Zurich Insurance enhances customer relationships with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales

Zurich Insurance Group's commercial insurance teams faced the challenge of switching between applications to update CRM data, risking data staleness.

Zurich Insurance Group uses Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales to help streamline workflows by integrating AI and sales insights into daily tools like Outlook and Teams, reducing the need to switch between applications and keeping CRM data up to date.

Zurich Insurance Group benefits from Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales and Dynamics 365 Sales by streamlining workflows, improving data quality, and providing meaningful relationship insights, saving approximately 14,000 hours annually.

Zurich Insurance Group (Zurich) has been in the business of protecting people and the things they love for more than 150 years. Headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, the company provides a wide range of products and services globally in property and casualty as well as life insurance—for 75 million customers in more than 200 countries and territories. Reflecting its purpose to “create a brighter future together,” Zurich offers protection services that go beyond traditional insurance to support its customers in building resilience. The insurer combines innovation with prioritizing relationships to help its customers thrive. The company moved to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales in 2019 to take advantage of a modern customer relationship management (CRM) platform. With the goal of digitizing the business to more easily and efficiently take market-facing teams to the next level with data analytics and AI, Zurich’s commercial insurance business uses Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales to enhance customer relationships and to help improve operational efficiency.

“Time is a precious commodity in our business, and every minute Copilot for Sales saves results in better outcomes for our brokers, our customers, and our company.”

Carlo van Houten, Global Relationship Leader, Zurich Insurance Group

Bolstering efficiency with richer, more up-to-date customer data

Zurich’s commercial insurance business is known for writing large, complex multinational insurance programs. Its market-facing teams manage multifaceted risk assessment, prevention, and mitigation analysis and pricing activities that require extraordinary attention to detail, a substantial investment of time, and multiple applications.

In Dynamics 365, the company had a real-time database of customer information, fundamental for revealing in-depth relationship insights. But for client- or broker-facing employees minding more than 100,000 active opportunities, switching between applications to transfer updates from email to the CRM was inconvenient and time-consuming. As a result, the data in the CRM was at risk of becoming stale.

Zurich looked for a way to use its Dynamics 365 platform to reduce the number of applications the commercial insurance teams must work in, while bolstering the operational efficiency of client- and broker-facing teams with more up-to-date data. The answer was simple: Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales.

Copilot for Sales is an AI assistant for client- and broker-facing teams that maximizes their productivity by bringing next-generation AI and sales insights from Zurich’s CRM platform into the Microsoft 365 productivity tools they use daily, like Outlook and Teams. The benefits for the company’s market-facing teams and account managers were plain from the start.

Copilot for Sales makes it easy to keep CRM data up to date, improving data quality and empowering Zurich’s teams with meaningful relationship insights. In the Copilot for Sales side pane in Outlook, employees can create, update, and link email contacts with opportunities in the CRM, all without interrupting the flow of work to switch to another application.

“The Copilot for Sales pane is critical,” says John Martin, Global CRM Product Lead. “We need our CRM data to be up to date and accurate because it feeds into our reporting systems and is the basis for how we derive insights and analytics. The streamlined experience allows our users to simply access key records without the need to open and search other applications.” While leveraging the technology, all data stays within Zurich and isn't shared with or accessible to anyone else, underscoring the company’s public Data and responsible AI commitment.

“The Copilot for Sales pane is critical. We need our CRM data to be up to date and accurate… The streamlined experience allows our users to simply access key records without the need to open and search other applications.”

John Martin, Global CRM Product Lead, Zurich Insurance Group

Consolidating interaction data to inform next steps

Zurich sponsors events for risk managers across Europe as one way to cultivate the one-on-one relationships that are crucial for market-facing teams. Underwriters, broker account managers, and customer account managers use outreach and attendance data from these events to inform next steps, such as targeted email campaigns. Copilot for Sales consolidates that data with other interactions in Outlook and Teams and presents concise summaries in the Outlook side panel, providing a complete picture of a customer relationship that’s easily accessible in the flow of work.

The same convenient access to sales and relationship insights in Teams meetings gives Zurich’s teams a 360-degree view of the account every time they interact with their customers and distributors.

Martin says that Copilot for Sales is “removing friction from administrative tasks. We are still early in the journey, but what we see is that when people log in to Copilot for Sales, they tend to stay logged in.”

“[Copilot for Sales is] removing friction from administrative tasks. We are still early in the journey, but what we see is that when people log in to Copilot for Sales, they tend to stay logged in.”

John Martin, Global CRM Product Lead, Zurich Insurance Group

Saving time is only the beginning

Copilot for Sales has quickly become a critical productivity tool for Zurich’s 300 Copilot users, who find even more benefits as they continue to work with it in Outlook.

Copilot for Sales summaries of long email threads save crucial time when escalations mount and teams need to understand an issue quickly. Copilot-assisted email drafts allow non-native speakers to respond to customers with confidence, saving them the time—not to mention the stress—of checking and rechecking grammar and meaning.

Carlo van Houten, Global Relationship Leader, manages a portfolio of some of the company’s most important customers and uses Copilot for Sales every day. “Simple email tracking makes it much easier for our market-facing teams to stay current with customers with meaningful visibility across the portfolio," he says. He’s confident that as the time savings grow, so will the benefits across the business.

In fact, user feedback already confirms that Copilot for Sales improves Zurich’s sales and retention ratios. The company estimates that Copilot for Sales will save its employees approximately 14,000 hours over the next year.

“Time is a precious commodity in our business, and every minute Copilot for Sales saves results in better outcomes for our brokers, our customers, and our company,” says van Houten.