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Building a Scalable Foundation for Customer & Agent Engagement and Enterprise Automation
How an insurance company modernized CRM and expanded into enterprise automation with Microsoft—improving visibility, reducing manual effort, and creating a platform for continued growth.
The Challenge
A U.S.-based insurance company wanted to modernize the way it managed customer and agent relationships while creating a more scalable foundation for growth.
The company had no enterprise CRM in place and relied heavily on relationship-based selling through a large agent network. At the same time, it was preparing to introduce a new product through an indirect channel, increasing the need for better lead management, communication tracking, and visibility across the sales process.
Customer, policy, sales, and service information was fragmented across processes and systems. The organization needed a more consistent way to manage leads, customer interactions, communication preferences, and agent visibility into submitted business while integrating with core policy administration and claims systems.
The challenge extended beyond customer engagement. Across billing, accounting, and operational functions, many processes still depended on manual data entry, document handling, reconciliation, and exception-based workflows. These activities consumed significant staff time, created opportunities for error and rework, and made it harder to scale efficiently.
Rather than continue addressing these issues one at a time, the insurer wanted a broader modernization strategy that could improve consistency, reduce manual effort, and make greater use of its existing Microsoft technology investments.
The Solution
HSO first helped the company establish Microsoft Dynamics 365 as the foundation for modern customer and agent engagement.
The initial CRM phase introduced core sales and marketing capabilities while integrating Dynamics 365 Sales with policy administration and claims systems. The solution also addressed communication preference management, enabling customers to specify how they wanted to receive different types of communications, and included tools to give agents better visibility into the status of submitted applications and approvals.
With that customer-engagement foundation in place, the company expanded its modernization efforts into finance and operations through an Enterprise Automation Strategy and Proof of Value built on Microsoft Power Automate. The engagement combined cloud flows with desktop Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to automate targeted, high-impact processes that are repetitive, rules-based, and dependent on multiple systems or manual handoffs.
Priority use cases included processes across billing, fund distributions, refunds, accounting, and other operational areas where employees were spending significant time on data entry, document handling, reconciliation, and exception-based work. These processes were selected specifically because they offered strong potential for reducing manual effort, improving consistency, and accelerating throughput.
HSO structured the initiative as a Proof of Value rather than a broad, one-time automation rollout. The goal was to validate that Power Automate cloud flows and desktop RPA could reliably execute selected processes end to end while providing a practical way to measure time savings, reductions in manual effort, and potential cost savings before expanding further.
The engagement also introduced a repeatable automation framework covering design, development, testing, user acceptance, deployment, production support, monitoring, and exception handling. HSO used an agile delivery model so the company's team could review working automations quickly, provide feedback, and refine them iteratively rather than waiting for a large-scale rollout.
The Results
A modern CRM foundation for managing customer and agent engagement
Modernization extended into finance and operations by targeting repetitive, rules-based processes that previously required significant manual effort
Governance, development standards, testing practices, and a support model that enable the company to scale automation responsibly across the organization
A repeatable Microsoft-based approach to modernization that can reduce manual effort, improve consistency, and support future growth without continually adding operational complexity
Looking ahead
The company plans to use the lessons and results from the automation Proof of Value to guide a broader enterprise automation roadmap and identify additional processes and business units that can benefit from Power Automate.
With Dynamics 365 and Power Platform in place, the company also has a foundation for continued expansion across customer engagement, data, automation, and other Microsoft capabilities as its needs evolve.
How can HSO help your company grow?
Contact us to talk to an HSO insurance industry expert today.