CRM BRIEFS

By Diana Garber

Selective Insurance Group, Inc. (Branchville, NJ), announced plans for a new 24x7 claims service center, a value-added option for Selective's independent agents and their customers. The center will be staffed with trained company personnel who will receive loss notices for all lines of business, begin the claims handling process for each claim, and service small automobile physical damage claims to completion. The program pilot begins this month, with a planned rollout to agencies in Selective's 20-state operating territory by year-end. The Selective claims service center will be located in Richmond, VA, the site of the company's existing service center, which handles policy administration for small business accounts. Designed to enhance the customer and independent agency claim experience, the Claims Service Center is also expected to provide cost savings by reducing claim cycle time, increasing efficiencies and enabling field claim management specialists to spend more time on large, complex claims. James McLain, senior vice president and director of claims, adds, "We expect the claims service center to generate annualized net savings of $1 million, while at the same time, freeing up our field claim personnel to spend more time with agents and their customers."

Global leaders evade long-term CRM pitfalls by utilizing proper management and measurement tools, according to a survey by Best Practices, LLC, a Chapel Hill, NC-based consulting firm. The study, "Countdown to Customer Focus: A Step-By-Step Guide to CRM Implementation," says companies that view CRM as a process, not a project, are more likely to achieve lasting success. For continual CRM success, the survey recommends a detailed plan for the management of expectations for the long-term success of a CRM process, strategies to measure CRM performance and tactics for the supervision of continuous improvement initiatives to ensure lasting success. The study was based on interviews and surveys with CRM team leaders at 32 organizations worldwide.

E.piphany Inc. (San Mateo, CA) now offers out-of-the-box global features in its next-generation software suite, E.piphany E.6. E.piphany's program allows insurance companies to run multi-national marketing campaigns with round-the-clock international support at a reduced cost of deployment, the vendor says. The application infrastructure of E.piphany E.6 is based on the Unicode standard, which is a way to manage binary coding of text of script characters. Features available in the software include Single Database Multilingual Data, international e-mail support, linguistic sort order, input method editor and translation tools for implementers. E.piphany products are available in English, German, Spanish, Korean, Portuguese and Japanese; other languages can be installed into the program.

Interface Software (Oakbrook, IL) announced the released of InterAction 5, a new relationship intelligence system. The new software helps relationship-based organizations, including insurance and financial services companies, overcome cultural, process and technological challenges associated with CRM implementations. The new program includes a more rapid ROI, a reduced cost of ownership and an increased ability to identify new business opportunities. Interaction 5 is enhanced in areas including data quality and new projects architecture. InterAction 5 also gives control over whether and to what extent information is shared in the firm database.