Central, operational Universal Customer Master across all Lines of Business
Executive Summary
Interamerican Group is the leading private Insurance organisation in Greece for over 40 years with a unique history of innovations in the insurance market. It is part of Achmea Group with more than 20.000 employees.
Interamerican had a fragmented view on its Customer data, due to the fact that Customer information was dispersed in more than 10 core back-end systems, resulting in series of issues including:
- Limited Customer view (contracts, products, needs, cross-sell & up-sell opportunities, affiliations, addresses, etc.).
- De-centralized management of the Customer data (personal data, addresses, telephones, contracts, affiliations, preferences, etc.) with customer data duplication in multiple different systems, and across business lines.
- No single-point-of-access for Customer data, contracts, relationships with other customers and Sales Channels.
Interamerican asked Cognity to implement the Project “Cosmos” to resolve the above issues and enable Interamerican to excel in Customer Experience Management. Cognity’s “Cosmos” Project scope was the creation of a Unified Customer Master that would serve as the central and operational repository of all Customer-related information for the Insurance Group. The Project led to an improvement in the Customer Management and Customer Service processes of Interamerican, as mandated by Solvency II requirements. As an indication of the quality delivered by Cognity, is the fact that the completeness and the accuracy of Customer address data reached 98%.
Finally, the project has been awarded in the Greek “Business - IT Excellence Awards” demonstrating its success and the tangible results it yielded for Interamerican.
Business Challenges
The main business challenges addressed in the context of this project were:
- Integrate Customer data from more than 10 core Insurance back-end systems, to provide a 360 degree customer view.
- Decide on Customer data survivorship and business rules for cleansing, standardising and merging Customers
- Cleanse, standardise and de-duplicate Customer data coming from all the back-end systems
- Enrich Customer and Address data with external sources and reference data (e.g. Greek Post Office data)
- Ensure the integrity and consistency of all Customer-related data
- Create a unique Customer record in the Universal Customer Master and maintain its relationships with the data residing in the back-end systems
- Streamline the Customer creation process, starting from the Universal Customer Master and continuing to the relevant core Insurance back-end systems.
- Address the complete Customer lifecycle, (create, update, terminate, expire, etc.)
- Enable external systems and applications to participate in the Customer lifecycle processes.
- Improve Customer Experience by empowering the customer-facing employees with a complete Customer view
- Promote continuous process optimization through continuous monitoring
Turning Vision into Results
Cognity introduced Oracle Siebel Universal Customer Master (UCM) as the MDM solution, Trillium Data Quality as the Data Quality & Data Governance solution and used the IBM Websphere as the SOA integration and Portal implementation solution for Project “Cosmos”.
During the initial phase of the Project, all Customer data were extracted from the core back-end systems. Within the context of the Project, data were cleansed via Trillium and migrated into Siebel UCM. From this point onwards the business operation changed so that each new customer of Interamerican had to be first inserted into UCM and then shared online to the appropriate back-end system, over a SOA based integration layer, according to rules pertinent to each one of the back-end systems.
During Customer creation each Customer is assigned a Universal Unique ID (UUID) and then it is cleansed, matched and de-duplicated in real-time, so that it can then be shared through the SOA integration layer, with the back-end systems of Interamerican.
To support Interamerican, Cognity implemented a thin web application, on top of Siebel UCM, that serves the functionality for searching-creating-updating a Customer, which is accessible by all Interamerican employees, agents and also serves B2B channels.
All Customer Data (multi-million records) were initially cleansed, standardised, de-duplicated, merged and then migrated to UCM. Then UCM interoperates, in real-time, with the core back-end systems and shares the Customer data to these systems for all Lines of Business, in order for them to continue operations, applications for new products, contract management, customer billing, receive payments, etc.