A leading UK and international insurer needed help managing their customer service operations, including end-to-end administration, digital services and business support.
They turned to us to benefit from our 30+ years’ experience of outsourcing and managing call centre operations for some of the world’s leading companies.
The challenge
With more than 1.6 million life and pensions customers globally, the client’s back-office operations involved almost 3,000 individual workflow processes across four international sites. Many of these processes were fragmented, with a lack of transparency and control which made it difficult to resolve errors, to truly understand customer expectations and to forecast accurately.
As a result, the end-to-end customer experience took an average of 35 days from initial request to fulfilment, with some taking up to 100 days. Customers were dissatisfied - service delivery received a negative Net Promoter Score (NPS) and overall customer satisfaction was less than 70%.
Working closely with the client, we designed a three-year service modernisation programme which included streamlining their standard operating framework with radically simplified processes, the introduction of a new quality framework, overlaying digital technologies and creating a best-in-class first-line risk and controls team. The aim was to significantly improve outcomes for general enquiries, retirements and claims related to bereavement, surrender and maturities, and to future-proof the customer service function to ensure preparedness for the ‘new normal’.
To further transform customer experience and enhance the control environment, we introduced a market-leading workflow tool to deliver complete visibility into front and back-office processes and performance across the four sites, including real-time desktop analytics to identify process, compliance and operational inefficiencies. This also enables real-time work management with ‘line balancing’ across multiple locations and channels.
We also made the most of the breadth and depth of our capabilities by integrating expertise from our divisional teams, comprising complaints, client accounting, actuarial services, management information, and claims and underwriting.
The impact
By radically re-engineering processes, standardising software to form the foundation of modernisation, and upskilling the workforce, customer outcomes have dramatically improved:
- 80% of all customer demands fulfilled at first point of resolution (FPR)
- Reduced end-to-end processing time average from 35 days to less than three days
- Increased overall NPS score by 50 points
- Improved bereavement claims NPS from -11 to +79, ease of service from 68% to 99%, and customer satisfaction from 72% to 99%
- Reduced 2,663 customer-workflow processes to 250 end-to-end processes
- Replaced manual, paper-based processes with paperless digital-verification
- Reduced complaints by 50%
- Reduced colleagues’ attrition by 70% by increasing job satisfaction and purpose
- Improved operational control, now en-route to best-in-class first line controls
- Eliminated key person dependencies through targeted multi-skilling based on current and future customer demands
Ensuring business as usual in unusual times
Whilst the coronavirus pandemic has had a devastating impact on many companies’ ability to serve customers, our priority has been to ensure ‘business as usual’, building a model for our client to thrive in the new environment.
By rapidly putting a virtual operations-management and quality framework in place, including a virtual ‘mission control’ centre and ensuring 97% of our contact centre colleagues could work from home across the world, we ensured minimal disruption.
We ramped up our conversational messaging programme to enable digital fulfilment of customer demands and accelerated payments to customers to within three hours instead of three to five days. Working to this new timeframe, we paid out more than £10m to care homes and carers, and some £6m to beneficiaries arising from bereavement claims related to Covid-19. Furthermore, 100% of immediate lifetime care applications were processed within 24 hours.
We’re transforming our entire strategic and organisational approach to all our services sector clients, pivoting our business model to deliver business-critical services and solutions to a broad range of sectors, from local and central government to education, transport, health, life insurance and pensions.
“This innovative solution has undoubtedly supported the thriving relationship we have with our insurance client and made Capita a more responsive partner. We can now track and optimise the end-to-end customer experience, ensuring we consistently deliver better outcomes for the client and its customers.” Capita customer
