Professional services leader speeds customers toward software ROI

Claire Roberts sees how automation helps customers launch new InsurTech products

Professional services leader speeds customers toward software ROI

Get to know our experts. This series of blogs discusses how Vertafore leaders work for our customers.


Claire Roberts, senior director of professional services, has several jobs at Vertafore, primarily because she’s a self-starter. She leads the professional services team and the conversion tools team, which helps our customers switch over to Vertafore products. Across the board, she jumps in where help is needed.

And in those roles, she helps our customers clear any problems in their path to getting value from Vertafore products.

"We're all one team at Vertafore, and our goal is to get our customers using our products successfully,” she says. We’re obsessed with helping agencies get value from their tech faster—which is why Claire’s team is focused on accelerating conversions.

A career pivot to insurance

Like many in the insurance industry, Claire started out somewhere else before transitioning to her current career. Unlike many others, though, her background is in academia. She holds a PhD in cultural anthropology, but pivoted to the business world not long after earning the degree.

I pivoted after graduating and found myself in project management. I love mentoring and coaching. That’s really what I enjoyed about teaching.”

 

Agencies want to do everything faster. Vertafore does, too

When a customer goes through an insurance software conversion, they want to get onboarded as quickly as possible. AMS360, QQCatalyst, and Sagitta are mission-critical software that agencies need to run their businesses. The faster they can get up and running, the faster they can see the value of the software.

"We at Vertafore want to understand how we can do things faster, too,” Claire says. Her professional services team partners with the conversion tools team to find ways to minimize the downtime for customers during conversions. One key way is mapping data from competitor products to Vertafore products more quickly and without errors.

AI is eliminating conversion roadblocks

In the mapping process, a customer’s data is matched from its current location—most likely on a competitor’s product to Vertafore software. Claire and her conversion team are working on making that process smoother for everyone.

Human errors can happen on the customer or conversion team's side. Whether a customer does something incorrectly or someone on the conversion team mismatches data, it can lead to errors in an agency’s live database.

We're using AI to help with this. My team is really excited about it, but it's like a whole new language, and there's a learning curve. Once we get past that learning curve, the door is wide open.”

 

Automation is future-proofing Vertafore customers

Many customers are turning to AI to automate everyday tasks so their jobs become quicker and easier. The result is that they can spend more time focused on selling and growing relationships. Vertafore’s product team is always hard at work creating better workflows for customers. Her conversions team is looking at how to make the most of those product changes.

"For conversions, we might look at what additional data we could convert so there’s not a manual process where the agency’s employees have to go back and look at an old policy and input the data they need. If we can get more data into the system, it reduces the need for the employees to add it themselves.”

What’s coming for the industry?

AI. That's a big change everyone is focused on right now.”

 

Claire sees firsthand how AI and automation make her work more impactful for agencies. They’re getting on new products faster, they’re getting more accurate with their data. She says there are so many possibilities, but she only gets more excited as she hears about what AI can do for insurance and businesses across all industries.

Read more in our expert series

The person behind the role

Your TED Talk?
The nuances of college baseball. Kids are out there doing what they love, and they get to go to college while they do it. But they get to form a bond that I think is not necessarily the same as you get on a Major League team. 

First job?
My first real paycheck was as an ump for girls’ softball. I will still chatter some umps when I think they're making bad calls, but I have a different respect for them now. 
 
Favorite concert?
I don't really go to concerts, but I did see The Backstreet Boys at the Las Vegas Sphere. That was pretty cool.

Book recommendation?
Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage. It's about the explorer Ernest Shackleton. The Endurance is the ship, but endure is also what they did—they had endurance. It's a page-turner.

AI at Vertafore

Innovation you can trust

Vertafore is powering your possibilities in the AI era to help you spend less time on manual tasks and more time building trusted relationships.

We’ve been investing in AI since 2017, delivering practical tools that simplify work and drive growth across agencies, MGAs, and carriers.

From automating plan imports in BenefitPoint and predicting retention in RiskMatch, to generating client-ready content in AMS360, Vertafore AI turns innovation into real results.

 

Learn more about AI at Vertafore