Great Expectations Drive Great Outcomes

Even if Veruca Salt isn’t one of your customers, you know we live in a world of high and ever-escalating expectations.

In our personal lives, we order products from Amazon with expectations based on their star ratings, and expect them to perform to that level and better. We expect them to deliver their intended functions and to also be energy-efficient, recyclable, aesthetically-pleasing, and returnable at any time if they don’t match up.

We drive our children to (often unattainable) expectations of success and achievement. We expect our significant others to help us achieve happiness and fulfillment (even though that’s not their function in life). We even expect inanimate objects (cars, boats, fashions, social media, you name it) to deliver satisfaction.

Driven to Perform

Our professional selves are no different. Given the investments we make in time, energy, and focus, the amount of money often involved, and that we’re not purchasing just for our own satisfaction, our expectations may be even higher.

Particularly when we judge our vendor partners, including software providers such as Earnix, we purchase their products and services with the expectation that they will meet and exceed our well-thought-out RFPs, feedback from peers, and the high delivery standards we set for ourselves, our teams, and our organizations.

The road is littered with companies that didn’t listen to their customers and failed miserably as a result. Others have listened, but failed to act, or thought themselves smarter than their customers (“they don’t know what they want”), with the same disastrous results.

Only companies that partner with their customers to really understand the market, and are willing to act accordingly, achieve long-term success.

“Table Stakes” Expectations

Any product or service must meet a minimum set of requirements dictated by laws and standards – what you might call “table stakes.”

Compliance and information security standards such as the CISA EO, SOC2 and GDPR comprise the bedrock of trust, especially important in industries such as insurance and banking. Vendors hoping to gain business must adhere to these basic standards, and partner only with others who will do the same.

The volume of data we now hold is growing exponentially, not just “real” data, but “synthetic” data. (This fascinating concept and its applications are the topics of a recent blog post by Reuven Shnaps, Earnix’s Chief Analytics Officer.)

In addition, certain technologies have also become “table stakes.” To be relevant, any vendor, especially in the analytics space, must have a solid base of capabilities in such diverse areas as AI and ML, SaaS/cloud, personalization, and interoperability with complementary solutions. The agility these technologies afford is essential to success.

Models, Models Everywhere

We have greater power than ever to make better decisions and attract more business. To go well beyond the minimum expectations for data stewardship and technology, and to put them to highly-productive use.

As data scientists and as decision-makers, we have expectations that models will continue to improve, become ever more accurate, quicker to point to valid conclusions, easier to test and deploy, and more effective in driving business results.

That’s where Earnix comes in, and where customer expectations help drive us and our directions. Where we want you to keep “raising the bar” and expecting more, and sharing your vision, your expectations, and your feedback with us on an ongoing basis.

The Three Pillars of Earnix Responsiveness

The ways in which we respond to rising expectations can be found in three key areas, which we refer to as pillars: product innovation; market focus; and, excellence in customer care and customer support processes.

Pillar One - Product Innovation

Product innovation is the backbone of sustained success for any business. It enables a company to attract new customers, to retain existing ones, and to build brand loyalty among all its constituents, no matter how markets evolve and change. To thrive as expectations grow and escalate.

At Earnix, the evolution of our Price-It^TM flagship product is a great case in point:

• Starting as a ground-breaking analytical engine, it has since become a market-leading dynamic pricing tool, allowing carriers and bankers to adapt more rapidly to changing market conditions and to the escalating expectations of their customers and prospects.

• To become a solid piece of the business ecosystem, it has been augmented with disaster recovery protocols and tools to accelerate testing, deployment and regulatory compliance and auditability.

• Responding to the desire of our customers to do their modeling faster, we’ve augmented Price-It with the Automatic Generalized Linear Model (AGLM) tool. It eases the time-consuming and tedious task of data preparation in the modeling process. It can cut dedicated variable selection time in half, by automating the process of winnowing down hundreds of potential variables into a set that really matters, often as few as a dozen or so, making data scientists more productive by building effective models in less time.

• By adding visualization tools, Price-It’s dynamic monitoring of model changes and generation of concise KPI reports allow data scientists to see the results of their changes more quickly, and to open their world to business decision-makers, who can more easily digest pricing information and steer changes that will drive success.

• To further improve modeling speed and effectiveness, Earnix Model Accelerator is a web-based module incorporating advanced models in pricing, underwriting, and real-time rating.

As another example of product innovation, and expanding on our initial focus on pricing, Earnix introduced Underwrite-It^TM to serve the needs of another key function in every insurance firm. An entirely new product designed to take advantage of the Earnix Enterprise Rating Engine, Underwrite-It applies Earnix technology to the underwriting community, and ties it more closely to pricing teams.

All these product innovations were driven by feedback from our customers and the market, and demonstrate the responsiveness we pride ourselves on. Keep it coming!

Pillar Two – Market Focus

As a global company, Earnix has evolved our language support beyond our initial English and Hebrew roots. We are now executing projects and managing discussions in Portuguese, French, Spanish, Swedish and German.

In North America, we have released our Rating Worksheet, a detailed premium breakdown to assist our customers in improving their customer service by understanding exactly how premium prices are changing.

And, we’ve enabled customers’ IT and audit groups to tighten their governance, with tools to control system access, read-write privileges, and rules for pricing approvals and release to production. This suite of capabilities has expanded greatly over the years, and will continue to evolve as we listen to feedback.

Pillar Three – Excellence in Customer Care

Earnix is dedicated to making sure that every customer realizes the maximum benefit from our products. Our customer success process consists of several key elements:

• An onboarding and adoption program with must-have elements that ready new customers and teams to realize the maximum benefit from their Earnix investment:

  • Delivering a “first taste of success,” through thorough user training and a quick-return initial project

  • Ensuring the product is delivering as expected

  • That users have mastered the product functionality

  • And, that Earnix is an integral part of day-to-day operations among groups such as pricing, underwriting, and senior management

• Apart from Antarctica, Earnix has customers on every continent. In response, we have built out a “follow the sun” customer care capability, providing 24/7/365 support coverage, with the flexibility for our customers to choose from several tiers of support to find the one best suited to their needs.

• Every customer has a dedicated customer success manager, with support available in multiple local languages.

• In addition, Earnix Academy, an online learning platform that allows our customers to consume knowledge about our products, pricing strategies, and best practices at the pace that best suits their needs, is available at any time and from anywhere in the world.

Summing Up

At Earnix, we listen, we act, and we go beyond expectations – we are driven to excellence in everything we do, and proud of our responsiveness and the customer success it enables.

We encourage you to continue to expect more out of our products and services, to keep raising the bar, sharing your vision and expectations with us, and pushing the insurance and banking industries forward with us.

To Learn More

The topic of meeting elevated expectations was addressed in more detail in a recent presentation by Earnix’s Osnat Yanushevsky Yacoby, Chief Customer Officer, and Doug Wing, Head of Professional Services for North America, at the E^xcelerate 2023 customer conference in London.

You can view their presentation in its entirety here, and review all of the presentations from the conference here.

Schedule a free demo with Earnix today!