Sales on the go
Pacific Life Insurance says it has improved sales force productivity through the use of mobile enterprise voice portal technology. With the solution, field wholesalers in Pacific Life's Annuities and Mutual Funds Division can communicate with support staff and supervisors more quickly and reliably, enabling the company to pursue sales opportunities days or weeks faster than with the old system. The technology from iHello supports the company's sales force automation and customer relationship management solutions.
"We faced several process challenges that the technology we had in place wasn't addressing," says Phil Teeter, VP of technology at Pacific Life. "We needed to find a solution that made it even easier for the field wholesalers to do their job more productively, and that is what we have now."
The field wholesalers use BlackBerry PDA phones to keep in constant communication with financial representatives who sell their products and with their support team, which is responsible for providing follow-up materials. They use Pivotal CRM software to manage contact account data. According to a recent news release from iHello, its technology was chosen to improve the capabilities of the existing implementation, and to address several issues such as poor BlackBerry coverage in certain areas and difficulty entering detailed call reports using a small keypad.
“After only a few weeks of implementing the solution, we saw the number of completed activities increase as a result of a more simplified workflow. It also allows us to better leverage our CRM application to identify the best practices of our best salespeople so that managers can use that information for training and incentives,” Teeter says. “Equally important from our perspective is that the solution has one of the highest acceptance rates of any technology we’ve ever deployed to our wholesalers, due to its inherent ease of use and the fact it works within the business user’s workflow and transparently with our CRM system.”