Insurance Leader Gains Revenue and Competitive Advantage with Analytics

A leader in providing top-quality insurance since 1885, award-winning Hastings Mutual Insurance provides commercial, personal and farm insurance regionally in the MidWest. In an increasingly crowded market, Hastings Mutual wanted to build on its data initiative with analytics to improve its competitive advantage. Randy Sykes, IT Director of Data Services was in charge of leading the transformation into a data-directed organization.

The challenge: Support data-driven decision-making

Hastings Mutual wanted to democratize data to support effective business decisions and processes. Earlier, the team was using static mainframe reports based on data that was 30-45 days old. Randy initiated the building of an on-premise financial data warehouse that supported an earlier dashboarding tool. However, that tool required labor-intensive ad-hoc customizations to meet the needs of the end-users. Consequently, the BI team was inundated with requests from end-users. The team needed a solution that would increase speed to insight, and accelerate their time to market. They wanted to organize and present data in a way that would make it easier for end-users to understand requisite data sources and relationships which would empower them to build their own dashboard visualizations.

Last-mile delivery of analytics

Randy’s team found that the Sisense Fusion Platform offered not only the next generation of analytics that they wanted, but also the solid data modeling capabilities needed to take their business analytics to the next level. While the team quickly built the behind-the-scenes data models, Sisense’s intuitive, easy-to-use dashboarding tool helped democratize the data by putting analytics back in the hands of the users. “Typically we see with any project, 80% of it is fairly easy to get going and running—it’s always that last 20% that will stop you if you haven’t done things carefully,” says Randy. “Sisense has truly taken over that last mile of analytics delivery for us. To be able to get people to use the analysis to actually make business decisions — that’s where Sisense comes in. End-users are no longer faced with a bottleneck and can get truly self-service BI to do their own analysis and drive their decisions.”

A paradigm shift for internal users

Using Sisense’s data modeling capabilities, Randy’s team presented a framework to business users that would help them to create self-service visualizations to quickly gain deeper visibility into problems and focus on remedies. Since reporting times improved by 98% along with greater data granularity and accuracy, adoption is high with 25% of Hastings Mutual employees utilizing 180 active Sisense dashboards and insights today.

Customers get the complete financial view

Next, Hastings Mutual embedded Sisense analytics into its agency portal providing daily visualizations of an independent insurance agency’s book of business including premiums, losses and plans. This provides Hastings Mutual’s business partners with a complete financial picture of their on-going business with Hastings Mutual. Additionally, information about upcoming renewals and potential business upsell opportunities helps partner agencies drive retention and growth. In less than two months, more than 760 external users have signed up for the service and begun to access those embedded dashboards which exceeded Randy’s initial expectations.

Figure 1 – Main Agency Book of Business Dashboard providing a summarized, drillable view

Figure 2 – Agency Book of Business Commercial business drill-down

Figure 3 – Clicking a policy count brings up policy details to help agent target additional sales

Infusing data culture throughout the organization

Seeing how successful the Sisense embedding has been with customers, the organization as a whole is excited about the possibilities of the tool and continues to come up with new ways to use data and insights. There is buy-in from the C-suite, with the CEO regularly using the internal KPIs dashboard and championing the agency portal rollout. Line of business leaders now use geospatial insights like weather information from NOAA to identify potential exposures due to storms which resulted in more than $150,000 in cost avoidance annually. Marketing is beginning to use data from the US Census Bureau to identify business opportunities and review agency partnerships to ensure service levels throughout Hastings Mutual’s coverage area. With the geospatial visualizations, the heat map color coding of selectable attributes (lines of business, weather types, agency locations) along with policy and claim information allows the business teams to visually explore specific geographic areas to understand business conditions and situations better than a spreadsheet with numbers could ever provide.

Figure 4 – Hail, Wind, and Tornados along with potential impacted policies for 12/15/2021 weather event. Listing of policies are under the map. Policy clusters are drillable.

With Sisense, data teams can provide a layered approach to the maps, so that business users can discover the data without additional querying or thinking about the underlying data model. The addition of demographic information allows Hastings Mutual to use analytics in making data-driven decisions about business opportunities in specific geographic locations.

In the future, armed with data, the company will be able to send proactive alerts to policyholders ahead of potentially damaging weather conditions. These types of abilities create a competitive advantage by fostering a differentiated, positive customer experience with the brand. “This will help us step out of the box as property and casualty insurers and allow people to make better life decisions even before they make a transaction. That, I believe, is the bigger impact of analytics and how we can leverage it to help the community,” says Randy.

Immediate impact

Hastings Mutual recorded immediate results with its first Sisense use case in the commercial underwriting area, with a 2% increase in revenue. Through the agency platform, they were able to identify upsell opportunities of over $50 million for their business partners.

Following the successful implementation of their data initiative, Hastings Mutual has been honored by the 2021 Drexel LeBow Analytics 50, a national recognition of analytics distinction, honoring 50 organizations that have used analytics to solve business challenges.

Roadmap to the future

Randy expects to further accelerate their time to market by supporting straight-through processing to ensure minimal manual touching of policies. This will include the development of systems and architecture that have AI and ML integrated in a large part of the underwriting process to improve speed and accuracy. With Sisense as a partner, he feels confident that they will be able to build on the data modeling that they already have in place to up their game. “Sisense has been an integral part of our whole data strategy, where we not only look at where the data is coming from, but also examine how to put data into the hands of the decision-makers,” says Randy.