American Fidelity: Solution-at-a-Glance

by Britta Dahl

American Fidelity markets to a broad range of employers through a network of branch offices and agencies. Key insurance products include disability income, group and individual life, and hospital indemnity.

Customer data is managed by the Records Department where voluminous paperwork had been hindering the company’s customer service representatives (CSRs) when assessing customer information. The system also threatened the building since the records had reached the maximum weight the structure could support. Making matters even more urgent, a customer database of 600,000 was growing by 20% per year.

These issues combined with rapidly escalating costs provided the final impetus for major process change. The Information Technology Services team at American Fidelity embarked on the development of a new knowledge management system - one that would add workflow and document management and COLD to image and information management technologies. The group turned to Xerox Professional Services (XPS) to provide rapid deployment of imaging and COLD, as well as assistance with creating a document management architecture and strategy to guide future developments.

The XPS system supports the printing of 40 million pages of customer information per year. It also provides enhanced on-line viewing capabilities which, under the old system, had reached its capacity, frustrating CSRs in their efforts to provide information to customers. The new system eliminated the need to print 11 million additional pages.

XPS also designed a COLD-based system that adds capacity and the ability to view entire forms, including graphics. The selected technologies automate data mining and support CSRs by processing over 7,000 file requests per month.

"Customers can now have their information requirements satisfied with just one phone call. That’s a substantial improvement in Customer Service, and service is what we’re all about," says Bill Patric, second vice president of Information Systems at American Fidelity. Patric says his company chose Xerox Professional Services for its experience with documents. "They understand the aspect of applied knowledge management better than anyone in the marketplace," he said.