Compeer Financial insurance officers realized they were behind in the marketplace when it came to educating farmers on their crop insurance products and on dairy revenue protection (DRP) options. They were using either basic, homemade tools or were not using tools at all and relying on other sources to give farmers the information they needed. The team was even maintaining large spreadsheets full of data from the government and other private insurance companies, but this was difficult to keep up within an industry where pricing data is constantly updated and hard to obtain. Due to the lack of tools available, the insurance officers were spending their time creating or using third-party applications and maintaining spreadsheets full of complicated data and formulas.
Compeer Financial knew that in order to become a leader in the market, they needed tools that rivaled their competition and presented a knowledgeable, professional image to support the full value of the products and options available to farmers. Compeer Financial came to the Emergent Software team with an idea to build two different calculators to create quotes for farmers to compare their crop insurance products and calculate the current, federally mandated price for a new dairy revenue protection endorsement.
Crop Insurance Decision Tool
To streamline their sales process, the Compeer Financial team had an idea for a custom-built web application that automatically generates custom insurance quotes for farmers. The custom-built app needed to include parameters like a field’s location, projected crop prices & yields, and the farmer’s risk tolerance to help insurance officers and customers make better-informed insurance investment decisions. The tool also needed to include benchmarks of historical trends and county data, using PASS and RMA data to help farmers compare crop insurance plans and options in a simple-to-understand format.
As the Emergent Software team began to create the custom app, they began to compile the various sources of the market, pricing, insurance, and geographic data needed to build the calculator. The complex nature of the data involved in this calculator required a lot of dedicated time and effort from the Compeer Financial and Emergent Software teams to ensure that data was being pulled, reported, and calculated properly. Also built into the tool is the option to generate a quote in a simple PDF format and even pulls in Salesforce customer data to populate various fields in the final quote.
Dairy Revenue Protection Calculator
The Compeer Financial team had been using a third-party tool to calculate dairy revenue protection options, but they had outgrown its use. The team wanted an experience for their customers that was specifically branded for Compeer Financial, have more control over, and ultimately, not be reliant on a tool that was maintained by a third party. The Emergent Software development team gathered a list of industry- and- company-specific insurance information, such as location, class ratio, insurance type, and more to build the calculator and specific fields around information that mattered most to insurance officers and farmers. Next, the Emergent Software team developed a Microsoft Azure WebJob function that takes publicly available dairy market data, imports it into a data warehouse, and then pre-processes it to make the calculations faster, which uses a Monte Carlo statistical data model to create simulations and projected pricing. All data is stored in an Azure SQL database, which requires a robust level of function for blob storage and stored procedures needed to do the required DRP calculations.
The combination of the specific fields, data model, and constantly changing market data in the calculator can create two different email alerts for users: price alerts, and daily quote notifications. Once a user has entered in the specific data they want to track into the calculator, they can set up personalized email notifications, which are automatically sent out through an integration with the company’s email marketing automation tool of choice, Marketo. The specific notification feature was a must-have from the Compeer team, as tracking the prices manually was challenging and time-consuming. The DRP Calculator, hosted on Microsoft Azure, can now create quotes quickly, efficiently, and in much less time than the system the team was using before.
Thanks to Emergent Software, agents of Compeer Financials' Crop Protection Program are now outfitted with a custom-built app that instantly calculates the best crop insurance product available for each customer’s specific situations and a tool that calculates dairy revenue protection options. Compeer Financials' agents are helping their customers make better-informed insurance investment decisions than ever before right there in their own fields with sophisticated, custom, branded web-based applications.
With a great relationship built on trust, communication, and the flexibility to maintain an agile workflow, the Emergent Software team is excited to continue working with Compeer Financial to enhance their custom-built calculators, streamline their processes, and help them become leaders in the market.
Technologies Used
