An enhanced Siebel SFA solution for a national insurance company

Hambra's Insurance Company client is a diversified financial services provider and a leader in the residential mortgage industry. For more than half a century, the Insurance Company has been offering a wide range of insurance programs designed exclusively for financial institutions, general agents, mortgage bankers, lenders and their customers.

To improve sales forecasting and processes the Insurance Company purchased Siebel's Sales Force Automation module but struggled to successfully integrate the SFA solution into the company. After several years of very low acceptance rates, the Company all but abandoned the system until executives at the parent company asked them to try again.

The Insurance Company brought Hambra Consulting in to help implement the SFA solution, delivering it in just 60 days using Hambra's International Delivery Methodology (IDM). According to Rahul Pasarnikar, the Hambra Partner who led the project, “Our team has executed more than 100 Siebel implementations so we know how to get the software up and running quickly and effectively. Our hybrid delivery model also allowed us to strategically match up onshore and offshore resources to increase speed.”

Prior to implementing Siebel SFA, the Insurance Company's sales team tracked and reported their pipeline using spreadsheets – a very unwieldy process, according to a company executive. “Aside from a more user-friendly system for the team, management now has one view of the forecast which makes it easier to adjust to peaks and valleys in real time.” After initial deployment, Hambra also helped establish infrastructure to support the new SFA solution, including a help-desk process and facilitation of end-user training. The Insurance Company continues to outsource ongoing application maintenance to Hambra using the company's IDM.

“Hambra has truly become an extension of our team,” said the executive. “We did an IT analysis and found four to five things within Siebel that needed immediate enhancement. Hambra's expertise and delivery model enabled them to go knock these out while our internal folks focus on other IT areas.” Hambra Consulting also worked with the Insurance Company to help refine and manage the company's Siebel claims processing solution. Faced with uneven performance and low acceptance, the Company asked Hambra to help build an upgrade justification, then implement the upgrade using a smart blend of onshore and offshore resources. According to Company executives, the upgraded solution greatly improved speed, efficiency and accuracy.

Hambra's team also built solutions to help Company representatives better track and manage policies, the inbound call center and service level agreements.

“We were able to quickly handle a backlog of change and enhancement requests from the Company's processors using our onshore/offshore methodology,” said Pasarnikar. “This helped claims get handled faster and made payments to customers more timely.”

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