AA Insurance started life in 1994 as a joint venture between the NZ Automobile Association and Suncorp-Metway Ltd, to provide New Zealand motorists with specialised car insurance.

Since then, AA Insurance has grown to over 300 staff providing house, contents, boat, caravan and motorbike insurance. A healthcare product also attracted 150,000 customers with over 300,000 policies which, while closed to new business, still required ongoing customer support and claims management.

Clunky legacy system
To manage the health portfolio the company had a legacy system that had been added to and adapted to fit with the company’s needs, but had reached a point where upgrading further was not possible. In addition to this, internal team changes meant there was no longer anyone in-house with the required knowledge of the system. The hardware had also become so outdated it was no longer supported.

“There were reconciliation issues within our existing system for our health insurance team that meant we were unsure about the integrity of the data,” says Martin Chisholm, finance and administration manager.

“We had been tracking the issue for a while and decided we needed to address the problem and change to a more user-friendly, solid reporting solution, to ensure our customers were properly supported.”

The company turned to a vendor it had worked with in the past, Integral, as the latter knew the business and understood the existing data issues.

Off-the-shelf solution
AA Insurance took on board Integral’s recommendations and looked to implement a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution, opting for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Integral specialises in delivering membership management solutions.

“We have a great relationship with Integral and trusted their understanding of our business needs. The Microsoft solution was exactly what we needed – an off-the-shelf solution with the required flexibility.”

Other solutions were investigated, but these were not available out-of-the-box.

Many years worth of transaction history needed to be transferred from the old system, so Integral ensured all the fields that were relevant on the existing system were mapped to the new CRM solution.

“As the healthcare product is closed to new business, we didn’t want to spend large amounts of money to build a major new system. Integral helped us build a basic insurance system with the capability to rate premiums, issue invoices and pay claims,” says Chisholm.

Advanced yet simple reporting
The new Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution was implemented in February 2010, and ran in parallel with the legacy system until this was decommissioned, in April 2010. This allowed staff to get up to speed with the new system before the old one was taken offline. The solution is delivered as software-as-a-service.

The feedback from the AA healthcare team is that the new CRM system is much quicker to use. It’s also easier than the previous one when it comes to training staff on it. Familiarity is also a key benefit for employees, with Microsoft Dynamics CRM having the same look and feel as Outlook.

“We can now use the ‘find and report’ wizard to generate the reports we require. In the past, this had been handled by IT experts and was very time-consuming.

The reports also have a better layout, and we have the ability to drill down to individual transactions, which was not possible before.”

“We’ve enjoyed helping AA insurance transition to its new solution,” says Lincoln Watson, Integral’s general manager for professional services.

“It has seen immediate benefits.”

“The deployment and data migration to the new CRM platform was extremely smooth, because of the close interaction of the teams, and the software-as-aservice model.”

“Microsoft Dynamics CRM has improved usability and reporting for the team, which, along with the ease of transferring the data from our old system, were great selling points for us,” says Chisholm.

“In addition, having the ongoing support for Dynamics CRM from Microsoft has given us confidence in the longevity of the solution. Overall, this system has delivered all we needed and is a great leap forward from the previous system.”

AA Insurance now has better control over its healthcare invoicing and premiums, along with intelligent reporting and streamlined processes.





> Microsoft New Zealand
P: + 64 9 362 5865
E: askdynnz@microsoft.com







10/6/29_ex_m_h_nl