Using workforce management systems and modern data analytic techniques is driving increasing levels of sophistication into our resource planning processes, supporting the operational teams to deliver great customer outcomes in the Life, Pensions, Financial and Regulated Services sectors. It is also helping us to win awards, writes Lynette Martin, Head of Planning at Capita Regulated Services.
I’m proud to share that the Capita Regulated Services team recently won the fiercely contested award for ‘Planning Team of the Year’ at the annual Forum Awards, which recognises excellence in contact centre, field services, back office and retail operations. It has been a real boost for the team after a tough year of disruptions and challenges caused by Covid-19. And for our clients, it acts as a reminder that Capita will always evolve and innovate in order to delight our clients and their customers.
A key reason for our win is combining our advanced resource planning and customer service modernisation and transformation capability, sitting at the heart of our operations. So, what does that mean, and how does it play out for our clients?
Good planning is at the heart of effective operations and excellent customer experience in the insurance sector. It involves forecasting 100% of customer demands for your team’s services, understanding demand drivers, and optimising supply against demand. In addition, it also requires real time visibility of full operational performance and rigorous performance management, all embedded into a customer improvement culture.
But the advent of advanced techniques for managing and analysing data, and then optimising performance based on data-driven evidence and decision-making, has taken planning to a new level of sophistication and impact. Here are some key features and benefits of our approach and how they make a difference for our clients, including some of the UK’s most well-known financial services organisations such as Royal London, Zurich Insurance, Co operative Bank and one of the UK’s largest life and pensions providers.
Full operational diagnostic using a unique toolset
Capita's operations management team have developed a proven toolset that allows us to easily perform an end to end operational diagnostic for our new and longstanding clients such as The Co-operative Bank and a large UK Life and Pensions customer. The approach uses a series of detailed questions, which take away all the emotion and give us a clear, factual assessment of current operational maturity versus our clients’ aspirations and competitors in the market. This supports the creation of an account-specific roadmap, which through simplifying the operation and deploying technology delivers better outcomes for our customers, clients and colleagues.
Using technology to improve customer end-to-end journey times
We help our clients such as Royal London to progress through levels of maturity, relentlessly remove inherent inefficiencies and improve the customer experience. At maturity stage 1 the focus is on end-to-end process visibility, which isn’t always apparent from the service level agreements (SLAs) for individual processes. Through this visibility we can understand where to bring in technology to reduce end-to-end times for the customer journey, improving the experience for our clients and their customers. An example of this end-to-end optimisation using technology is how we’ve reduced the time to handle a bereavement claim from 35 days to just 2 hours, which is a huge relief for the end customer at a difficult time.
Managing surges in bereavement claims during the pandemic
Our planning analysts have developed sophisticated models which correlate hospital admissions due to Covid-19 to trends in deaths rates and ultimately customer claims. This has helped our clients such as Phoenix Life and the Royal London Group to anticipate claims demand ahead of time, and we have been able to scale our resourcing up and down accordingly.
Internal SLAs
At Capita we don’t just work to the contractual service level agreements (SLAs) for our clients such as Royal London, we go a step further by analysing customer tolerance points — in other words the points where customers are likely to call in and ask for help. We anticipate and prevent the need for the customer to reach out, which benefits the customers, our clients and us too. It improves the customer experience while reducing the effort needed to service customers for our clients, because we are solving problems before they happen.
These are just some examples of how we are relentlessly focused on making things simpler for our clients and their customers. With the unique analytics tools at our disposal, we diagnose and make visible the end-to-end processes of our clients, optimise resourcing based on shrinkage and demand forecasts, and introduce technology-driven efficiencies that reduce the customer journey and simplify processes for our clients. The bottom line: happy customers, reduced costs for our clients and efficient, optimised teams.
Paul Luke, Managing Director, Capita Life and Pensions states, ‘this is the third time that we have won this prestigious award, and it’s down to the great work that Lynette and her team have carried out making incremental improvements over the years, leading the way as always. This award underlines some of the important work Capita has carried out in our Service modernisation programmes where clients experience significant gains in both customer experience success metrics and improved workforce productivity (1) (2) (3) (4).
Capita is a consulting, digital services and software business. We deliver innovative solutions to simplify the connections between businesses and customers, and between governments and citizens. We partner with clients to transform their businesses and services. We do complex and difficult things so clients don’t have to. Part of the fabric of UK society, we help millions of people every day.
Capita Regulated Services deliver great customer outcomes on behalf of several FTSE100 FS clients in the UK and globally. With over 20,000 colleagues across front and back-office operations distributed across UK, European and international sites. Capita has over £600 billion funds under management, and over 20 years’ experience in financial markets.
Contact us:
Get in touch to learn more about how Capita can help you and your business, please visit our website, or call Paul Luke, Managing Director, Capita Regulated Services on Tel: 07557 170733 today or Paul.Luke@capita.com
References
[1]A leading UK and international insurer needed help managing their customer service operations, including end-to-end administration, digital services and business support.
[2]Simplify Strengthen succeed, Capita’s approach creates better outcomes for customers, clients and colleagues
[3]Simplify Strengthen succeed, Future Proofing Customer Service Excellent in the ‘New Normal’
[4]Webinar replay ‘ Streamlining CX: Rethinking Front-Office Customer Interactions’
Lynette Martin
Head of Planning at Capita Regulated Services
Lynette Martin is Head of Planning at Capita Regulated Services. Lynette has over 20 years of experience in Planning and is professionally accredited by the Planning Forum. She is also a service modernisation practitioner who has been involved in customer transformation across a number of Regulated Services accounts. Lynette enjoys horse riding and spending time with her husband and two children.
