Home › More Stories ›
Using Decision Intelligence to improve productivity and create a solid foundation for expanding operations
PRODUCTIVITY
GAINS
OVER 15%
IMPROVED CAPACITY MANAGEMENT DECISION MAKING
REDUCTION IN OPERATIONAL COSTS
BETTER CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AND TURNAROUND TIMES
EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT SCORES INCREASED
MORE EMPOWERED AND MOTIVATED STAFF
“ActiveOps gives us an extra layer of confidence that we didn’t have before.”
Jon Burke
Director of Operational Support Services, Atlanta Group
Stories from Atlanta Group
Hear from across the ops team, the senior leader and team leaders about how ActiveOps Decision Intelligence has created transformative change.
The challenge – Insights and consistency needed across multiple operational teams, sites and brands
A major priority of Atlanta Group’s back-office operations is to maintain a balance between delivering quality to customers, and keeping employees engaged and happy with work. The operating model and workforce management approach are heavily dependent on ops data to optimise operational services to best serve their customers. Senior ops leaders at Atlanta Group realized that access to this data for their ops team was vital to this work. The team wanted to eliminate manual data gathering and analysis and improve their limited ability to view crucial data such as service levels, giving them faster and better insights to answer questions such as:
- How much resource do I need to complete the work that I have?
- Will we meet our service commitments today, tomorrow and in the future?
- Can I achieve my efficiency goals whilst sustaining and improving sacrificing customer experience?
- Are we getting the balance between productivity and employee experience right?
- How do I keep my people engaged? Are my people at risk of burnout?
“Without any data you can’t forecast or plan know how many staff you need. So it was very difficult to plan your workload. In fact, sometimes it was impossible.”
Lynda Boote
Head of Admin, Atlanta Group
For Atlanta Group, the challenge was compounded by the multiple brands within their operations. Originally the Back Office Admin was aligned with each brand as Atlanta Group grew via acquisitions. Having undertaken a programme to create a centralized Back Office Admin shared services function with common processes, the challenge shifted toward optimizing their resources across this new Centre of Excellence, whilst maintaining the unique features that differentiated each of the brands.
John Gilbert, Group Transformation Director at Atlanta Group, explains:
“Each brand’s back office operations were run differently, with different measures and processes in place. Standardizing those operations would give us much better insight into our operations, as well as more opportunities for agility. But we needed to do it in a way that didn’t destroy the uniqueness of each brand, which was important for both customers and employees.”
The Solution – ActiveOps
ControliQ from ActiveOps was selected to help Atlanta Group achieve its transformation. “We saw that ActiveOps has a track record of delivering results,” says John, “and their proactiveness and friendliness during the rollout confirmed that they were a good choice.”
ControliQ combines human and artificial intelligence to help operations leaders make better decisions faster. Underpinned by the Active Operations Management (AOM) methodology, ControliQ helps Atlanta Group bring together the data already in the organization to unlock powerful insights into what’s happening in operations. With this Decision Intelligence, Atlanta Group can unlock more capacity in order to increase productivity, customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and demonstrate the value of operations to the wider organization.
The AOM methodology was particularly important to Atlanta Group.
“The technology gave us a way to make better use of all our data, but the methodology gave us a way to standardize how our operations are managed and measured while respecting each brand in the group.”
John Gilbert
Group Transformation Director at Atlanta Group
The Results
Having implemented ActiveOps and providing employees with the intelligence to make better decisions and faster, Atlanta has quickly seen some significant improvements:
- Customer experience has significantly improved, with quicker turnarounds and the team has seen a big reduction in customers following up on progress of their requests
- Staff are feeling more empowered and in control of their work and personal development and that has shown in the higher employee engagement scores. “Because we can see what’s happening, we can do more with less and operate smarter,” observes Jon.
- Productivity has increased across teams by over 15%, enabling them to do more work with less resources
- Operational costs have been cut thanks to robust capacity plans
- Overtime gradually reduced, with no overtime required in the past 5 months since deploying
The other major win for Atlanta Group is the professionalization of its back office. The AOM Methodology has simplified ops management and brought consistency to the business, enabling different teams to lend and borrow resources to handle spikes in workload far more easily. “We’re also cross-skilling colleagues to further increase the flexibility in our operations,” says Jon Burke, Director of Operational Support Services at Atlanta Group.
In this new environment, it’s much easier for Atlanta Group to integrate new businesses into the group. Incoming team members get a new way of working that works with their brand. This is enabling them to develop their skills even further, while the existing business gets access to additional resources to increase agility and resilience when it’s needed.
“ActiveOps combines with other key capabilities of our operating model, making them greater than the sum of their parts. This has been a great journey for the Atlanta team, and it has become embedded as our way of working”
John Gilbert
Group Transformation Director, Atlanta Group
“If we didn’t have ActiveOps today, I think we would have increased workload from a team leader and manager perspective. My confidence levels in their ability to be able to forecast and then feed into our overall operational budget plans would be completely diminished.”
Jon Burke
Director of Operational Support Services, Atlanta Group
About Atlanta Group
Atlanta Group is home to many brands, each with its own unique story, background, heritage, products and customer base. Brands in Atlanta Group include Swinton Insurance, Carole Nash, Healthy Pets Insurance, SafeGuard, and Be Wiser.
Today, Atlanta employs over 2,100 colleagues and consists of some of the largest personal lines brokers in the UK and Ireland, with a common goal to relentlessly pursue excellence on behalf of over 2.6 million customers.
