A modern makeover for a traditional insurance agency, using Google Workspace

When Carlo Ferrara joined his father’s agency, StreetSmart Insurance, as chief operating officer, he set out to modernize the business’s outdated office technology. His father, Jimmy Ferrara, was hesitant: He liked his systems based on faxes, phone calls, and paper documents scanned into old Windows 7 computers. But in 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit their community in New Jersey. Without power or internet access, employees couldn’t work at the StreetSmart office for a month, and with the office’s software backup out of service, the business lost a month’s worth of files.

The experience of losing access to business documents and email—plus a series of software crashes—convinced Jimmy Ferrara that StreetSmart needed business tools that were up and running no matter what. He also wanted to help his team—his son Carlo and his four other sons and daughters—to connect seamlessly with an international support team. A year after Sandy, Carlo Ferrara brought Google Workspace to the agency. Now—come hurricane, high water, or simply a busy day at the agency—all the Ferraras have every insurance policy, customer appointment, and email available, regardless of where they’re working.

An agency moving at the speed of … fax

The insurance industry has traditionally run on paper and faxes. Jimmy and his kids managed a constant flow of policy agreements and cancellations from insurance companies, as well as signed documents from clients—all of which had to be viewed by Jimmy, scanned, then filed away on agency hard drives.

The fax shuffling and scanning was slow—a process made slower by regular software glitches and shutdowns on the agency’s Windows computers. A family friend with a knack for IT was called in regularly to patch Microsoft Office, in hopes it would keep running the following week.

At the same time that its business systems were starting to break down, StreetSmart was growing, adding remote workers for bookkeeping and customer service. Everyone needed easy access to StreetSmart documents and tools to communicate with the Ferraras in Freehold. StreetSmart clients were sending more and more emails with policy questions; they started asking the Ferraras for chat consultations, which the agency couldn’t do with its desktop tools.

Carlo had built his own website with Google tools, and he thought Google Workspace might solve the firm’s problems. "At that time, around 2011, working in the cloud was not a big thing in our industry," he says. "So talking my father into buying Google Workspace was difficult."

The Google Workspace migration started on a Friday afternoon; everyone’s Gmail addresses were ready to use by Monday morning. Carlo found support articles in the Google Workspace Learning Center about creating email addresses, managing users, and setting up two-factor authentication.

"Google Workspace’s online support is amazing," Carlo says. "I don’t even need the IT guy anymore." By using two-factor authentication and Google Workspace mobile device management to secure user accounts, StreetSmart reduced costs for security software by 22 percent.

Once everyone had email addresses and logins, the switch to Google Workspace was painless—and also quite welcome. "Compared to Microsoft Word, Google Docs is much more reliable and powerful," Carlo says. "It’s so easy to teach anyone to use it."

Emails reach the right person for the job

In the years since StreetSmart began using Google Workspace, workflows have changed completely. The agency staff used to forward emails to each other to make sure the right person handled queries from customers, insurance underwriters, and claims teams. They worried about delays in response time that might affect customer service.

Carlo created an email address, hello@streetsmart.insurance, specifically for incoming queries from customers. He set up the address as a group email so that several StreetSmart employees would get the messages, ensuring that anyone could quickly respond. The result, Carlo says, is that messages are answered more quickly.

To keep pace with the paperwork generated by insurance companies, Carlo created 16 Drive folders that map to common documents, like policy renewals and cancelations. When emails arrive with the documents attached—such as messages from RingCentral with faxes—StreetSmart employees can simply click the "Save to Drive" button in Gmail, and save attachments to the correct folder. It’s a much more efficient process than the old way, in which Jimmy Ferrara fielded all the RingCentral emailed faxes and had to print them out or file them away himself.

From New Jersey and California to India and the Philippines, the StreetSmart team has everything needed to keep customers’ insurance policies in force and the business running smoothly. Those fax stacks and software crashes? Just a distant memory.

"We are always in sync," says Ferrara. "If we didn’t have Google Workspace, we wouldn’t be able to compete in today’s insurance environment. It’s one of the best decisions we’ve ever made."

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