Usaa Case Study
Question: Is USAA a typical insurance company? List all supporting reasons.
No, USAA is not a typical insurance company:
- It specifically targets current and retired military officers and their dependents for a variety of insurance, asset management, and quality of life programs. Most insurance companies do not carry a full package of financial products.
- Their strategy was about customer service rather than profit or revenue. The growth was built on creating new products for the existing target market.
- The homogeneous, well-educated, and relatively affluent target segment is easy to market to since the core message of trust can be used across the board as the customers have a common life experience and background.
- Retired Air Force Brigadier General Robert McDermott turned the company around by creating managerial positions and filling them with retired military leaders and hired diverse employees, cutting turnover by over 34%.
- The company moved to a paperless environment before anyone else. This enabled them to consolidate customer service representatives and create a one-stop-shop experience and single image unmatched by any other company.
Question: Describe the role that IT plays within USAA.
Information Technology played a huge role within USAA and the company was considered one of the most technologically sophisticated operations in the insurance business at the time of this case.
Prior to the introduction of IT initiatives, the company, as most insurance companies, worked exclusively off paper. This included advertising, files, and policies. The company received 80,000 pieces of mail a day and had to employ 30 people at night just to look for missing files, sometimes taking days to locate. At any given time, half of the files were unavailable because they were in use, in transit, or lost.
Additional difficulties came from the sheer size of the company. There were 32 wholly owned subsidiaries with over 9,000 employees. Each group
No, USAA is not a typical insurance company:
- It specifically targets current and retired military officers and their dependents for a variety of insurance, asset management, and quality of life programs. Most insurance companies do not carry a full package of financial products.
- Their strategy was about customer service rather than profit or revenue. The growth was built on creating new products for the existing target market.
- The homogeneous, well-educated, and relatively affluent target segment is easy to market to since the core message of trust can be used across the board as the customers have a common life experience and background.
- Retired Air Force Brigadier General Robert McDermott turned the company around by creating managerial positions and filling them with retired military leaders and hired diverse employees, cutting turnover by over 34%.
- The company moved to a paperless environment before anyone else. This enabled them to consolidate customer service representatives and create a one-stop-shop experience and single image unmatched by any other company.
Question: Describe the role that IT plays within USAA.
Information Technology played a huge role within USAA and the company was considered one of the most technologically sophisticated operations in the insurance business at the time of this case.
Prior to the introduction of IT initiatives, the company, as most insurance companies, worked exclusively off paper. This included advertising, files, and policies. The company received 80,000 pieces of mail a day and had to employ 30 people at night just to look for missing files, sometimes taking days to locate. At any given time, half of the files were unavailable because they were in use, in transit, or lost.
Additional difficulties came from the sheer size of the company. There were 32 wholly owned subsidiaries with over 9,000 employees. Each group