AmFam creates more functionality for agency owners via a Tableau Embedded Analytics portal

American Family Insurance (AmFam) is a private mutual insurance company providing a variety of consumer and commercial products, including property, casualty, life, health, and homeowners coverage, along with investment and retirement planning products and services. Corporate teams at AmFam use Salesforce CRM products including Salesforce Marketing Cloud to generate, manage, and analyze data for a wide range of activities, from account management and customer service to business development and executive planning.

Beyond corporate implementations of CRM, however, AmFam has another important set of users to support with data: the local and regional agencies that sell AmFam products, organized as independent contractors who are licensed to transact with end customers and incentivized to meet performance targets. To be successful in their own businesses, and to support AmFam’s success in the process, these agencies are an integral part of the AmFam data ecosystem, gaining insights from corporate data that help optimize their sales and customer service contributions.

Susan Malack is Manager of Sales Insights & Analytics at AmFam. “The work that my team does is really for the agency owner, so they can have all the information and metrics they need to run their business successfully,” said Malack. “It’s our goal to make sure they have that quickly and at their fingertips, because it helps them get the answers they need for how their businesses are performing, so then they can spend less time wondering and more time serving customers.”

Malack’s team used Tableau Embedded Analytics to create a new self-service analytics web portal for agencies and corporate users alike. The result was myDashboard, a collection of data visualizations showing customized, personalized analytics designed to give users helpful information and insights in real time.

AmFam sought opportunities for improving the delivery of analytics to its agents needed around product availability, performance metrics, and expected business results. Ultimately this led to myDashboard, a portal platform that could integrate into whatever workflows and UI the agencies were already accustomed to using. MyDashboard empowers users with access to vital insights without disrupting their work by having to look in multiple other locations.

The myDashboard solution offers AmFam agencies new ways of doing things:

• Customization. Using Embedded Analytics, agencies can adapt the portal to match their own branding and UI workflows. This helps promote adoption and integration of myDashboard visualizations into each agency’s day-to-day operations.
• Ease of use. Pre-built dashboards for common metrics such as revenue, premiums, new business, and retention, together with preset filtering and customizable search, help non-technical users feel comfortable and productive in the portal without facing a steep learning curve.
• Security and governance. Row-level security in Tableau lets AmFam enforce data access permissions based on various roles, including corporate user, agency owner, and agency staff. Additionally, AmFam adopted Tableau single sign-on, allowing users to view reports and dashboards without leaving the myDashboard UI context.

Malack’s team has automated processes with the new portal, and they’ve allowed for consolidation and retirement of older systems, enabling agency and corporate employees the time to pursue other initiatives.

To illuminate this new functionality, Malack offers a real-world sales planning example. “An agency owner might not realize they’re only one or two policies away from meeting a bonus incentive or campaign award,” she said. “With the data right there in front of them, they can see that insight and take action. They can even be creative and use it to generate some fun competition among their agency staff, if they have one. Without the embedded data, these kinds of opportunities wouldn’t typically come about.”

Another example, she said, comes when agency owners use embedded analytics to identify cross-selling opportunities. “When a customer has two kinds of policies with us, the agency owner can talk to them about also signing up for a third policy, or other value-added offering,” Malack said.

Also, with modernization comes the opportunity for professional development from interacting with data dashboards and visualizations, often for the first time. “For people who are just learning about data, this can be very new territory,” said Derek Alsup, Business Analytics Analyst IV at AmFam. “That can further enhance the owner's mindset. I won't even say it's the future anymore—this is the reality that we live in now.”

That learning curve will continue to apply in future scenarios, Alsup emphasized, as AI and other developments can broaden users’ workflow even further. “Right now, we give them the information to help them make timely and relevant decisions,” he said. “In the future, we really want the data to help guide that decision making, to say: This is what we think you should do based on these conditions and what we're seeing right now with your customers.”

As companies modernize and big data gets harnessed in new ways, analytics dashboards and visualizations are becoming ubiquitous, appearing everywhere from business software and consumer apps to news websites and gaming portals. With myDashboard, AmFam has joined this approach to help its agency owners and employees across geographies and departments get the insights they need. Personalized views of embedded Tableau dashboards, infused into familiar user experiences, enable dynamic, near-real-time reporting on key metrics and performance. And these resources all draw from a single source of truth to provide data-driven insights that continue to transform the AmFam corporate–agency business model. 

For a more in-depth look at how AmFam chose Tableau Embedded Analytics, read our recent blog post on the benefits of implementing embedded analytics into existing workflows and UI.