Texas Pioneer
New Core Platform Creates Competitive Advantage and Receives Rave Reviews from Customers
Summary
Texas Pioneer, a leading farm mutual insurance company in Texas, was drowning in paper and process. They needed better automation, accessibility, and policy management capabilities to maintain their 100+ year history of service excellence. In 2019, they selected and implemented the BriteCore cloud-based platform. The transition from Texas Pioneer’s old system to BriteCore was simple, efficient, and immediately resulted in cost savings and enhanced flexibility.
Fortunately, Texas Pioneer migrated to BriteCore before two historic crises: a global pandemic in 2020 that shifted workers to remote offices and a severe winter storm that paralyzed the state of Texas in 2021. The company realized huge benefits from its new platform. BriteCore’s cloud and digital capabilities enabled Texas Pioneer to smoothly navigate the business disruptions of the pandemic. During the winter storm of 2021, Texas Pioneer efficiently processed and settled hundreds of storm-related claims within two weeks while its larger competitors, handicapped by power outages and transportation challenges, were still mired in their claims assignment process.
About Texas Pioneer
In 1911, the descendants of Swedish immigrants living in Round Rock, Texas founded the Goetha Farm Mutual Association of Texas. Their simple goal was to provide property insurance for the members of their small, rural community. Over 100 years later, the association they founded has grown to become Texas Pioneer Farm Mutual, a recognized insurance leader. With agents located throughout the state, Texas Pioneer continues to serve rural Texans, as well as those living in urban areas. Although the company has grown, expanded coverage, and changed with the times, the concept of its founding fathers has remained the same: neighbors helping neighbors.
Inefficient Operations and Lack of Accessibility
The limitations of Texas Pioneer’s 20-year-old legacy system spawned paper-intensive workflows that slowed daily operations and increased the risk of errors. Claim details, billing documents, and policy information were only available via hardcopy and were costly to print. Employees wasted valuable time manually shuffling, filing and retrieving paperwork, and the company had to devote enormous amounts of office space to storage.
Accessibility was also a challenge for employees, agents, and policyholders. The lack of remote access to the legacy system limited the company’s options for dealing with business disruptions. The company wasn’t an attractive partner for agents who expected digital access to accounts and the ability to make changes on demand. Texas Pioneer was ill-equipped to respond to the growing preference for digital business among consumers.
Migrating to the Cloud with BriteCore
Texas Pioneer selected and implemented the BriteCore cloud-native core platform to address these challenges. The company immediately saw improvements in its day-to-day operations. The intuitive, paperless workflows in BriteCore’s policy, billing and claims modules drove efficiency gains across the entire insurance value chain. Freed from manual processes, the employees of Texas Pioneer were able to shift from shuffling paper to serving their policyholders.
BriteCore’s cloud and digital capabilities dramatically improved the agent experience and improved accessibility for Texas Pioneer employees. BriteCore’s agent portal gave agents a new digital channel that enabled them to easily and efficiently quote and submit applications and update policy information. With cloud-native BriteCore hosted on world-class AWS infrastructure, the employees of Texas pioneer had 24/7 access to an ultra-reliable, ultra-scalable platform.
Measuring Success
As Texas Pioneer continues running its business on the BriteCore platform, the company has realized several key benefits:
Flexibility & Resilience
Employees no longer have to be physically in the office, but can easily work remotely. Dramatically reduced cycle times due to BriteCore’s process automation and paperless workflows Improved.
Increased Satisfaction
Greater agent satisfaction with the ability to conduct business quickly and easily through Texas Pioneer’s agent portal and improved customer service through the ability to respond to inquiries more quickly and efficiently.
Cost Savings
Dramatically reduced costs by eliminating printing and storing paper. Texas Pioneer is now on a path to become a truly paperless office in the future.
BriteCore’s capabilities enabled Texas Pioneer to navigate the major business disruptions of the 2020 pandemic when new mandates and stay-at-home orders put their business continuity plans to the test. BriteCore’s platform also enabled Texas Pioneer to shine during a major winter storm, Uri, that hit Texas during the 2021 winter. During this storm, over 4.5 million homes and businesses lost power. About one out of every three Texans reported water damage (often due to burst pipes in the freezing conditions) and total economic losses were estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
The storm paralyzed many businesses, including many large insurance companies. Texas Pioneer, though, was unphased. The company’s cloud-based BriteCore platform was not impacted by local conditions, and Texas Pioneer employees were able to continue operations and manage the dramatic increase in storm-related claims. After two weeks, while many insurers were still assigning claims, Texas Pioneer had already settled most of the storm-related claims.
