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Swedish Insurer Builds 'Customer Interaction Hub' Using Infor Technology

By Tracey E. Schelmetic, TMCnet Contributor

Is the shape of customer interaction changing? If your customer service were an object, what shape would it be? Would it be a line at which your customers arrive, waiting their turn to be addressed by agents? Would it be a platform onto which your customer pile, mingling in chaos until you’re forced to deal with them? Or would it be a hub with spokes that is capable of turning to serve different customers via different media, always showing a unified face to the customer?

If you’re Swedish insurance company Folksam, it’s the latter. The multiline mutual company is working at improving its customer engagement by partnering with U.S. company Infor to co-develop a new Customer Interaction Hub, which will be offered to other insurers. Folksam plans to go live on the Hub in May 2013, reports Insurance Technology’s Anthony O’Donnell. Infor is a New York-based provider of customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise performance management solutions. The Folksam Customer Interaction Hub will be powered by Infor’s CRM Epiphany Suite.

O’Donnell writes that through the Customer Interaction Hub, Folksam expects to gain improved management over its sales leads, allowing it to align information and messaging with the right customer in real time via the appropriate channel. According to the company, being able to develop more “nurtured” relationships with customers will allow the company to gain a better picture of key life events relevant to their need for different insurance products.

Folksam said its needs for new technology were dictated by its ambition to move from being a product-focused company to relationship-focused company: something any company looking to improve the customer experience should concentrate its energies on.

Folksam consulted with Forrester Research (News - Alert) during the vendor selection process, including the RFP and proof-of-concept stages.

“We wanted a single vendor for the entire marketing platform, responsible for all the Web services through the various channels,” Staffan Magnehed, Folksam’s CRM director, told Insurance Technology. “We knew going in that we wouldn’t find a vendor with everything on the functionality side, so we envisioned a partnership with Forrester and a vendor, and Infor came closest to fulfilling what we needed.”

In addition to the Customer Interaction Hub’s lifetime event-based approach, the solution is also expected to help Folksam to better understand and react to lifetime customer value, an important element to maximizing the revenue generation potential of the contact center.

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