Morgan Stanley analysts heard about those snafus in late January and promptly downgraded Cigna’s stock.

Not surprisingly, Cigna’s customer service center was besieged by calls. But because of the layoffs (which Anania says was "a business management decision" she was not involved in), there weren’t enough call center reps to handle the load. People waited on hold. And waited. And when they did reach someone, the reps who had been newly hired had not been adequately trained in how to handle the new technology.

"You can have the best system in the world, but if you have people with relatively little tenure, you’re not going to get the best service," says Anania. "There were people with very little tenure handling these calls." (Cigna has since hired back a number of the reps it laid off.)

There were also problems with the actual migration of data from the legacy systems to the new platforms. "There were some issues with that," Anania acknowledges over bow-tie pasta and chicken in Bloomfield. "The back-end data didn’t work at the front end."

As other CIOs have found, converting customer data from the back end to new customer-facing apps can be tricky. The data has to be cleaned and filtered in order to be understandable to customer service reps taking calls and to members seeking information online. "When you take data from the back-office function that was built to process claims and expose that data to the front end, it starts looking funny," explains Ounjian, the Minnesota Blue Cross and Blue Shield CIO. "Take ZIP codes, for example. Many years ago, saving space on disks was critical, so back-end programmers compressed the ZIP codes from nine digits to eight, and if you just took that data and exposed it to the front end, you’re going to make your company look awkward."

Ounjian, whose company has captured a few of the national accounts lost by Cigna this year, says the key to a good CRM system is not how many features it has, but how it’s executed. And the key to a good execution is testing and retesting the system in a real environment.

Anania acknowledges that the Cigna team "didn’t have time to do a very thorough volume testing or end-to-end testing" in the rush to go live. But she blames that on the IT staff working for Cigna HealthCare’s business unit and on the CGEY consultants brought in to do the implementation. Asked if she herself bears any responsibility for ensuring that comprehensive testing was done, she says, "The business divisions had autonomy, and you can’t second-guess the people on the ground every day. The business was working with a name-brand systems integrator, and they were not knocking on the door saying, Don’t go live, don’t go live. Can you truly expect one individual to have more visibility into the day-to-day workings of what’s going on in that project than the people in charge of it?" (Brian Baum, chief marketing officer of CGEY’s health business unit, declined to comment, citing "contractual arrangements" that prohibit the consultancy from discussing the project publicly.)