Insurance Giant Gains 360-degree Customer View with NoSQL Implementation

By Tracey E. Schelmetic
TMCnet Contributor

If contact centers have a kind of Holy Grail, it’s this: developing a 360-degree customer view. This means that regardless of which channel the customer chooses to contact a company, whether it’s telephone, Web, paper or electronic bill payment, mobile app or even social media, the customer support organization can track, analyze and utilize the information to provide better customer service.

It’s a challenge for many companies, particularly those that operate older, legacy systems that don’t integrate well with newer channels. The stakes are high: when customers perceive that one part of the customer support organization doesn’t know what the other is doing, customer perception of quality, and therefore customer satisfaction, take a nosedive.

For insurance companies, this need of a 360-degree customer view is particularly acute: many insurance companies sell different types of insurance such as life, home and auto insurance. If a customer carries multiple policies, it’s important the company not treat that customer like multiple accounts. In fact, if insurance companies hope to attract new customers by offering multipolicy or family discounts, they had better gain an overall picture of the customer.

Insurance giant MetLife is one of those companies that has been striving to gain this all-encompassing customer view. According to a recent article on InformationWeek, the company recently took a major step forward in revamping its customer view by implementing a NoSQL database as the platform for bringing together data from more than 70 separate administrative systems, claims systems and other data sources.

"We had 60 different teams working together as one group, and they were working nights and weekends not because they had to but because they were excited and wanted to," Gary Hoberman, MetLife's senior VP and CIO of regional application development, told InformationWeek. Hoberman notes that the implementation of the new solution took only 90 days, impressive when many such installations run to months or even years.

InformationWeek’s Doug Henschen noted that MetLife’s implementation of NoSQL makes sense because these databases can ingest structured, semi-structured and unstructured information without requiring tedious, expensive and time-consuming database-mapping or extract, transform and load (ETL) processes to normalize all data to a rigid schema, as required by relational databases.

The result has been that MetLife is now better positioned to integrate its multiple product lines and provide customer support personnel with a view of not individual products and policies, but of the customer and all transactions and policies for that customer over the course of what could be a very long customer lifecycle.