Technological advancements and a global pandemic have changed the approach to and expectations of customer service.

 

While providing a means for speaking to someone when needed is still an essential service that Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance Company of Idaho must provide, the company also recognizes that self-service has emerged as the preferred choice for many people. This is one reason for our strategic initiative of making it easier to do business with us.

 

True to that initiative, Farm Bureau Insurance has created a customer portal, the "Customer Self-Service Hub," to streamline and simplify the way we do business. The Hub soft launched on Monday, June 22; the full launch takes place on Monday, July 20.

 

To mark the Hub’s debut, Coverage spoke with a few of the people behind its development.

 

Dana May, Director of Customer Experience: The Customer Self-Service Hub was a customer-driven initiative. One of our strategic initiatives is to make it easier to do business with the company. We believe that by empowering our customers to self-service, we are making it easier for them to do business with us. This is just one step in a series of many to empower the customer to self-service.

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Using the SAFe methodology, the portal was created in approximately ten weeks. However, there was some foundational work that was completed prior to that to ensure it was ready to develop.

 

Many groups and individuals were responsible for the portal’s creation. Anthony Atkinson did a lot of the leg work up front to ensure we were ready to develop the product. All of the development teams had a hand in creating the following features: enrollment and logging in, viewing and paying your bill, viewing and printing documents, having agent contact information available, and filing a first notice of loss.

 

The Training team was instrumental with communication, training, and collecting feedback. The project owner was Shilynn Francisco, and she facilitated the flow of the project from beginning to implementation. Sales helped with marketing materials, and Eddie Colon in Information Services created the Farm Bureau Hub logo. It’s really been an organization-wide effort.

 

COVID-19 was an interesting hurdle, but the teams adapted well to that. Interestingly enough, COVID-19 was also a projectile for this as it brought visibility to the need for our customers to have access to more self-service tools.

 

Other than that, there weren’t really any setbacks. Everyone did a great job of overcoming any roadblocks and overall, the work has gone pretty smoothly.

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One issue that was a top priority for us was data security. Many measures were taken by the system team to ensure that the product is secure and safe for our customers to use.

 

Chris Joslin, Enterprise Architect: We have multiple layers of security protecting the portal and the information passing through it. When a customer connects to the portal, the traffic is secured by industry-standard encryption. The traffic also passes through firewalls that monitor for malicious activity and keep the customer’s information and our systems protected.

 

Data entered into the portal is immediately passed to our back-end Guidewire systems and vice-versa; the portal represents a live connection to our Guidewire systems.

 

Jer Hermance, Software Developer III: To keep portal data secure, user authentication is handled by Microsoft Azure B2C. This is a battle-tested authentication layer that Microsoft created to facilitate the development of business to consumer applications.

 

User accounts provided by Azure B2C are linked to policies through the enrollment process using Guidewire’s User and Account Authentication server (UAA).

 

The UAA server stores any policy memberships and minimal user information, like their account nickname. These are hosted on secure servers behind our Farm Bureau firewalls and secure website protocols.

 

Policy information for our users is still managed in the Guidewire suite and is not directly exposed to the user.

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Dana May, Director of Customer Experience: Testing of the portal has gone well. We began with a small group made up of internal employees and agents, received feedback, and then expanded the test group to all employees and agents. We’ve documented and prioritized all the feedback in order to make improvements. Some of the feedback suggestions have already been made and others will be made incrementally. In a sense, the soft launch was another test to see how our customers fell about the product. It’s exciting to see the customers use the portal so we can gain their perspective on how it benefits them.

 

We received a lot of feedback during testing related to making logging in and enrolling easier. We also received feedback that it would be nice to file a claim and quote and buy insurance. Those are all things we intend to implement eventually. Overall, the feedback has been positive. We do have items that can be improved and we will make those improvements soon.

 

We will continue to solicit real feedback from customers with surveys. We will take that feedback and decide which items are the highest priority for improving the customer experience. The surveys include a Net Promoter Score (NPS) question: “How likely is it that you would recommend the Farm Bureau Customer Self-Service Hub to a friend or colleague?” This will tell if our customers are promoters or detractors of the Hub.

 

There are so many things we can do down the road with the Hub. Short-term, we want to make improvements and enhancements to the current product. Long-term, we want the customer to be able to file a claim and have visibility into the status of their claim throughout the process. We also want our customers to be able to quote and buy insurance with the Hub. It’s going to be exciting because all of these things are achievable now.

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