SIDEBAR: From Green to Keen

Aon, a leading provider of broking and consulting services for risk management, insurance transactions, reinsurance, employee benefits and superannuation, is implementing CRM as part of its push to become a real-time enterprise. CEO Peter Harmer says Aon is currently rolling out PeopleSoft CRM 8.0 across its Australian business. The system will be used by staff managing customer calls from complaints to general enquiries. It has essentially taken Aon from a green-screen system, which staff refused to use in preference for filing cabinets, to a flexible, intuitive browser-based system. Pilots of the new system have resulted in an 87 per cent increase in efficiency (from 15 minutes to two minutes per customer).

"From our perspective we didn't start necessarily with a decision that said: 'We needed to be a real-time enterprise'; we started from the position that said: 'Where are we at as a business and why aren't we fulfilling what we think intuitively is our potential?'," Harmer says. "And part of the answer was very simple. It was because we, like the rest of the insurance industry, has been far too product focused. I think generally our industry has had a tendency to try and squeeze client need into a product bucket, of one form or another."

To rectify that, Aon decided to invert the way it thought about the business and its clients, and to ensure that it properly understood the client need prior to choosing a product.

"One of the early realisations that we had was that Aon had come together through the mid-90s as a product of a series of mergers and acquisitions, and we had something like eight different transaction processing systems. If we were going to think about our clients and understand the totality of their needs, and then start to think about how we could mirror and match with products, services, solutions, we actually didn't have any place where we could go and see what our total relationship with our client was. We had to potentially go to eight different sources of information."

And with no visibility of trends in customer complaints and enquiries, it was impossible to create a feedback loop back to business stakeholders.

"Now four or five of our major business processes are captured by the CRM system and our productivity gains so far have been quite astounding. At a macro level we've grown the business in revenue terms in three years by 60 per cent, in a market that was pretty static, so we've taken our revenues from $150 million to over $250 million," Harmer says.