The situation
One of Ireland’s largest insurers, with over 40 years’ experience and over 500,000 customers, needed more capacity in its Central Operations Team. The team handles back-office administration for all policy processing. With more capacity it could take on work from departments such as Claims and Underwriting, freeing technical capacity there.
The team was versatile and already took on work from other departments, but how work was assessed and allocated lacked clarity and structure.
The approach
We profiled the team’s processes, demand and capacity with its managers, team leaders and staff, and found what got in the way of a steady day’s output: unexpected phone calls, system downtime, faulty printers, unplanned meetings and new-system testing. The work followed our 25-step Service Operations Fundamentals programme.
- Reasonable expectations. We shadowed people with different levels of skill, and the whole team agreed how much work an average team member could do in a day.
- An Opportunities Workshop. The team gave honest, anonymous feedback on processes, document quality, other teams, systems and training. The senior management team guaranteed a response to every suggestion.
- ServiceForce, now CollabForce365. Each person saw a balanced, fair workload for each seven-hour day, matched to their skills, and team leaders got reporting on demand, value-added work, productivity and forecasts.
- Taking in new work. An agreement between departments set out how each new process would transfer in, so training, quality and customer service were protected.
The measured result
- Capacity up more than 25% in four to six months.
- Value-added work up 15%.
- Better customer service levels.
- Weekly and monthly performance measures that the team sees as transparent and fair.
- Higher morale and output, and better cooperation between teams.
- The team now takes in administrative work from the wider business.