Challenge: Propel Insurance needed a modern business intelligence tool and operational reporting platform it could use to empower its staff at all levels to provide better service for its clients.

Solution: Domo allows account managers, sales reps, and executives across all business units to self-serve reporting and visualizations so they can better serve their business clients.

Impact: Domo has become a foundational technology for tracking financials, exploring market segments, providing sales intelligence, managing workloads, tracking renewals, informing negotiations, and more.

Propel Insurance accelerates its insights with Domo.

For nearly 100 years, Propel Insurance has provided specific insurance solutions for businesses across several industries, including construction, healthcare, transportation, and banking. Each industry has its own complex set of insurance requirements; as a broker, Propel finds and manages the best insurance products for its business customers.

As a company in a conservative industry, Propel found itself falling behind when it came to technology. Nearly four years ago, Shaun Marsh and a team of new folks joined Propel with a mandate to overhaul the company’s entire technology stack from the ground up. “We replaced virtually every piece of technology in the company, from the network to the desktops to our phones and email,” Marsh said.

However, one thing that didn’t change in the first few years was Propel’s internal business reporting, not because it was modern and easy to use; far from it. The system they used was incredibly complex and industry-specific, making it difficult to find another solution. In addition, the technology was cumbersome, making changes an uphill battle. “The combination of needing a strong understanding of the data and having to deal with bad tools just meant we weren’t prepared to crack that nut in those first couple of years,” Marsh remembers.

Building a new data foundation.

That’s when Marsh and the team found Domo. Thanks to Domo’s Business Cloud, Propel is able to handle all of its data warehousing, processing, certifying, reporting and visualization needs with one platform.

Using Personalized Data Permissions to create a personalized experience for each user through the use of entitlement policies, Marsh was able to quickly build out individual dashboards for hundreds of staff to help manage their clients and projects. Integration with Propel’s single sign-on provider Okta means users can easily and securely connect to Domo.

Executives, sales staff, account management teams, finance and accounting teams, claims teams, and compliance teams now each have their own unique dashboards they use to self-serve their reporting requirements. Meanwhile, the mobile app will let sales teams and executives in the field have complete access to all their data from their phone. Executives use Domo to unlock new analytical insights, such as which insurance carriers they work with most, to provide the intelligence they need to negotiate better discounts for their customers while building more robust business relationships.

With Domo, Propel has gained a level of agility that was impossible using its previous reporting solution. Marsh recalls a recent example: “On a Friday, I was told by our claims department that they would need some specific reports very quickly. By Monday I was able to roll out a claims dashboard, and by Wednesday had five reports available for the department to use.”

In addition to improving reporting for his users, Marsh uses Domo to ensure everything runs smoothly from a technical perspective. He built an administrator dashboard to inspect all of Propel’s data flows to validate operations, with the system set to send him an alert should there be an issue. This helps him ensure his users can stay at work without worrying about downtime.

Delivering service at a higher standard.

By far, Propel’s largest group of users are its account managers. As a service-oriented company, these are the people who work with clients daily while tracking opportunities for upselling and renewals. To improve their service, Marsh built a set of dashboards for individual account managers to see their own data.

In addition, he built a separate dashboard that team managers can use to compare employee performance and manage workload. This allows managers to anticipate any issues that may impact service so they can take action before there is a problem. “The manager dashboard enables a better allocation of resources so that our account managers are no longer getting overloaded,” Marsh said.