M3 Insurance Sees Upsurge in Win Rates and Efficiency with AI-Powered Insights

M3 Insurance operates in the highly competitive field of insurance brokerage. It helps clients manage risk, purchase insurance, and provide employee benefits programs.

M3 provides property and casualty (P&C) cover to protect businesses against risks like property damage and liability, as well as providing consultation on employee benefits strategies and plan design, which are essential for attracting and retaining talent in a tight labor market. In addition, it advises on employer-sponsored retirement plans. With businesses seeking cost-effective, comprehensive coverage, brokers must differentiate themselves through pricing, specialization, and superior client service.

The brokerage industry has historically been based on relationships, but this is changing to relationship-plus-insight as clients want the data to support their decisions around policies and benefits programs, demanding to know how they benchmark against competitors.

Over the last two years, M3 has focused on bringing that level of insight into its client relationships. M3 Applied Intelligence Vice President Erik Vandermause and Data and Analytics Manager Paul Krause led a mission to equip client-facing teams with all the data they might need–in a very clear, visual format–that would significantly enhance their performance in the most efficient, automated way.

M3 set out to achieve three key goals:

• Compete more effectively by using data to add more value to customer conversations, helping M3 to consult and help clients make data-driven decisions
• Increase client retention rates by demonstrating to clients the value and cost-effectiveness of M3 services and programs.
• Drive efficiency through AI-powered insights with Tableau Pulse, enabling sales and service teams to query data, and throughout the company’s sales and financial reporting processes

A client’s risk profile changes all the time. By using Tableau, M3 can present clients with dynamic dashboards that benchmark their Total Cost of Risk and demonstrate how their exposure can increase in line with their growth, such as payroll increases, changes in building valuation, and any one of 100 or more metrics that can affect their premium.

From its data warehouse, M3’s Applied Intelligence team has focused on bringing in large volumes of data to support client risk and employee benefit plan design and total rewards strategy. Not only does it include all the data for each client’s business, focusing especially on physical and cyber risk profiles, but it also ingests data from what clients’ peers are typically offering in total rewards, like retirement benefits, voluntary benefits and paid time off, as well as industry employee turnover rates.

This enables visualizations of claims trends, turnover rates, risk exposures, and benchmarking against peers, helping to identify coverage gaps, optimize renewals, and enhance client risk management strategies with actionable insights. M3’s Sales teams get very granular in terms of showing clients what they are paying per unit of exposure compared to their peer groups, and clients can see where costs are spiking and why, demonstrating at a glance if they are adequately covered and getting a good deal.

One of the most important benefits for M3 is that the visualizations are client-facing and can be used as part of the sales cycle. By looking at where they are, their industry, size and attributes, M3 can advise them on how to stay competitive in terms of employee benefits and costs and risks associated with the business. M3 has a lot of ability to customize how the data visuals are presented: The organization can create dynamic, interactive dashboards tailored to specific customers, building a very polished, client-facing product that looks and behaves like a bespoke app. This sets M3 apart from its competition, helping it to consult and compete more effectively.

Improve and expand trust in risk management data

A common question in the broker world is “Can I trust the quality of the data?”. As part of onboarding Tableau throughout the organization, M3 set high-level KPIs for data quality, with procedures to clean up and measure data accuracy. At the outset 65% of data passed the quality threshold and this number has now risen to over 95%, giving M3’s consultants and clients the confidence to trust the visualization results into individual clients and comparable businesses.

But M3 goes much further with the type of data it analyzes and shows to clients. M3 uses APIs to add mapping and weather data to its property and casualty consulting. After inputting all the client locations onto maps and laying out relevant geographical data, the APIs then bring in historical and current trends of geological and weather hazards, such as earthquakes and hurricanes. This data helps M3’s clients understand their appetite for risk ahead of acquisitions or opening new office locations, for example, and go on to make informed decisions.

Not only does this mean M3 can advise clients on how new office locations could increase their premiums if they are in commonly impacted areas, but it also allows M3’s risk management team to get ahead of extreme weather events and take proactive steps to advise clients on how to protect their property and staff.

Use Tableau to be better, more competitive consultants

Tableau has become a gamechanger in M3’s ability and confidence to consult with clients. It provides clients’ finance directors and CFOs with the data and proof that they have the right programs for their business.

Using dynamic charts in meetings means both M3 and clients get live feedback and metrics on plans so they can make immediate adjustments to meet client objectives. For instance, M3 can consult clients on staff turnover, showing how a switch in employee benefits strategies makes the company more competitive and can improve staff turnover rates.

Likewise, the visualizations help clients analyze whether the company is paying too much for a program that is not delivering and where that money could instead be better invested into their employee benefits overall solution.

The charts have become a standard component for all strategy and renewal discussions. As VP Applied Intelligence Erik Vandermause explains:

"We are bringing new and proactive ideas to our clients, backed up by high-quality, trusted data. This enables our team to be better consultants for our clients, earning the right to become an extension of the client's leadership team."

 Erik’s team tracks the impact of Tableau across its sales organization and has seen how it is increasing the company’s ability to stay competitive. By recording when Tableau is used in the sales cycle, M3 has been able to measure a 48% increase in the win rate and that the average win amount increased by 63%.

With high-quality data at the ready, M3 is beginning to layer machine learning (ML) to identify key influencing variables so it can advise clients further on positive steps to improve or reduce premiums or employee attrition.

Enhance internal efficiency with Tableau Pulse and AI-powered insights

Away from the sales environments, M3 is hitting its objectives to drive efficiency and automation into other areas of the business. M3 uses Tableau Pulse to enhance the efficiency of its finance teams by automating insights of monthly and quarterly reviews.

Tableau Pulse provides quick, actionable insights and executive summaries, streamlining quarterly reviews, and enabling executives to ask critical questions in natural language and on-demand, which not only improves but also enables faster decision making, responding to market dynamics.

Pulse also helps M3 stay on top of business performance by proactively flagging trends and anomalies with notifications and in the insights summary.

One of the additional areas that M3 uses Pulse is to aid staffing analysis. Pulse helps surface insights related to metrics across the team such as account size, tenure, and workload to identify areas of the business to scale up or down, which enables M3 to stay ahead of business demand by proactively reassigning account teams and recruiting personnel.

M3 evaluated Tableau against other business intelligence platforms, with criteria to select a best-in-class tool with strong embedding capabilities to complement and support M3’s existing CRM platform. M3 chose Tableau for these abilities, as well as for its deep expertise in the financial services industry, noting that Tableau goes way beyond the basic capabilities that other platforms offer: “[Tableau] can make anything happen”, specifically calling out the customization capabilities of the visualizations and dashboards.

M3 has over 300 users of Tableau within its sales and services teams now, with over 70% of the organization fully engaged in using analytics to consult with clients and inform their recommendations. Now that Tableau has been shown to be a success internally, M3 is working to get its team to use it earlier in the sales cycle and to use it dynamically in front of clients.

The Results

M3 has tracked the usage and impact of Tableau within the organization, demonstrating a clear and significant advantage for those using it.

• Win rates increased by 48% when Tableau is used in the sales process
• Win values have increased by 63% when Tableau is used in the sales process

Beyond these metrics, M3 is currently measuring the impact of Tableau in enabling sales and services teams to increase client retention rates.