Skandia capitalises on the quality of its customer service
Skandia is an insurance company of Swedish origin that now belongs to the financial services group, Old Mutual. Its speciality is long-term savings products and financial investments and it has been operating in France since 2002. In 2004, Skandia France called on Selligent to build a customer database accessible by everyone in the company. Two years later, with the aim of offering optimal service quality to all its brokers, it entrusted the same software developer with the customer service management tool.
Hubert SéguraClient/Markets Director
“Selligent makes a big contribution to our organisation’s customer orientation as well as helping to improve service quality. Today, the overall level of satisfaction with service quality is around 94%.”
“What we particularly liked about Selligent was its scalability, which enabled us to start out with a centralised client database but eventually to manage all our relationships with the advisers through a single tool.”
Skandia was founded in 1855 and is one of the jewels of the Swedish insurance industry. It was originally a “multi-sector insurance company”, but in the mid 80s made a major strategic shift to focus on long-term savings products and financial investments. Skandia set up shop in France in 2002 and made the strategic choice to distribute its offerings exclusively through independent asset management advisers. The latter are the Skandia clients and have the mission to advise individuals on the management of their financial assets, offering them savings, pension and life insurance products to optimise their capital. As a result, they are totally independent in the way they manage their end-customer relationships.
Click on the headings below to read the full article
The foundations of the future strategy
Today, the French subsidiary ranks fourth among suppliers of life insurance products for the asset management consultancy sector. Right from the outset, its focus was on quality, proximity and responsiveness. In 2004, that is, only two years after its start-up, it had built up a huge network of partners such that it was no longer possible to manage them using Excel files. The time had come to think in terms of CRM. At this point, the aim was to quickly provide all the departments with a client repository containing the profiles of the advisers so as to guarantee a client-oriented approach at all levels. But this was just the launch pad in the Skandia strategy, as Hubert Ségura, Client/Markets Director, points out. “What we particularly liked about Selligent was its scalability, which enabled us to start out with a centralised client database but eventually to manage all our relationships with the advisers through a single tool.” Jean-Luc Canty, IS Manager, explains that other aspects also gave Selligent an edge. “From a technical point of view, we wanted a Web tool based on Microsoft.NET technology and able to integrate an Oracle database. In addition, we felt a certain affinity with Selligent, a company with a human dimension, like us.” At the end of 2004, the solution was up and running.
Migration and request management
Initially, the system was used primarily by the customer service department to enrich the data and record the interaction with the advisers. It was gradually extended to other profiles. And then, in 2006, in view of the increasing number of advisers on its books, Skandia came to the realisation that their processes needed to be further automated and their modus operandi improved so as to continue enhancing service quality, at the same time maintaining the human touch they were so proud of. The way they solved that issue was to introduce Selligent’s Customer Care module. This new phase soon took on an additional dimension, as Canty explains. “We decided that this was a perfect opportunity to move to the new version of Selligent, Selligent X@. So we worked with Selligent to do the migration in parallel with the definition of our request management needs.” Those needs were relatively complex, given the level of automation Skandia wanted. The excellent co-operation was decisive in the success of the project, which lasted eight or nine months. Canty stresses that “the migration was very smooth and the impact on users was minimal. In fact, all they were subjected to was a training session on the differences between the two versions. Then they were given a little time to feel they had mastered the new version before the Customer Care module went into production mode.”
Processes under control
What now happens is that all requests and complaints go straight to Customer Service, where they are qualified and resolved where possible thanks to the knowledge base at its disposal. If Customer Service cannot respond to a request, it is transmitted via Selligent to the department concerned. The response is then sent back to Customer Service and from there to the adviser. This process has a number of advantages, as Ségura points out. “First, qualifying the requests enables us to analyse the evolution of requests over time. Also, each type of request has a response time assigned to it, and we can see directly if the turnaround time is being respected or not. These two elements allow us to identify possible shortcomings in the process and to make the necessary adjustments in a department or in the process itself. Furthermore, because of the better knowledge of our advisers, we can home in on the subjects their requests cover and consequently on their expectations. So, based on the type of request and the adviser’s profile, we can roll out sales initiatives or training opportunities as we seek to constantly improve the quality of our service.” Skandia has developed specific dashboards to optimise the monitoring of requests. Each user has his or her dashboard showing the requests to be handled and its associated response time. Global dashboards help to manage the activity and adjust the organisation and committed response times, depending on the results of the analyses.
A cross-functional tool
For Hubert Ségura, the tool’s ease of use played a big role in the enthusiastic adoption by its users. Selligent is seamlessly integrated in the Customer Service processes and, indeed, in the company in general. “Thanks to the request management module, we can now track the whole of the relationship with the advisers through Selligent, automate co-operation among departments, and make firm commitments on response time. Selligent is a cross-functional tool that helps make everyone aware of advisers’ expectations and in so doing makes a big contribution to our organisation’s customer orientation as well as helping us to provide high-quality service.”
Record level of satisfaction
While introducing e-mail templates has sort of “mechanised” certain aspects of the relationship with the advisers, the latter have certainly noticed the improvement in how their requests are handled. The numbers are there to prove it. “In our last satisfaction survey, over 95% of advisers indicated that they had observed an improvement in the quality of the responses provided,” notes a contented Ségura. “Today, the overall level of satisfaction with service quality is around 94%. Such results affect employee motivation positively because it’s always a boost to morale to know that people appreciate what you do.” Jean-Luc Canty adds that “there are also internal benefits to using CRM, because to perform well vis-à-vis the outside world, you have to be efficient internally. Introducing Selligent has allowed us to streamline the organisation and improve our processes.”
CTI, marketing and visit reports
Skandia is thinking about linking its CRM system to a call centre in the near future. Currently, the e-mails sent to Customer Service are automatically transformed into requests in Selligent. The goal is to do the same with phone calls. A call from an adviser should cause his/her file to pop up on the agent’s screen and automatically generate a request. In the longer term, implementing the Marketing module should enable Skandia to know which mail shots the advisers have received, what training they have signed up for, etc. It is worth noting here that the advisers are expected to go through a specified number of training hours a year, and Skandia is significantly expanding this area. So it is important to be able to analyse the results of its campaigns and decide what type of training the advisers are most interested in. Then it will be the sales representatives’ turn. They will be able to enter their visit reports in Selligent, meaning that the company will then really have a total overview of its customer relationships and be able to cross-reference the data. “The way we have designed Selligent today and the way we plan to expand it will enable us to underpin our strategy with service quality to the advisers,” Ségura concludes. “And that is the key to our future success”.
