| Vovici Case Study |
Plymouth Rock’s commitment to delivering more than just automobile insurance has made its agents and policyholders among the most loyal in the industry, and earned them praise from Boston Consumers’ Checkbook. |
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Plymouth Rock Vovici Case Study
Industry: Financial Services
Challenge
Plymouth Rock Assurance Corporation (www.prac.com), the flagship company of the Plymouth Rock Company headquartered in Boston, MA, has provided automobile insurance to New England drivers for nearly 25 years. A little more than five years ago, the company launched an initiative to capture customer and marketplace feedback to guide decisions ranging from how to optimize customer service to the design of roadside billboards. Historically, they used outside consulting firms to conduct market research projects. As the family of companies grew in number, size and complexity, the demands on feedback and customer insights grew too, resulting in significant challenges.
Business Challenges:
- Planning, timing and budgeting became difficult to forecast with external Market Research consultants and resources
- Establishing a robust in-house survey tool to support the needs of the organization
Solution
From the beginning, the Plymouth Rock Company’s objective was to “in-source” as much of its marketing research efforts as possible. Ed Fernandez, President and CEO of Palisades Safety and Insurance Management Corporation (a company within the Plymouth Rock family), sponsored the effort to drive deeper market intelligence and gain greater control over important market research efforts.
In 2008, after a rigorous evaluation of the top Enterprise Feedback Management solutions, Fernandez tapped Vovici as the survey platform for Plymouth Rock’s business. “We needed both a solution and a company that could empower us to operate a high-performing, cost-effective internal market research group, and we found these in Vovici,” said Fernandez. “Vovici’s sophisticated yet easy-to-use solution, coupled with their deep consulting experience, has played a critical role in our ability to continue to operate as a customer-centric organization.”
The 5-year plan culminated in the launch of Plymouth Rock’s Customer Feedback Group in 2009. Rob Madonna, who was hired in July 2004 to lead customer research, coordinates the enterprise initiative. “Our primary goal was to make MR a more predictable in-house capability — one that helped the business to drive better decisions,” explained Madonna.
Centralizing survey and community initiatives on Vovici has enabled Plymouth Rock to significantly reduce costs for market research. The Customer Feedback Group recently completed a pricing study that Madonna estimates would have cost $12,000 prior to Vovici. The same study conducted with Vovici cost $2,100. Similarly, for a two-wave brand awareness study that used to cost $18,900, Madonna was able to deliver the same results for $3,800 using Vovici. “Not only did we achieve our goal of reducing the variability of the cost to conduct market research, we continue to save a lot of money with Vovici,” explained Madonna.
“Because we don’t have to pay consultants and can negotiate rates to acquire sample from panel companies ourselves, and because it is so much easier and faster to develop, deploy and analyze surveys with Vovici, it is not uncommon for projects to come in at 20% of their cost prior to Vovici.”
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Vovici has also enabled Plymouth Rock to become more efficient at collecting insights. Prior to launching the Customer Feedback Group, the company would have to plan research projects months ahead of time and coordinate with outside research vendors to execute projects. Delays and unpredictability in conveying requirements, passing data, interpreting results and iterating on the analysis did not support the inquisitiveness and the speed of the business. “We have a large and sophisticated organization and they all want to ask questions of our customers and the marketplace,” described Madonna.
“I used to get maybe 50 responses in 4 hours of calling for a project that would take at least a week to run. With Vovici, I get over 100 responses in 3-4 hours for a survey that I can create in a day. I can have 6 to 7 projects going on at any given time and this kind of efficiency makes a big difference.”
Alongside cost savings and improved efficiency, Vovici has elevated the quality of research possible within Plymouth Rock. The adoption of Vovici provided the company with the best-in-class security, reporting, data integrity and complex logic that a previous survey solution lacked. In addition, Vovici’s online community capabilities will help Plymouth Rock to establish a continuous stream of insights through both quantitative and qualitative forms. “We want to include insights from our independent agent channel and customers in decision-making — Vovici can get us there,” said Madonna.
