Insurance: Auto/Property/Casualty Insurer

Auto/Property/Casualty Insurer

Venali Internet Fax assists a leading auto insurer in cutting costs and streamlining workflow while maintaining their exceptional level of customer service.

The Company

Venali’s client is the largest direct marketer and the fifth-largest private-passenger auto insurance company in the United States. In addition to auto coverage, the company’s offerings include motorcycle insurance and emergency road service. The company is also the 10th largest property/casualty insurer in the U.S. with assets over $13 billion. In the U.S. alone, this company has more than 5 million policyholders and over 9.5 million autos insured. Sales are close to US$7 billion and revenue growth is far greater than other top insurers in the nation.

This company employs more than 22,000 associates nationwide with 12 major offices throughout the U.S., and international operations in Asia and Europe.

The Challenge

As one of the nations’ leading auto insurers, Venali’s client was sending and receiving thousands of fax documents per day. From claims forms to body shop estimates, the company was challenged to find an efficient solution to integrate fax documents with their business operations. A key issue the company faced was managing multiple communication fronts, from customers and attorneys to other third parties involved, while at the same time delivering exceptional customer service. The company sought an efficient and quick way to send insurance binders to waiting customers and give authorization to body shops for repairs on the customer’s car. Receiving sensitive in-bound documents such as police reports or signed paperwork from customers also necessitated a simple method to quickly collect and process documents. The company also needed to deliver information to customers, attorneys and other third parties on demand.

The company had invested millions in state-of-the-art business and IT systems to efficiently accommodate its growing customer base and the number of documents generated as a result. While the client’s current IT infrastructure and call centers addressed some of these challenges, fax was still required for a large portion of in-bound and out-bound communications. Venali’s client sought a fast, reliable way to send, receive and store countless fax documents. Venali Internet Fax Services created an effortless and cost-effective solution that responded to the client’s needs.

The Strategy

Venali’s IP Fax solution provided a bridge between the world of fax communication and the client’s various IT and business systems.

The company deployed Venali Desktop Fax Services to more than 8,000 employees. This allowed customer service and claims agents to send, receive, store and manage faxes right from their desktops. Fax documents such as signed customer claims could now arrive directly through email to customer service agents for immediate processing. As the faxes resided electronically they could also be tied to customer records or insurance cases and stored on file for later recall.

The company also integrated Venali Production Fax services with their internal business systems. Customer service agents could now fax information directly from customer records in the mainframe. Using Venali Production Fax Services, the company also implemented a fax-on-demand system which provided a self-service interface on the web site for customers to request and receive their own information by fax.

The combination of Venali Desktop and Production Fax Solutions delivered tremendous savings both short- and long-term. The web based fax-on-demand service which was implemented cost virtually pennies per request and saved the company approximately $4 per service incident. In addition to streamlining its workflow, the company also saved thousands of dollars in traditional fax server hardware, software, and on maintenance costs. Other benefits included a reduction in call center volume and call costs as well as a vast improvement in overall customer response time.

Benefits

Streamlined Customer Service and Workflow

• Faster customer claims processing and fulfillment at a fraction of the cost of their current fax method
• Improved customer response time while reducing direct call center volume
• In-bound claims and other time-sensitive faxes arrive directly in email inbox for immediate response
• Faxes can be sent and received while managed, routed, and stored digitally
• Company agents in the field can send and receive faxes from wherever email access is available

Cost-effective Technology Easily Deployed

• The single global IP-based fax solution was easy to deploy and implement for multiple locations and platforms, across the entire company
• Easy to integrate with existing email and legacy systems
• Provides infinite fax capacity which automatically scales based on need
• No changes to the customer’s existing IT infrastructure were required
• Removes investment and maintenance costs associated with hardware-based fax servers