Case Study Overview
Meet Vertafore
Vertafore, a Denver-based company with over 1,400 employees and multiple offices spread throughout the U.S. and Canada, develops insights cloud-based software and services for the insurance industry worldwide.
For over 45 years, Vertafore has grown to provide services to approximately 20,000 insurance agencies, 1,000 carriers, and 50,000 insurance professionals.
The Challenges
- Unintuitive customer experience (CX) surveys were used to collect feedback from customers and internal employees.
- Communication of collected CX data across departments was inefficient due to rigid and outdated processes.
- With a CRM migration from Oracle to Salesforce on the horizon, Vertafore needed to re-strategize and explore alternative solutions.
The Results
Vertafore now maintains a customer experience “center of excellence” approach, which is powered by:
- Increased response rates to Transactional Surveys.
- Better measurement of customer experience and loyalty via NPS surveys.
- A seamless Salesforce integration for efficient data management and communication.
- Internal surveys to capture employee feedback.
- Enhanced data visualization capabilities.
Alchemer has enabled us to continue scaling efficiently by not only collecting precise, meaningful feedback from our customers, but by allowing us to automatically store that data in Salesforce and communicate it across departments for optimized collaboration.
Everything about Alchemer is easy — from administrators building surveys, to customers and internal employees providing responses from their phone, computer, or tablet. It’s never been easier to take direct action on the data collected, and we couldn’t be happier with Alchemer.
-Britton Bigby, Senior Technical Program Manager, Vertafore
Becoming a CX “Center of Excellence”
Adopting Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
In order to grow efficiently, Vertafore has adopted Scaled Agile framework (SAFe) — a strategy founded on a knowledge-base of organizational and workflow patterns meant to guide enterprises in scaling lean and agile processes.
A SAFe strategy promotes alignment, collaboration, and delivery across large numbers of agile teams, which means that the efficient collection, storage, and communication of information both internally and externally is imperative for Vertafore’s success.
The Problem
While under contract with a top provider in the survey solutions market, Vertafore was faced with the following challenges:
- The surveys that were being used to collect feedback from customers, as well as from internal employees, were not intuitive enough. Building and distributing surveys was difficult and time consuming.
- The communication of collected data across departments was difficult, as certain processes were rigid and inflexible. Vertafore’s feedback tool at the time did not integrate with other technologies being used by departments across the business, which meant there was no way to customize how individuals received the information that was relevant to the success of their role.
- With a CRM migration from Oracle to Salesforce on the horizon, Vertafore became increasingly concerned with the inflexibility of its feedback and insights software.
After prolonged frustration, Vertafore decided to re-strategize and explore alternative solutions.
The Solution
After evaluating the top tools in the market, Vertafore chose Alchemer based on the following factors:
- The flexibility and ease-of-use for administrators, employees, and customers alike. Building and responding to surveys is simple and time efficient for all parties involved.
- A seamless Salesforce integration which allows for convenient, standardized storage and communication of data across departments.
- The ability to customize data visualizations depending on the personal preferences of the employees required to act on the data.
- Unparalleled support from Alchemer’s customer success team.
The Results
Vertafore has been able to prioritize and maintain a customer experience “center of excellence” approach across the business since implementing Alchemer in 2015.
Increased Response Rates to Transactional Surveys
Today, Vertafore closes thousands of cases per month, and follow-up transactional surveys are distributed after each case is closed. Precise customer feedback is collected which allows Vertafore to gain insights into how to provide the best customer experiences possible.
Vertafore is experiencing a significant increase in its response rate, which gives them the data it needs to continue improving its services.
NPS Surveys
Vertafore utilizes Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys with its CX strategy. Customers are regularly asked about their relationship with Vertafore, which allows the business to maintain a tight grip on what its customers like and dislike.
Salesforce Integration for Efficient Data Management and Communication
In the past, an operations team consisting of five members would spend a collective 12-15 hours per month transferring survey data to Vertafore’s previous CRM. Alchemer’s Salesforce integration has eliminated this requirement, which has directly resulted in the operations team using their time more efficiently by focusing on higher priority initiatives.
This fits perfectly into Vertafore’s Customer Experience strategic objectives, as data yielded from surveys is now automatically migrated to Salesforce, which serves as a central and standardized storage system for all departments across the enterprise. Inter-team communication has never been easier for Vertafore.
Internal Surveys to Capture Employee Feedback
Employee engagement and satisfaction are essential to Vertafore’s success. To reach its roughly 1400+ person workforce across the US and Canada, Vertafore routinely creates surveys to capture employee feedback and ideas. From choosing the theme of corporate community service events to feedback on executive town halls, the internal communication team utilizes surveys to easily capture and categorize employee sentiments.
Enhanced Data Visualization
For Vertafore, the ability to leverage visuals in both the data collection and analysis phases of working with customer feedback helps them to take informed action more quickly.
Data visualization techniques are leveraged throughout the Alchemer tool from how questions can be built using images, graphics and icons, to how the data is then reported on. Data visualization features are entirely customizable based on personal or team preferences.
Survey reports are easily generated by the click of the export button and within seconds a plethora of data is packaged and displayed using best practices in data science.