-up call is required, record the date and time for the follow-up call in the call sheet
10. After the call is over, update the status of the call in the call sheet

On2Biz workflow objects

1. Sales Project or Opportunity - a sales project or an opportunity is a single case of selling something to a customer. For example, an insurance policy. We may have more than one sales project for the same customer. Hence, it is important to differentiate between a customer and a sales opportunity.
2. Sales Milestones - Each sales project or opportunity goes through several stages of selling. Starting with a fresh call, the project may go through several follow-up calls and stages, including visits by field sales, and finally till the payment is collected and the order is closed. The project may also get aborted at any stage, with an unsuccessful outcome. Each stage of the sales process, where there is a easily measurable outcome, is called a milestone.
3. Sales Projects Pipeline - a list of sales projects at various stages of the sales process, is called a sales pipeline. A sales person’s primary responsibility is to move projects ahead in the sales pipeline from one milestone to another, till the order is closed.
4. Tasks and Appointments - the activity that a sales person carries out so as to move the project from one milestone to another is a set of tasks, phone calls or personal visits. The phone calls and personal visits are termed as appointments, while other types of activity which need to be done are called tasks.
5. Notes - these are remarks that can be added be anyone associated with a sales project. It could be remarks added by the sales person to record any important information regarding the project, or can be added by a manager to record suggestions to the sales person.

The new process using On2Biz workflow

The new operating procedure using On2Biz was designed as follows:

1. Check whether there are any follow-up calls to be done by looking at the “Pending Appointments”
2. If no follow-up call appointment is due at that time, look at the list of projects in the “Projects Pipeline”
3. In the project pipeline, click on the project title to open the Project page. The project page shows the entire case history of the sales project
4. Look up the phone number of the customer to be called by clicking on the contact name.
5. Call the customer
6. Discuss the offer (as per call script)
7. Select the type of policy to be offered by editing the Value section of the project. Then select the policy to be offered by selecting the checkbox on the left. It will also open the form to capture data about the vehicle, such as the age, cubic capacity, seating capacity etc.
8. Look up reference spreadsheet to get the IDV of the vehicle by clicking on the link “IDV Lookup”
9. Click on the “Premium Calculator” to prepare premium quotation using the calculators. If necessary, offer more than one insurance package for comparison
10. If any follow-up call is required, go to the Activity section, and add a new appointment to record the date and time for the follow-up call
11. After the call is over, update the status of the call in the milestone section.

The Infrastructure

Connectivity - They were able to arrange for a 512 Kbps Internet connection for every location

Computers - Each user was provided with a low-end laptop with a Celeron processor and 512Mb RAM. A Server was configured as a gateway and proxy at each location.

Operating System - All laptops and servers were equipped with Suse Linux.

Web Browser - Firefox

Documents Manager - Open Office

Read more about the setup at Arun’s blog

The Result

Ace Money is now using On2Biz for all their sales executives. Managers are able to monitor the flow of opportunities through the pipeline of every sales executive, and measure the sales effectiveness at every stage of the sales process.

Performance Measure	November 2007	March 2008	Improvement
Total Number of Cases Handled	3791	6667	175%
Overall Conversion Ratio	2%	2%	0%
Average Sales Cycle	17 days	9 days	52%

Screenshots of Dashboard

Sales Performance in November 2007

Sales Performance in March 2008