Rob Shoenfelt, CPCU, is SVP, Chief Information and Innovation Officer, at Celina Insurance Group. He has led the technology team at Celina for more than 20 years and has also led marketing. Prior to joining Celina, he founded and led an insurance software company and served as VP of Information Systems at Victoria Insurance Group. He holds a BA cum laude from Ohio State University.
What are some of the capabilities you’ve deployed lately that have had the biggest business impact?
Probably the biggest thing we’ve done lately is relaunching our agent and customer portal on a new .NET core. In addition to re-platforming, we enhanced a lot of the functionality and usability. It’s much faster, more intuitive, and simpler, and the feedback from both agents and internal staff has been great. Our marketing team had been showing the prototype before launch, and the universal feedback was, “Wow, when can we get this?”
We also created a mobile app for our agents that has been life-changing for those who use it. It makes submitting photos and other information for underwriting much easier. Forms have been re-engineered for the phone, and agents have really taken to it.
We’re also rolling out SMS billing reminders, which can be customized to come from the agent or directly from us.
Basically, there’s been a lot of focus on using current technology to enhance customer experience for both the agent and the insured.
What are your top priorities for the next 6-12 months?
Continuing to add our existing products to the new platform. Then we’re also rolling out some new products in some additional states. Our core system is old, but it works for us. Then we’re doing some other things like migrating to Office365 completely.
Using Microsoft Teams for integrated messaging and video conferencing has had a big impact on our remote workers; it’s helped them be much more engaged. We’re exploring video conferencing to connect agents and underwriters as well, but we need to be careful to avoid introducing new technology to the agent desktop.
What are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen over the past few years in the role of technology?
The way we deliver technology is changing as our organization evolves. We’re bringing in developers with more current technology skills who may not know our business or industry quite as well, so that’s making the role of the business analyst much more important.
Business leaders are also changing the way they think about technology and are taking a broader view of how things like user experience need to be balanced with product design. We have a product that has 1,000 underwriting questions. That’s not something that works in today’s world, and they’re starting to think differently.
What are some of the biggest challenges you see on the horizon?
Well, keeping up with security issues is always a challenge for everyone, and that’s not going away any time soon. I think another challenge is managing dependency on vendors—both large vendors and small InsureTechs. There’s a lot of great capabilities out there, but we need to be prepared for changes in product strategy from large vendors and entity risk for small ones.
How have you and your team leveraged the Novarica relationship?
The information that Novarica provides is widely used within the company; we have a lot of people referring to it, not just within IT. Working with the team, and leveraging the perspective they have from a broad range of insurers in the network, is really useful in terms of helping us understand what else is going on in the industry. The events are also very useful for the same reason; it’s great to get to talk to so many different carriers and learn what they’re doing. And just to understand that yes, sometimes we’re in the same boat, sometimes we’re not.
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