Car insurer

Assessment of customer contact operations and management in a “post start-up” telematics insurance company to determine opportunities to increase sales and reduce costs

Five years after start up, our client was on the brink of being sold to a Japanese insurance business, with management highly incentivized to deliver the business plan. It wanted to convert concerns over the leadership and cost base of customer operations into an improvement plan, but lacked the expertise and bandwidth to deliver the challenge to the status quo required.

David led a team to review operations, advise on how well incumbent management were doing and the actions required to maximize value.

Our team interviewed key stakeholders outside customer operations – CEO, COO, CFO, head of business efficiency – to understand their concerns and hypotheses. The CEO, in particular, had strong views that the cost base was “overweight” and the Head of Customer Service was culpable. The COO was concerned that an outsource partner – a stalwart “friend” of the business – was abusing its position by charging excessive premium process

To provide an independent, data-driven view, we

• used Our diagnostic framework to guide data gathering across technology, process and operating model.
• interviewed management, supervisors and front line staff.
• monitored and assess live calls and call recordings
• obtained and analysed operational performance and cost data
• benchmarked the operations

We found that the head of customer operations had created an operation with a rare, distinct customer-orientated culture, likely to be of value in securing “white label” business eg retailers. However it was doing so at high cost. We proposed seven action prongs to deliver the actions required to improve performance and align better to benchmarks.

The question of leadership of customer operations during the changes was finely balanced. The incumbent had successfully set up operations with a distinct culture and had energy and appetite. However his skills at managing his C-level stakeholders needed improvement. We recommended the incumbent be given the opportunity to make the changes needed. To help with stakeholder management, we recommended stakeholders outside customer operations set objectives, with the Head of operations accountable for preparing and delivering plans to meet them.

Challenging findings identifying 30% cost saving opportunity Clear prescription of the actions required and roadmap Participative working to deal with inter-company conflict.