Reduce Errors, Reduce Time- Allstate Improves Reporting With i-Sight Case Management Software
Allstate
For more than 60 years, Allstate Corporation has promised, “You're In Good Hands With Allstate®.” Even as the company has grown to insure over 17 million households, it still lives by that motto. Today, the Allstate Corporation (NYSE: ALL) is the nation's largest publicly held personal lines insurer with auto, property, life, business and other coverages.
At Allstate, the Enterprise Business Conduct group oversees the company’s 33,000 employees and another 30,000 plus contracted sales professionals on issues of privacy, regulatory compliance, ethics and corporate security. The group handles any reports of misconduct, and takes steps to mitigate and educate to prevent future occurrences.
The Challenge
Enterprise Business Conduct must analyze cases for two key purposes:
- Determine communication and education for employees and contractors
- To report statistics, including the cost of fraud, to the board and audit committee per regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act
“We need to know how long cases are open, types and numbers of cases, and cases by job description, by pay grade and by geography,” said Lyn Scrine, Ethics Director.
Yet, the group must do all that without viewing the names of those behind the cases. Everything must remain confidential, yet available for detailed reporting.
With information decentralized in four separate company databases, Scrine found reporting time-consuming and prone to error. Each quarter, she collected case information from those managing the various databases – typically taking about a week to gather and report on.
“I would have to manually reconcile all the numbers each quarter,” Scrine said. “It was hard to be 100 percent confident in the accuracy because some of the cases could be duplicates. They were well-researched estimates.”
The Solution
Scrine recognized the need for a centralized case management system. The company’s third-party call line provider had such a system but it lacked important flexibility. For example, Allstate needs specific workflows by groups using the system, such as human resources, claims, and legal. The system also must provide levels of privacy based on users.
Allstate’s extensive procurement process included requests for proposals from approximately 10 companies. The team saw presentations from several, and scored them based on cost, ease of use, integration with SAP, prior industry experience and access levels.
Moreover, a web-based solution was a must for security purposes, maintenance and ease of use by employees across the country.
Based on those criteria, i-Sight Case Management software came out on top. The web-based solution enables Allstate to create workflows flexibly and set levels of privacy and access depending on the type of user. Most importantly, it provides detailed reporting with essential “confidential transparency.”
Customer Expressions assisted Allstate in migrating information from all four databases, including 10 years of corporate security data. Additionally, they are integrating i-Sight with the company’s SAP system for data sharing.
Customer Expressions also helped Allstate define its various workflows to ensure each case routes to the correct individuals and follows specific protocols. Incoming call line cases immediately and automatically funnel to the assigned team/person for that geographic area.
Approximately 150 human resources professionals and 50 other corporate users enter cases and access i-Sight, and see varying levels of information depending on their established privacy settings. They can attach all documentation related to a case – notes, audio and video interviews, emails, faxes, etc. – keeping everything in one place.
Results
i-Sight provides the level of confidentiality the company demanded. i-Sight also provides the Enterprise Business Conduct team with the ability to report on cases as a whole. With i-Sight reporting, Scrine and her team can analyze types of cases and assign estimated costs to them, as well as ensure workloads are fair across case managers. They can also spot trends, allowing them to respond with communication and education for employees and contractors.
“We’ll better understand the age of cases, where they occur, the lifecycle of a case, and know things like how much legal or investigative involvement was needed,” Scrine said.
Centralizing all cases in one database gives the group a continuously up-to-date record that’s accessible at all times – and only by those with the correct authority. In turn, Allstate can also build a historical view to understand how cases are trending.
Instead of taking a full week to pull together data from widely dispersed teams and databases, Scrine will be able to complete quarterly reporting in approximately half a day. Likewise, she has the confidence that reports do not include duplicates.
“It will only take an afternoon to prepare quarterly reports now. We can report and put a cost on cases, and figure out how to mitigate and prevent them in the future,” Scrine said.
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