About eight years ago, CSAA Insurance recognized that its lagging systems were slowing down its progress in the industry, and were proving to be a competitive disadvantage.
So, in 2010, the insurer made the decision to overhaul the way things were being done, in order to deliver better and more reliable results to its staff and its customers.
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“Our mission is to make insurance simple, personal, and proactive. [But] we couldn’t even achieve our mission with the legacy products and technology we were operating with in 2010,” said Debbie Brackeen, chief strategy and innovation officer at CSAA Insurance Group.
“We had multiple policy administration systems, multiple claims administration systems, multiple telephone platforms, legacy IT infrastructure that wasn’t stable or scalable. So the transformation, while it was a massive undertaking, we were able to address all of that. We now have a single policy and single claims administration systems [and] a modern data platform.”
The changes CSAA has made in the past eight years have been “tremendously important,” Brackeen said.
“We actually can quantify the impact of the transformation in several ways,” she explained. “From a premium revenue perspective, we have grown faster than the industry growth rate – about 30% from $2.7 billion to $3.5 billion. We’ve been able to have reduced loss adjustment expense ratios and reduced underwriting expense ratios. Our customer satisfaction surveys are strong.
“We’ve definitely seen the results in our key metrics for our business, for sure.”
As well as meeting those business metrics, Brackeen said the transformation also meshed with what the company wanted to do for its customers now and its customers of the future.
“The world is changing pretty dramatically because of all these technological innovations we’re all living with right now,” she noted. “We view it as our obligation to our customers to understand all of what is happening in today’s marketplace – the accelerated pace of change: things like ride share and car share and autonomous vehicles. How does that affect our members and how do we offer new solutions? There are changing demographics and changing customer expectations.”
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