Products > Case Studies > OutRight Insurance
The OutRight Company, formed as a result of the buy out of HSBC Select (UK) Limited from HSBC Bank in April 2003, operates its high volume call centre business at market leading efficiency. With numerous affinities in place as well as its autodirect business, the intermediary uses CDL Classic to support both its back office and online systems.
However, the company was clear that to continue to deliver profitable growth, it had to first get its processes right. It invested heavily in a major project to boost efficiency and recognised that CDL consultancy services had an important role to play in both identifying and realising potential improvements.
OutRight Chief Executive, Andrew Lee, acknowledges this involved a major investment: “Spending money to save it is always difficult, and our decision to buy the consultancy time was, to some extent, a leap of faith. But it was one that paid off. By giving processes proper attention, we have been able to achieve not only measurable efficiencies but also corresponding improvements in our performance.”
Three examples of operations that were transformed by the efficiency drive were procedures for handling print runs, diary entries and mailings.
OutRight wanted to be able to carry out print runs for renewals and newly issued policies in planned volume batches rather than individually. CDL programmed the system to automatically generate documentation for high volume hit lists at three staggered intervals throughout the day, ensuring a steady flow and saving operator time by eliminating the need for manual instructions. Other processes, such as accounting lists, were scheduled to run through the night and the utilisation of printers was also realigned to ensure that the most powerful and cost effective machines are allocated to high volume work.
CDL also helped OutRight devise a system of ‘labelling’ for diary entries. By giving operators standard ‘pick lists’ for recording conversations with customers, OutRight was able to ensure a more systematic approach, resulting in less ambiguous entries and reducing training time required, while providing a means of extracting valuable management information statistics from the system.
Finally, CDL worked with OutRight’s post room to implement a system that allows operators to immediately verify when documents have been sent out. Using barcode stickers rather than stamps, OutRight is able to scan all post and load details onto a web fronted database, allowing operators to track documents quickly and easily.
To illustrate the difference efficient systems can make, Andrew Lee cites the acquisition of a book of business which OutRight has proved able to handle with less than half the staff that the previous administrators had used – despite the fact that they had been operating the same CDL platform. “For us, CDL represents a slick and scalable operating platform with fully integrated online quotation facilities and the capacity to absorb large chunks of business quickly and easily. Operators can recall quotations generated online; different ‘books’ of business can sit on the same database while being kept separate; and the system’s documentation facilities can easily be rebranded to support affinity relationships.”
In summary, Lee concludes: “It is not just the fact that there are no system challenges to our growth plans, but by working with CDL, we have found that we have been able to simplify existing processes and thus improve our competitiveness.”