en insurance policies and investment instruments. Not only, then, was the audience fragmented among media outlets; it was also increasingly fragmented in terms of its insurance-buying desires.
In response to these fundamental changes, Capital Management concluded that a mere tinkering about the edges of the DRG marketing system would not be sufficient to truly restore its competitive position. Instead, they chose to attempt "corporate reengineering:" a comprehensive reconstruction of the entire way in which DRG did business, a reconstruction to be rooted in a fundamental analysis of the processes by which DRG sold insurance. Within DRG, the conception was symbolized by a figure-eight; the top loop represented management of the market as a whole, while the bottom loop represented management of individual customers (Hammer and Champy, 1994, p. 185).
The core feature of the reengineering was what can be characterized as a right-angle change in the way that business with the firm's customers was handled. Instead of a relatively impersonal, cookie-cutter, mass-marketing approach to customers, DRG would seek to build ongoing relationships with its customers. To do so, customer service representatives would be given broad responsibility for handling all phases of a transaction (such as a request for a new policy). Instead of a customer application moving from department to department to be processed, the customer service representative would carry out the entire processing of the application, only calling on functional specialists as required.
Such was the general conception of the reengineering. Carrying it out was a complex process. Some eighty thousand customers were "pulled" at random from the usual customer-processing system to be handled by the new system on a pilot basis. At the same time, a "cultural audit" of the whole firm was carried out to determine how employees' assumptions about their work environment e...