Allianz Transforms the Way its Agents Sell Products

The Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America is not waiting out the financial crisis to make itself more attractive to agents who have gotten decidedly more picky over the years. It knows better. 

“With the increase in the number of product choices, agents have more choice in who they do business with,” says Jason Linn, VP of Fixed Annuity Product Innovation at Allianz. “The challenge we have is making it easy for them to do business with us, and that is extremely important from an illustration perspective.”

The illustration system Allianz had in mind needed to be flexible and address the dual challenge of being compatible with its operating systems and staying current with the new versions being introduced. It also needed to be easy to use. 

“If we can offer a system that is easy for our distribution to use and let them focus on selling, and not on the phone with technical support, we can use that as a competitive advantage,” says Linn.

It chose Insurance Technologies, a company it had had a relationship with for years. “Partnering with an illustration vendor that is able to stay ahead of the game is critical,” says Linn in explaining the selection.

“Since the products are complex, and we are illustrating guarantees, it is critical to illustrate values that are accurate and repeatable,” says Linn. “Insurance Technologies and the ForeSight Platform ensure that our results meet both of these criteria.”

Allianz has been using the Foresight program since 2005 to ensure accuracy in its Life calculations. The ForeSight 5.0 platform, however, which won the Windows in Financial Services 2008 Innovator Awards, enabled the company to offer its Vista users an illustrations system. The components of the installation also were compatible with the primary operating systems being used by the company. 

“With our move to the ForeSight 5.0 platform, we gained significant ground from a technical perspective,” says Linn. 

In getting the system running, there were some challenges to address. “Our launch date was firm so all development and testing needed to be complete in four months,” says Linn. 

To reduce testing time, the company had to create its most complex product first so it would have a foundation for the other products. During the development process, it selected and reselected the functionality that was critical for launch, pushing off the others to a later release. It also had to find creative ways to train its internal users on new software and new product with software that was developing everyday. 

In the end, product development was completed in the four month timeframe and the marketing launch went smoothly. “In the first week, we had only one installation question called into the service desk,” says Linn, and this was without following its normal practice of providing a desktop CD of the software to its agents on launch day.

As for the benefits, ForeSight 5.0 is far superior than the previous 3.0 system, according to Linn. “The installation process is more intuitive and the components used are designed to work with today’s operating systems,” he says.

The calls into Allianz’ service desk and the time spent on these calls have been significantly reduced, according to the company. The update process also has been improved as has the user experience. “With the introduction of the ‘Summary Values’ section, users are able to see how each parameter they modify alters the premium needed or death benefit available,” says Linn. “The field capabilities are expanded to let the user create very specific funding patterns, death benefit changes, illustrated rates and rider selections quickly and easily. We’ve also seen marked improvement in the speed at which the values are calculated and the actual report is rendered into PDF format,” he says.

“Users being able to quickly create a variety of situations has had the biggest impact,” adds Linn. “They are able to move quickly through the fields and from one page to the next, all the while seeing the results on screen. Our internal users are spending less time talking about how to install and use the software and more time selling product.”

As for next steps, Linn says Allianz will be putting two more life products on the software platform and it will be exploring the expanded capabilities of the Life system, such as sales concepts. “At some point we will look at bringing our Fixed and Variable annuities into the ForeSight 5.0 platform,” he says.

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