Success Story
CNA Cuts Travel Costs by Nearly 90 Percent with Cisco MeetingPlace
Travel has long been the insurance industry's lifeblood. In the past, insurance representatives traveled to deliver information and services to their customers, to train and update their extensive networks of field agents and brokers, and to communicate new rules, guidelines, and processes to all their regional offices. People-powered and often complex, the insurance world relied heavily upon business travel to make everything work smoothly.
CNA Financial Corporation—the fourth-largest commercial lines insurer based in the United States—with US$12.3 billion in annual revenue and 14,600 employees, believes that it has found a better way to do business. Instead of traveling, CNA now relies on Cisco® MeetingPlace, an integrated voice and Web conferencing solution. The company uses Cisco MeetingPlace to train its employees, demonstrate new software applications, make presentations, and conduct meetings that previously required coordinating the attendance of perhaps hundreds of people in one room. Travel expenses have shrunk dramatically.
Cisco MeetingPlace provides a fully integrated rich-media conferencing solution, including voice and Web conferencing capabilities. Residing "on-network"—behind the firewall on internal voice and data networks—Cisco MeetingPlace offers unmatched security, reliability, scalability, application integration, and cost-efficiency. Offering significant cost savings over traditional service bureau solutions, Cisco MeetingPlace—part of the Cisco IP Communications system—takes advantage of existing corporate IP and circuit-switched public switched telephone network (PSTN) voice and data networks to greatly reduce or eliminate transport tolls and recurring conferencing charges.
Cisco IP Communications is a complete enterprise-class system that integrates voice, video, and other collaborative applications into intelligent network communications solutions, securely and smoothly. IP Communications solutions—including IP telephony, unified messaging, voice messaging, IP-based rich-media audio and videoconferencing, and customer contact solutions—take full advantage of all the power, resilience, and flexibility of an organization's IP network and boasts an "inherent intelligence" that enables organizations to solve problems, conduct transactions, and complete tasks more automatically.
"Cisco MeetingPlace cost containment, effectiveness, and convenience really won us over," says Barbara Jacobsen, director of travel services for CNA. "For example, we use it to train thousands of field workers around the world each year—at about one-tenth of the cost of doing it onsite."
Now when CNA needs to get 14 people from two hemispheres and three time zones together in one room for four hours, Cisco MeetingPlace can help accomplish this task in less time, and at a reduced cost. "Why pour time and money into a massive travel program when you can get it done—faster and more effectively—from the convenience of your own office?" asks Jacobsen.
"And it's easy to learn, easy to use—it integrates right inside the Outlook calendar—and gives the meeting facilitator incredible control before, during, and after the meeting," says Jacobsen. "I only wish we'd adopted Cisco MeetingPlace sooner."
Solving a Need
The CNA Training Department was the first to try Cisco MeetingPlace voice and Web conferencing. Later, the company converted to a fully outsourced hosted service so that it could take advantage of an expert Help Desk and support staff and still maintain the advantages of a dedicated solution. CNA had previously owned the hardware and administered the system.
"With Cisco MeetingPlace, we get all the benefits of an outsourced conferencing solution without the fees, the hassles, and the security risks that you'd get with typical service bureau offerings," observes Jacobsen.
The Travel Services group was so pleased with its new voice and Web conferencing capabilities that it urged top management at CNA to deploy the solution enterprise-wide. CNA agreed and Cisco MeetingPlace usage quickly jumped by 50 percent as human resources, sales, IT, finance, and other departments began using the solution.
CNA employees appreciated the integrated voice and Web conferencing controls, such as being able to see a list of all the meeting attendees and exercising real-time control over who can contribute to the voice or Web portion of the conference. They were soon sharing CNA proprietary and third-party applications, as well as delivering lightweight Microsoft PowerPoint presentations with annotations during team and project meetings—without first having to get on an airplane or spend a few nights in a hotel.
"It's so simple when you think about it," says Jacobsen. "Airfare, hotels, and meals alone can cost one-thousand percent, or more, of what you'll pay when using Cisco MeetingPlace. And that doesn't even take into consideration the wasted productivity—including everything from travel fatigue to time on the road and in the air—that you recover with Cisco MeetingPlace."
Communications Is Key
Few industries, if any, rely on two-way communications as heavily as the insurance business. Field agents work closely with prospects and customers to assess their needs as well as the risks involved in meeting those needs. It's also essential that agents and office personnel throughout CNA and its affiliates follow the same underwriting practices and standardize on the same proprietary software applications and forms. The better the agents' underwriting practices, the greater the likelihood of a successful business.
To ensure that its field underwriters, from beginners to veterans, stay at the industry's vanguard, CNA mixes proven techniques with a more cutting edge approach in the company's ongoing Underwriting Quality Training (UQT) program.
Before the company adopted Cisco MeetingPlace, legions of CNA underwriters found themselves regularly rotating through the corporate headquarters for their UQT training. Now, CNA delivers rich-media presentations and shares the company's proprietary software wherever their underwriters work. Similarly, CNA trainers no longer travel across the globe demonstrating the company's software tools to its affiliates. The training is still provided but the trainers can do it locally.
"We can make our presentations and share our applications and attachments in a collaborative session," says Jacobsen. "Again, neither the trainers nor the trainees are tied up in travel, so we skip those expenses. But just as important, we can get our affiliates up to speed much faster than before."
From sales training to project team meetings, proprietary software demos to human resources presentations, CNA has traded travel—and the associated expenses—for Cisco MeetingPlace. "Cisco MeetingPlace will help you contain costs in a variety of ways," concludes Jacobsen. "From reducing travel expenses to speeding decision-making to boosting productivity."