Profit Magazine - May 2008

FINANCIAL SERVICES | SUPPORT
ACCELERATING
BUSINESS VALUE
MASSMUTUAL PARTNERS WITH ORACLE TO ACHIEVE BETTER ROI ON ITS IT INVESTMENTS.

BY TONY KONTZER

n the hypercompetitive financial services industry, business
intelligence solutions must offer rich insight that can lead to
lower costs, better business results, and valuable brand dif-
ferentiation. Executives at MassMutual Financial Group—a
financial protection, accumulation, and income management
company headquartered in Springfield, Massachusetts—realized
this when the company deployed Oracle’s Siebel Customer
Relationship Management (CRM) and Siebel Business Analytics
alongside Oracle Business Intelligence. They knew that the
project’s success depended on a clearly defined approach to
business transformation, not simply the implementation of great
technology. Governance, strategy, user adoption, and process
are all critical to achieve successful business transformation. But
to accomplish all this, they needed a partner that could guide
their efforts and align the technol-
ogy with business priorities.

LINDY GROENING

GAINING MAXIMUM VALUE
Scott Reed, corporate vice
president of MassMutual
Retirement Services,
decided early on that the
best path to maximizing
his company’s investment
was to turn to Oracle Support’s
Advanced Customer Services.
His plan was to leverage the group’s
Oracle Applications expertise to
help MassMutual achieve true busi-
ness value from its Siebel CRM and
Oracle Business Intelligence deploy-
ments. Oracle Advanced Customer
Services offered MassMutual cus-
tomized advisory services based on

industry best practices and provided both business and technical expertise tailored to MassMutual’s needs.

Reed will put the technology that supports his customer outreach up against the competition any day. For example, while MassMutual’s competitors run general enrollment campaigns across the entire base of potential participants, an approach that results in high costs for each new account they acquire, MassMutual is able to create laser-targeted campaigns that are specific to particular clients or objectives. This capability translates into much more efficient use of marketing dollars. “We’ve been able to run more campaigns and have better client satisfaction for a smaller amount of money than we were before our implementation,” Reed says. “The targeting also gives us two to three times the success rate of prior enrollment campaigns.”

If you look under MassMutual’s IT hood to see what’s

powering such dynamic use of information, you’ll find that the company boasts a tightly integrated Siebel CRM environment, boosted by the analytical capabilities of Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition. But Reed is the first to point out that it took much more than technology to get MassMutual where it is today. It took expert project guidance. It took the application of best practices. It took knowledge sharing. Most of all, it took an understanding of how to best match application functionality with MassMutual’s business needs.