Reinvent customer experience through digital transformation — Capgemini shows how and why!

Service businesses are constantly scrutinized for the quality of digital experiences they offer. Let’s look at a U.S. Automotive Association that runs a hybrid business with three parts: a growing 13.5 million membership-based travel and roadside assistance resource, an insurance practice, and a financial services unit. The firm wanted to build on its success by offering its customers an equally compelling digital experience.

Modernizing its insurance business alone, which had grown by M&A and was run on a mainframe, required the U.S. Automotive Association to initiate a front-to-back digital transformation. The U.S. Automotive Association brought in Capgemini, its longtime technology partner, for this major project. This is a good example of a smart partnership between a service provider and an insurance business for a material buildup of data and technology capabilities to ensure future success.

The “why” and “how” in the digital transformation of the U.S. Automotive Association insurance practice.

The U.S. Automotive Association had three important goals: establish a digitized business model, create a modern cloud-native technology stack that will help develop and launch new products and offerings at speed, and — most importantly — provide customers with a real-time, highly satisfying experience.

With support from Capgemini, the U.S. Automotive Association underwent a massive technology transformation that involved rationalizing all the interactions, data layer, and systems for policies and claims for mainframe migration; migration from private to public cloud, in this case, it was Google Cloud Platform (GCP); deployment of core systems including Guidewire and Salesforce; setting-up a self-service platform enabled by APIs, platforms, and software.

Capgemini’s support in cloud migration—a central piece of the puzzle in the U.S. Automotive Association’s transformation.

Mainframe migration of applications and data to the cloud involves working through a formidable set of technology, security, and operational protocols. Capgemini’s in-house asset, Clear Sight IT Decision Maker (Clear Sight ITDM), was critical for answering multilayer questions. What asset should migrate from the mainframe to the cloud, and what is the impact? Is a view of the entire estate required? What are the right security controls? Which workloads and applications need to transition first into the public cloud? Clear Sight ITDM revealed not just the right approach but also what the upfront consumption commitment with GCP would be like for the next 3 to 7 years. These insights helped the U.S. Automotive Association negotiate a good deal with its cloud provider.

With so many moving parts, the key process of cloud provider selection and migration carried high stakes with long-lasting implications.

For a data-rich industry such as insurance, GCP was a perfect fit. The cloud provider had built-in data formats with readily available automated pipelines pushing out the data to match how the industry consumes it. Cloud providers are in the early stages of creating composable building blocks for industry-specific use cases — services, applications, compliance, and other tools. A great start to assess a cloud provider for your firm’s needs is to take one tech capability at a time and evaluate against performance, business priority, and cost. In this case, the U.S. Automotive Association’s federated data architecture ensured selective data was secure and easily shareable with the company’s analytic models and across distinct business units.

A triple benefit for the U.S. Automotive Association: Satisfied customers, lower costs, higher growth.

In migrating to the cloud beyond the obvious cost efficiencies, the U.S. Automotive Association has transformed not just the core underwriting part of its business but also how policies are distributed, claims are managed, and how the organization serves its customers. The migration also broadened the Association’s product portfolio and geographic reach. Data and analytics helped the company unlock new ways to calculate and reduce risk, create appropriate value propositions for its clients, and increase engagement.

The Bottom Line:Transforming a mature business like the U.S. Automotive Association into a more nimble industry leader involved Capgemini combining the best of the Association’s core capabilities with a modern agile stack —a complex and incrementally executed transformation.

The U.S. Automotive Association’s digital transformation was challenging to accomplish. Much ink has been spilled on the theory of big digital ideas. Here is a practical example of a digital transformation by a decades-old business. Other insurers should take note: As the U.S. Automotive Association pursued consolidation after years of M&A activity, it gave significant attention to ensuring its technology backend was modernized at the same time.