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Westfield Insurance Creates Online Community With its Agency Partners

With a corporate culture rooted in its long heritage of building lasting relationships with independent agency partners, Westfield Insurance decided to use a new technology that is taking Fortune 500 companies by storm. Westfield enlisted the help of Vision Critical, a world leader in interactive research, to create an online branded panel with its agency partners.

The panel gives Westfield ongoing access to customer service representatives, sales producers and agency principals who distribute Westfield’s commercial and personal insurance solutions and are willing to participate in the company’s ongoing research. This enables Westfield to target agency personnel of different functions and positions for various research projects (e.g., web surveys, focus groups, polls, communities), to gather the right information from the right people, and incorporate implications into actionable plans.

“We rely on our strong relationships with our employees, agency partners and customers to keep us informed about their needs and expectations. This exchange of knowledge will, in turn, help us to refine our products, services, and resources so we can deliver the most value. It is important we learn about our customers as well as how we can best provide resources and support to our agency partners who solidify customer relationships and advocate our brand,” said Lisa Kozlowski. “Vision Critical’s software provides us with an innovative tool for accomplishing this with more efficiency and effectiveness than we could with more traditional data collection methods.”

“The insights Westfield will collect from their panel will significantly improve its ability to make faster, more informed decisions,” said Angus Reid, CEO of Vision Critical. “Westfield will be able to generate product and service development ideas, validate concepts, refine strategies and measure the effectiveness of different agency programs.”

In business for 160 years, Westfield Insurance, a member of Westfield Group, provides commercial and personal insurance in 18 states and surety services to customers in 28 states.  Westfield is one of the nation’s 50 largest property and casualty insurance groups, represented by a network of over 1,200 independent insurance agencies.  Westfield Group provides banking through Westfield BankSM and agency support through Westfield Services, Inc.  Learn more about Westfield Insurance at http://www.westfieldinsurance.com.

Vision Critical is the world leader in developing custom online panels and interactive research. At a moment's notice organizations can investigate the attitudes, behavior and opinions of existing or potential customers using interactive surveys, discussion forums and 3D environments.  Since 2000, Vision Critical has developed custom online panels for hundreds of leading brands, such as SIRIUS Satellite Radio, Nestle, MLB, Virgin Mobile and TIVO.

Posted on March 12, 2008
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