Insurance broker streamlines customer engagement, manages rapid growth with Dynamics 365

Growing business, growing needs 

Much of the United States population faces planning for healthcare, retirement, and wealth management. As workplace benefits continue to shift, businesses of all sizes have relied on OneDigital’s advisory teams for strategic counsel, helping them control costs and deliver value to workers. The company consults with employers on health and benefit insurance along with retirement and wealth plans, and it outsources HR functions for smaller businesses.

Founded in 2000, OneDigital grew quickly through mergers and acquisitions and now serves 85,000 employers. In 2017, the company had around 900 employees. In the past four years, it more than tripled in size, growing to 3,000 employees today. OneDigital relied on an on-premises IT environment that needed to be heavily customized and upgraded every few years to keep up with the growing, evolving business. The company also served a variety of customers and found it challenging to accurately track their journeys and needs in a complex environment.

“We have some customers that are benefits-only, some that use all of our services, and a mix in between,” says Greg Blair, Chief Information Officer at OneDigital. “That is why it is important for us to have one view of our customer and analytics to surface other sales opportunities. With our legacy systems, we didn’t have full visibility and the heavy-lift upgrades were inefficient.”

A standardized environment 

OneDigital adopted Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Customer Service to move its customer engagement platform to the cloud and streamline the customer journey. It will soon add Dynamics 365 Marketing. “We chose Dynamics 365 because we needed an agile environment that was highly configurable, but that also offered great features out of the box,” says Blair.

The company also uses many services in Microsoft Azure, such as Azure API Management. OneDigital used API Management to create easy connections with the insurance carriers’ systems. “With Azure, we can meet our carriers where they are,” says Blair. “The carriers are not all ready to build APIs or develop workflow automation with us, but they may be able to export files and give us data in an electronic format instead of on paper, which saves a lot of time.”

In addition, OneDigital adopted Microsoft Power Platform. The company used Power Apps to build a Return to Work app for employees who had been working remotely due to COVID-19. Staff also rely on Power BI to gain sophisticated reporting and data visualization capabilities. “I’ve built up our data analytics team over the past few years, and Power BI has been a game-changer for us,” says Blair. “We have a ton of legacy data that we couldn’t fully tap into without Power BI. We now add value back to the sales teams by giving them a view of their book of business, their opportunities, and where they should spend their time—leading to more efficient processes.”

Lastly, OneDigital uses Microsoft Teams for internal collaboration, file sharing, and video calls. “We’re breaking down silos with Teams,” says Blair. “Our staff is phasing out phones at their desks and instead using Teams, which we’ll eventually connect directly to Dynamics 365.”

Speed to scale

OneDigital’s biggest priority was to scale quickly to keep up with the average of more than 30 new acquisitions per year. “Some days it feels like we’re building train tracks while the train is going 90 miles an hour,” says Blair. “Our business speed is accelerating, and the size of the deals are increasing. Dynamics 365 has helped us move fast and get new agencies onboarded.”

Because the company is growing so quickly, it knows its technology expenses will grow too. By embracing Dynamics 365 and creating a more standardized IT environment, OneDigital is administering its budget more efficiently. “We’re not reducing our total spend, but we’re shrinking spend as a percentage of revenue,” says Blair. “By consolidating on Microsoft, we’ve saved money by simplifying our environment and eliminating the cost of extraneous legacy tools.”

Visibility across customer and company

Blair notes that the insurance industry tends to still rely on traditional business administration methods, like paper and faxes. By moving to the cloud and automating and digitizing many business processes, OneDigital has more visibility into what’s happening in the business and can unlock value creation related to digital processes. “We’re building one company on one platform, which helps unify our employees and customers,” says Blair. “With Dynamics 365, we improved transparency on the sales and customer service teams across the organization.”

Continues Blair, “We have capabilities we’ve never had before, such as the AI and relationship insights built into Dynamics 365 that alert consultants to important trends and customer needs. Thanks to Dynamics 365 Customer Service, we better understand the customer experience that we’re driving and deliver exceptional service, which is huge in a business based on relationships.”

Continued growth, new leads

As a result of a consolidated customer view, OneDigital more easily tracks, manages, and pursues leads. “We have nearly 85,000 customers in our customer engagement platform and a tremendous volume of leads for new prospects and cross-sell opportunities.”

Concludes Blair, “By adopting Dynamics 365, we’re better equipped to keep pace with the growth rate we’ve been lucky to experience organically and through acquisitions. We’re providing our staff with the latest and greatest Microsoft technology, which has helped us retain good talent and grow our business.”

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