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Long before customer-centric was a buzzword, Amica Mutual Insurance Company was showing the world what it meant.

Since 1907, Amica has held true to one mission: to create peace of mind and build enduring relationships. With over 1.7 million policies in force, the company is consistently ranked #1 for customer satisfaction by J.D. Power.

“We put the customer at the center of whatever we do, whether we’re making long-term strategic decisions or short-term practical decisions,” says William Fitzgerald, Amica’s vice president of sales and client services. “We’re always looking at everything through the lens of ‘how is this going to benefit our customers and allow us to ultimately execute on our mission?’”

Several years ago, Amica recognized the need to meet rising customer expectations by replacing its customer management solution with a superior tool. The company wanted to give sales and service representatives a full view of the customer in one system, help them prioritize activity to best meet customer needs, increase sales, and reduce overall IT costs. Above all, Amica wanted to personalize and enhance the customer experience.

After making the decision to purchase Salesforce, Amica began searching for an implementation partner. Fitzgerald explains that Salesforce expertise and cultural fit were equally important in the decision. Amica needed a partner that it could trust for the long-term.

Amica engaged Slalom to help deliver a complete view of customers to frontline sales, service, and marketing personnel through a phased implementation of Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. 

Meanwhile, Guidewire Software and Salesforce were in conversations to develop an insurance-specific object model to connect their offerings. Guidewire provides the industry platform that Property and Casualty (P&C) insurers rely upon, and Amica was one of Guidewire’s first customers more than a decade ago.

Salesforce and Guidewire approached Amica with an invitation to be the anchor customer for their new joint venture. “That was intriguing to us,” says Fitzgerald. “We would have input on design, on business flows, on the various nuts and bolts of the object model. It would position us for the future.”

The only downside was that the new object model was being built exclusively for the Salesforce Financial Services Cloud. “The Slalom team helped us work through the decision,” Fitzgerald recalls. “They helped us assess what it was going to mean from a timeline perspective, the rework we would have to do, and the overall business impact. It was a significant decision, but looking back on it year over year, it was the right one.”

Amica’s new system is called CARE, which stands for customer acquisition, retention, and engagement. It allows the company to access and use pertinent information that is stored not only in Amica’s policy center system, but also in Guidewire’s claim system and Amica’s Guidewire billing system as well.

“We’ll be able to take action on that data to improve first call resolution and customer satisfaction,” says Haney. In addition to a 360-view of customers, the system provides actionable insights sales and service representatives. “Providing information on next best action or best leads to follow up on will contribute to increased revenue growth and improvements in internal efficiencies.”

In addition, by using what Guidewire is providing and not having to apply its own resources to writing integrations, Amica expects to be able to reduce the size of its support team and reduce IT costs.

The first release of CARE in June 2018 was just the beginning. Future rollouts are scheduled into 2019, and Amica will continue partnering with Salesforce and Guidewire to understand and influence their roadmaps going forward.