Zurich Insurance Group gives its business units a modern, flexible customer engagement solution with Microsoft Dynamics 365

Creating a brighter future for 150 years

For most people, change is unavoidable—e.g., life changes, business changes, cultural changes. You can’t always predict change, but you can prepare for it. For more than 150 years, Zurich Insurance Group (Zurich) has provided a range of property and casualty as well as life insurance products and services to help businesses and people thrive in a world that’s constantly changing. Zurich has come a long way since its start as a marine reinsurer, but its mission has stayed the same: to help customers navigate the crossroads in life with confidence and care. Zurich has committed to putting the customer at the heart of everything it does. 

Beyond its Group function, Zurich consists of local business units (BUs) that are responsible for engaging customers directly in their respective countries, as well as growing revenue and generating their own profitability. BUs around the world are empowered by the corporate center to find solutions unique to each division that can help to enrich the customer experience, ranging from platform capabilities to chatbots, along with end user tools and other internal toolsets. These capabilities can be tailored to the specific market needs of the country each unit serves, as nuanced demands and different preferred methods of communication can be found in different regions. Individual BUs utilize different customer relationship management (CRM) systems as required to provide specialized support.

Optimizing processes for improved customer service

Three larger BUs at Zurich—Switzerland, Germany, and Brazil—were among those in need of a different solution. The three units operate using different business models: B2C (business-to-customer), B2B (business-to-business) or B2B2C (business-to-business-to-consumer) with either captive or non-captive insurance agents/brokers being either employed or not by the local Zurich business unit. All three were looking for a product suite that could deliver speed, flexibility, and personalization for their different market segments and serve their large customer bases.

It was this search that led to these three BUs migrating their customer and marketing data to Dynamics 365 Marketing, Dynamics 365 Sales, and Dynamics 365 Customer Service. These units specifically were impressed with the ability of Dynamics 365 to customize features on a case-by-case basis, depending on the business unit, and that it offered the cloud elasticity needed to withstand seasonal peaks in usage.  

While these three units have different business models, all aim to provide their insurance brokers with a more seamless way to gather data across multiple systems so they can continue serving clients quickly and effectively. Additionally, the marketing and sales teams wanted to recommend personalized events to customers based on product and behavioral history—a key strategy to reduce churn and increase lifetime value. Here’s how each business unit benefits from Dynamics 365 Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service.

A more personalized way to meet customers

The Switzerland business unit at Zurich is the company’s largest Dynamics 365 user, with 4,000 full-time users and more than 1,000,000 marketing and sales customers. As a B2B and B2C business unit, it sells everything from car to property to casualty insurance directly to individuals, and a range of commercial insurance to companies. For Zurich Switzerland, hosting online and in-person events is a crucial way to stay connected to its customers. Events can be anything from informational webinars where customers can ask questions about current or potential services to office opening parties to sales outings at a professional sporting match. And whom Zurich Switzerland invites to these events is determined by data to assure they get the right customers at the right events to drive the highest business impact. 

The business unit wanted to improve its ability to track if the customer opened event invitations—or even received them, as well as the connection to registration and attendance. It also wanted a system that could provide a formalized way to collect feedback or easily use engagement data to continue to optimize the sales process after the event. 

Using Dynamics 365 Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service, Zurich Switzerland now has a seamless way to maintain personalized contact with clients at any stage of the customer journey. The software can track invitation open rates at the customer level and send personalized follow-ups as needed.  It also has insight into how to best target customers. “With Dynamics 365 Marketing, we now have the flexibility to explore new ways to reach customers—something we didn’t have before. It’s been so much easier for us to shape our customer journeys. We've increased our lead quality by over 40 percent,” says Carolin Kräling, Product Owner at Zurich Switzerland. “We’re now getting more of the right people to attend the right events and are able to drive more effective follow-ups. This had led to a better experience and more sales.” 

Zurich Switzerland also uses Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice to collect real-time feedback from customers, helping the company fine-tune communication strategies. By sending personalized surveys, Zurich Switzerland can quickly learn if a customer attended an event, why they did/did not attend, and what events they’d like to attend in the future.  

A reliable solution for modern times

Like Zurich Switzerland, Zurich Germany relies on timely, accurate data to deliver excellent service to its third-party agencies who buy and sell Zurich policies to consumers (B2B2C). And the business unit sought to update its previous CRM system to handle the large amount of data to correlate across software systems.

With Dynamics 365 Sales, agents now have a single place where they can store, analyze, and manage customer information. To speed up data access, Zurich Germany used Dynamics 365 Sales to build a “global search” function into the interface, so agents can quickly and easily find anything they need to know about a customer. The agents can even put triggers on plan expiration dates to be automatically notified when it’s time to contact customers about renewing their services.   

The agents consider several factors when setting the cost of a customer’s insurance plan, a complicated calculation that requires specific software and tools. Using Dynamics 365 Sales APIs, Zurich Germany can seamlessly communicate across tools in a single portal, providing an easy and efficient user-experience. “We always strive to take care of our customers who put their trust in us. Trust is critical to our business. Dynamics 365 supports our teams in being trusted advisors for our customers,” says Stefan Küebitz, Project Manager at Zurich Germany.  

With the reliability afforded by Dynamics 365 Sales, Zurich Germany has an elastic, scalable solution to handle usage spikes and meet customer needs without interruption. 

Empowering agents to do their best work

Zurich Brazil is the largest Zurich office in Latin America and operates across all three business models (B2B, B2C, and B2B2C). Because of that, it needed a CRM system that could handle the wide range of business needs. It implemented Dynamics 365 Marketing, Sales and Customer Service, as well as the Microsoft Power Platform ecosystem including PowerApps, Power Automate, and Power BI. “With Dynamics 365, we can now better manage insurance production and centralize information that was previously distributed among several systems,” says Idevar Goncalves De Souza Junior, IT Manager at Zurich Brazil. The entire customer base and brokers are within Dynamics 365, providing a 360-degree view of the unit’s activities. 

Zurich Brazil started with the implementation of Dynamics 365 Customer Service, known as Z-Chamado (“ZCall”) and “Z-Atende” (“Z-attend”). With Z-Chamado, customers, brokers, and internal employees can quickly and easily create tickets for assistance and get help from across the organization. Within the call center, Z-Chamado works as a second-level ticket opening system if the agent cannot resolve a request on their own. “Z-Atende” is the first-level ticket opening with native dashboards and customizations through Power BI. It is also interoperable with chat on the Zurich Insurance Portal, WhatsApp, and voice service. All 15,000 employees throughout Brazil use the service, and since implementation, it has significantly boosted productivity. “Omnichannel for Customer Service works with WhatsApp, web chat, and voice channels to create a unique experience not only for the customer, but also for the agent, improving the quality of system use and customer service,” says Goncalves De Souza Junior. 

The CRM Comercial (“Commercial CRM”) provides an ordered and organized structure to drive higher sales. Features like separate access profiles bring the right access and performance visibility while providing security. Broker visitor reports are interoperable with the Outlook agenda, while business plans and several dashboards in Power BI are integrated into the Dynamics base. Commercial managers use CRM Comercial through the mobile app, allowing issues to be resolved on the spot. CRM Comercial has improved the broker and customer experience resulting in increased productivity performance in the commercial area by twenty-one percent in just ten months.  

Workflow Underwriter is a custom system that handles the entry of quote requests for lines of business involving large brokers and businesses. It also controls the flow from entry to policy issuance. The system has native interoperability with Outlook and through the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook, emails can be automatically converted into a request within Dynamics. Workflow Underwriter is also interoperable with CRM Comercial, and the global Dynamics 365 Sales system. Automatically converting emails to quote requests within Dynamics 365 has reduced quote time by 25 percent. 

The last capability Zurich Brazil has implemented is Dynamics 365 Marketing, which is known as Z-Comunica (“Z-Communicate”). The service is used to manage cross channel customer engagement for things like installment payment confirmation notices, non-payment and default notices, and general company notices to customers and brokers. Additionally, Dynamics 365 Marketing is also used for all internal emails to Zurich Brazil employees. With analytics from engagement, Zurich Brazil gains insights into engagement effectiveness and improves communication with customers and employees over time. “We’ve received a lot of positive feedback from employees on how Dynamics is not only improving conversation with customers, but internally,” says Goncalves De Souza Junior. 

With interoperable tools, improved communication, and deeper insight into customer needs, Zurich Brazil is better equipped to help its clients thrive. 

Ensuring a bright future  

As the customer landscape continues to change at the pace of technology, these units within Zurich now have modern solutions that can evolve alongside it. All three BUs share a goal of scaling up the numbers of active customers stored in their databases. 

From its founding in 1872 to now, Zurich has always been a company driven by personal connection. And with Dynamics 365 Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service, the Zurich BUs have the tools to stay hyperconnected to their employees and customers around the globe in times of uncertainty today—and into the future.   

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