Client name: A major insurance company

As a major supplier of insurance services, our client was formulating a three-year plan to improve its customer service levels whilst bringing down the costs of its multi-site service operation. Our client needed to know which of the many proposals they were considering would be most effective. The task was to assess the plan and to produce a prioritised set of initiatives in terms of quantified cost savings, service level improvements and time to benefits.

Our team worked in conjunction with the client's operational and financial departments over an eight-week period. We started by analysing the operation in terms of the processes and functions carried out by different department teams and locations. The team measured the performance of the processes by analysing operational activity data from sources, such as the capacity planning and rostering system, and the call and activity logs. Once performance levels were understood we were able to benchmark the client's contact centre performance against those of comparative operations and internally between agents, teams and departments.

This helped us to identify variations in performance from staff member to staff member and from team to team, discovering where areas of operational weakness lay. But more than that, the team were able to discover the root causes of identified poor performance such as staff skills, capacity planning and constraining IT systems. This enabled us to put together a list of solutions, their benefits and priorities for the client based on factual evidence, which were subsequently approved and adopted at board level.

The Detica recommendations we approved and adopted at board level and have resulted in a two-year programme of change. The programme is on track and has so far achieved an annual saving of approximately £10 million. In addition, customer service levels have significantly improved with target service levels being more consistently achieved.