Progressive Insurance - Creating Value via Mobile Field Service

It is no secret that in every industry, consumer expectations are climbing. To meet these increased demands, companies need to run their business operations more efficiently. The current field service processes are losing their ability to deliver first-rate customer service. To solve this problem, companies are beginning to invest in mobile field service processes that can serve customers faster and make it easier for customers to do business with them.

Progressive Insurance is widely considered a best-practice company in customer service. For some time, the company has been relentlessly executing against the focal point of being “easy to do business with.” In order to live up to this reputation, Progressive is an early adopter of and heavy investor in technology. This best-practice case study illustrates how:

• Customer service is vital to value creation in the insurance industry, particularly in auto insurance, which is highly competitive. Despite the focus on customer service, customer satisfaction levels are at all-time lows, with claims and other critical customer-facing processes bogged down by paper trails, missed phone calls, erroneous data, and other process inefficiencies.
• The Progressive Corporation is taking a long-term strategic (rather than tactical) approach to improving customer service. Progressive is investing in mobile technology to acquire, serve, and retain customers. The investments are wringing out inefficiencies from its customer-facing and back-office processes and directly affecting the company’s bottom line.
• Progressive Insurance is deploying mobile field service to streamline its claims processes and boost customer satisfaction. Progressive’s claims representatives can perform up to 20 different transactions in the field on a single site visit. In addition, it highlights a potentially profitable application of mobile in one-to-one pricing of insurance services.
• The return on investment (ROI) from technology investments is quite positive. Progressive is growing much faster than the rest of the auto insurance industry, and enjoys profit margins of 8%. This is in stark contrast to its peers, which have been losing money due to underwriting losses over the past few years.

The bottom line: Mobile field service applications have moved from the “nice to have” category to the “need to have” category. In this best-practice case study, we demonstrate the ROI of mobile technology and the power of mobile enterprise applications to reinvigorate the entire insurance industry.

Read the full case here...