Bhavesh Vaghela: Hello and welcome to Ops Game Changers, the podcast that shines a light on the crucial role that operations teams have in driving business performance and improving staff and customer experience. My name is Bhavesh, I’m the Chief Marketing Officer here at ActiveOps. In each episode, I home in on one key KPI or challenge that a business has solved. We delve into how they went about doing this and explore the outcomes achieved. Now, one of the biggest challenges faced by operations is building a flexible operating model that is able to meet demand. So I’m delighted to be joined by John Gilbert. Now John is the Transformation Director over at Atlanta Group, and in this episode, we’re going to focus specifically on how Atlanta Group went about building a flexible operating model across a number of their household insurance plans. So, John, so tell us a little bit more about how you ended up in operations.
John Gilbert: With pleasure. So, I started my life back in academia and consulting, and soon found myself in a position where I started fixing things in operations. It just became part and parcel of my role as I went into the Lean Six Sigma world. That built out into a couple of global roles, but mainly fixing stuff really. I got my first operational leadership role, which was with Egg, the internet bank that some of your viewers will remember.
Bhavesh: Yeah, I remember.
John: That gave me the bug for doing a little bit of both. Subsequent to that, went to Aviva and a number of other organizations, that got me hooked on ops and I’ve never been able to escape actually since that point. So that’s really where I started off.
Bhavesh: Oh, fantastic. Well, listen, we’re delighted to have you on the podcast and to share the journey you’ve been on with Atlanta. Now for our viewers and listeners who may not know your Atlanta Group, so you’re one of the UK’s the largest insurance brokers, covering a whole bunch of different products, so motor, home, bike, pets and so forth.
John: Correct.
Bhavesh: Something like circa, 3 million customers. So, tell us a little bit more about Atlanta then and the role of operations for Atlanta Group.
John: Okay, so just to fill in a few more gaps. So yes, you’re quite right, we’re a leading UK insurance broker. We were formed back in 2017 and grown out of alternate insurance, acquiring Carole Nash motorcycle insurance, and then the mouse swallowing the elephant as it were, when we bought Swinton Insurance, which is obviously a well-known household brand. Got a lot of customers, we’ve got 2,100 colleagues, got strong market positions in both motorcycle and van in the UK and also some top five and 10 positions in other markets as well in terms of products.
So royal operations within Atlanta is all about delivering great customer experience and outcomes. That’s what we’re about. That’s what we’ve always been about. That’s all underpinned and enabled by certain controls that a lot of businesses have in ops. So quality assurance being one of them in voice analytics. We listen to our customers through Net Promoter Score, CSAT and more. Also, our objectives are very much about transforming and advancing our operating model, which we’ll get into in more detail later, I think. That’s very much about simplification, processes, systems, our digital strategy and more.
Bhavesh: Fantastic. So, I mean it seems therefore then you’ve got these multiple brands and operating model. So, what were the challenges from an operational perspective, what’s the key challenges that you were faced with, or you would’ve been faced with before you did this?
John: Yeah, there are plenty. So, I can probably spend about 20 minutes just on that Bhavesh, in all honesty, the challenges, I think the main ones for me would be operations is by default dynamic. We have to be able to respond to market forces. A really good example right now would be the demand that we’re seeing and the changes we’re seeing in the marketplace driven by the cost-of-living crisis. Supporting our customers through that is a primary importance. That changes, for instance, the number of phone calls we get, the amount of dialogue we need to have with customers happy with their renewal, new business and otherwise. The other one is that as a large broker, we’re constantly watching the pricing. So, we’re adjusting our pricing all the time to ensure that we’re competitive in all the different niches and that means that volumes will also change as that happens.
There’s also marketing activity, which I know anybody, any operations professional watching this will fully understand what that’s like because that can change it short notice and you’ve got to jump to it and make sure you can reply. So that’s another dynamic. Then the other one is very much people and commercial. From a people perspective, we have to balance workload with customer demand and that whole see-saw of keeping our people happy, retaining them, because they play the vital role in talking to our customers as separate to our digital services. That’s really critical. Our commercial team, always scanning the market, looking for those opportunities, making sure that we’re competitive and things therefore change constantly. So, you’ve got to be very, very flexible and play to those challenges.
Bhavesh: So, I guess if we rewind the clock a little bit, John, from when you were starting with Atlanta group, and obviously you are growing rapidly as an organization, so what was the pivotal point or the drivers behind the decision to transform your operating model? What is it that you were trying to do?
John: Yeah, quite a few things actually. So firstly, I’ve already mentioned that Atlanta has grown through acquisition over time and that those first three businesses that came into the stable were just the very beginning and now we’ve got a lot more brands in the stable. So that means you need to be good at integration to be able to build that model up, make sure you can plug in those operations in an appropriate fashion whilst keeping what we call the secret sauce. Those brands have to retain their secret sauce, so they play in the right spot in the marketplace. So that and the need to simplify and standardize. If you leave it as it is, that’s not good, that’s not a good acquisition strategy, it’s not a good growth strategy. So, you’ve got to be able to integrate. Therefore, standardization simplification is really, really key.
So, in particular we’ve got commoditized services and specialized services. So, for instance, motor, private motor car is a fairly commoditized or very commoditized service and that needs that simplification opportunities there. We have several brands just in the private car market. The other thing was supporting further growth, so the ability to integrate new acquisitions as well. So, a lot of it was about building up this model or this target operating model in a way that allows us to plug in as we acquire new businesses and do that effectively. We’re pretty good at integration. We are good at integration. I’m not allowed to say pretty good anymore, but we are definitely good. We’ve proven ourselves as being good at integration and that’s something we aim to capitalize as time goes by and as future growth plans come to fruition.
The final couple of things, without spending too much time on this topic, are really technology. So, I’ll talk a bit more about that later on if that’s appropriate. But leveraging new technologies to benefit customers, service and support our people, as well as driving efficiencies, that’s another thing that drives the want to transform and move our overall target operating model forward. So, tech opportunities, I can come back to that. Then finally we have one very big thing, which I probably should have said at the start really is we’ve got a five-year plan. We’re at the moment three years through our five-year plan, there’s more to go. The plan changes because things change in the marketplace, so acquisitions and so on. We’ve got to achieve that and meet our objectives and the whole thing is designed around doing exactly that so we can continue to grow and meet that huge ambition that Atlanta has.
Bhavesh: Yeah, I mean it’s definitely a fascinating journey that you guys have been on in your first three years, and you’ve got a lot of growth still to come. So, I find it fascinating, this whole idea that you are bringing in these brands but still maintaining that secret sauce. I think that as a marketeer, that brand essence, what makes your brand different is not actually Atlanta, it’s the brand that you’ve purchased that you’ve got to maintain that way of customer experience. So, I would imagine that creates a bunch of challenges when you are trying to not only bring the business and operations with you along the way towards, A, bringing these brands together but also still retaining some of that secret sauce. So, what was that journey like? What were those challenges of bringing the business and operations with you?
John: It’s been amazing actually because one of the reasons I joined Atlanta is ambition, not mine, but the business, it matches up really well. We want to innovate. Also, what’s great about the organization, and you realize this when you do encounter any resistance to change, is that we’re very open. Change is basically part and parcel of what we do. So, there’s not much in the way of opposition. So, one of the things that had to be done in order to bring everybody along that journey, and it’s been in the fourth year of our transformation journey now, we’re just bringing that to a close as it happens, and it’s a lot about making sure that you bring everybody along on it. So, helping everybody to understand what the destination is.
The target operating model plays a huge role in that. That target operating model has a range of different components to it and making sure we understand what those components are, we have time to discuss it. We’ve spent a lot of time working that through an evolving model. So, it’s a lot about making sure that you’ve got the people on board even though, as I said, we’ve got very little resistance.
The other thing is around communications, and that’s probably pretty straightforward in most people’s worlds, but it’s often the thing that’s neglected, isn’t it? So, like any change, we just see it as the same. You’ve still got to make sure you bring others along, whether it be the other senior executives within the business who play their role or stand to benefit or even not benefit from something that you’re changing, it varies and mostly it’s beneficial. Or our frontline colleagues, who are obviously right at the epicenter of where that change lands and making sure their personal journeys are catered for, they can see why we’re doing stuff. If we have a temporary situation that needs to be tolerated, they understand why and how we’re going to get out of that. That happens from time to time.
I think the other final challenge is, of course, that as an ambitious organization you’ve got to be able to prove the benefits are real and that’s real to everybody involved. That’s real from a point of view of our investors, most importantly the customers can see it, it comes through in our numbers, it comes through in our feedback, it comes through in our efficiency benefits. That’s part and parcel of that journey. That’s a challenging one to make sure you can turn what is an estimate or a guesstimate of the benefit you’re going to get from unproven things, things we’ve never done before or indeed haven’t been done, maybe done elsewhere but not by us, making sure that comes to fruition. So, I think they’re a lot of the challenges that we faced in this overall journey.
Bhavesh: Which I guess are, as you say, not uncommon to any transformation journey that you’re going through, certainly from an ops perspective and how you bring staff as well as the business along with you. So, let’s delve into then that journey. So, what steps did you go through when you were trying to build that agility and flexibility into the model? Were there key steps that you went across there you thought looking back?
John: I think there are. Yeah, I think there are some main… It’s called the main building blocks really; I think the best that I would probably drive. One of them starts with resource planning. So, our, we call global model, but it’s effectively a fully flexible resource model, is underpinned by resource planning. So, the capability we have there is really good, and it has to be continually evolved. So, the foundation is around demand capacity planning, real-time planning and doing that both in the front office but also in the back office, which is where ActiveOps comes in. So that’s the key foundation.
The other thing, which is key, which is probably obvious but not always easy to determine, is picking out those niches where you should multi-skill people. So, we have this flexibility, the idea of the overall model is that it can respond to different things, different demands across different products, across different services, across the whole estate as we call it. That’s a difficult thing to achieve. It’s not a case of a multi-skill everybody just in case, targeting that multi-skilling, finding those niches, managing those skills. If you put my resource planning on, we’ve got a lot of skills to manage. We’ve got to make sure we rationalize them, we manage them effectively, and we know exactly who we’re going to multi-skill and when, so we can basically meet the demands as they arise. It’s right down to interval level, it’s right down to half hour slots, both particularly in the front office, but also making sure that our planning in the back office is effective and we’re planning to the right level, we’re getting the right throughput, managing service standards and so on.
I think the other one really in terms building that agility and flexibility is come back to the shape of the overall operating model. That has to be… That’s really, really key. It’s got to be able to support the move towards, for instance, single platforms to be, like any business that’s grown through acquisition, even in the commoditized world, you end up with multiple platforms and we’ve got to set out our store and go on that journey. We’re on that right now to move towards a single platform for our commoditized services. Then within that, of course, once you’ve done and achieved that, again, another key building block is that simplification alignment. We have a lot more business processes that are now very much more similar. They’re similar across different brands and lines of business, but by the platform and the process design so that when it comes to actually building that flexible resource model, our people are able to respond.
It’s not too onerous to build up a skill set that crosses say two different insurance products like home and motor and across a wide range of different service centers and from new business through renewal to midterm adjustments or otherwise. They’re absolutely the key building blocks.
Bhavesh: Yeah, it’s really interesting the building blocks you mentioned. The one that you hear a lot is the whole idea of the skills piece where you get individuals and who you’re going to train so they can do multiple tasks or multiple areas. You hear two sides of that. One is identification of those individuals and then getting them on a program, so they are being trained and that skill level is maintained over a period of time such that they can be utilized at the right time. I guess to some degree that’s the essence of that flex, the flex that you’re trying to create within the model. The second thing is, as you’re quite rightly say, some of the processes are very similar, so how do you make sure you align according to that? So, in the skills piece, did you get any resistance to that or were people generally quite positive about wanting to learn more skills in different areas?
John: I think generally positive. I think particularly when you look across the front and the back office, I think when it comes to learning new stuff which builds… We’ve got a design principle that helps us. I’ll just share this very quickly, so we understand. Our design principle is they wouldn’t have anybody across more than two products. So, say motor, we’ve got leisure, we’ve got various other products and just across the [inaudible 00:15:55] and lifecycle. So as long as it’s within those boundaries, it’s worked really well. The vast, vast majority of people being very happy to do that. I think where it gets difficult from the point of view of our agents is customer services has so many different elements to it, there’s a lot more to learn. The feedback I get from time to time is that is quite a lot to take in. So again, operating well is about making it similar, simple and ensure you’ve got the right support systems in place to make it easy for people, for our frontline staff to serve our customers as effectively as possible.
So, I think I may have gone slightly off the topic there, Bhavesh, but I think it’s a lot about making sure that you consider it from the perspective of every single one of our people, so you can play to that and not overload. We run air traffic control as well. So, we look very careful what’s landing when and trying to do our very best to avoid there being too much landing at any one time with our frontline staff because that can be very, very onerous. Then we also have lessons to help them such as agent guidance, so when you make a change, it gets built into that. So, we’ve got the support they need as well as the support of their team leaders and other subject matter experts to help them along the journey.
Bhavesh: So, it sounds like, John, that one of the things that I’m hearing, which is slightly different when I talk to other operational challengers and leaders here is you’ve got some sort of, as you say, a structure and a guide of how you’re going to be deploying this and how you have been deploying this over the last three years. That gives the guardrails, right, for everybody to understand where they play, how they play and how they support, which is I think a big difference to what you are describing that other organizations perhaps haven’t been through.
John: Yeah, and I come back to design principles, so part of our operating model is we set out that we review these design principles all the time. They relate to locations. They relate to people. They relate to systems. They relate to a wide range of different things. It’s not a telephone directory. It’s just literally a simple list on a single page. We stick to those because we’ve learned over time that if you go beyond them, it’s potentially to your peril and we don’t want to take risks like that. But then I think as you look over time, you can see that with emerging technologies, with other things you can use, op tech for example, that would help simplify and you could possibly stretch those a little bit further. But I wouldn’t want to do it in a way that is any way detrimental service, so we do that cautiously and knowingly and also with a path back to the standard that we’d set.
So, it’s really important. I think that’s a really important part of our operating and that’s a conscious set of decisions made by key people in the operations SLT, we get together, we discuss those things, we agree where we stand, we evolve it, we set out the store for the next year, two years, we work through transition states, we deliver against that. So, it’s a lot about having that as a guiding light because the great thing about target operating role, which you’re referring to there [inaudible 00:18:45] is it keeps you honest. It keeps you focused on what you’re trying to get to and prevents you from going off-piste. But it doesn’t prevent innovation. It doesn’t prevent us from being reactive as well, thinking well surely, we ought to be changing, let’s revisit and decide whether or not that’s actually still right, one of those principles.
We do that on a regular basis in response to anything like market force or anything that changes that we must respond to. So, they’re back into the dynamics of operations and having a plan of what you’re going to do and transform, guided by a model that sets out the destination that you’re aiming for.
Bhavesh: Yeah, and as you say, that once everybody’s clear on that, then you are pointing in the right direction. So, I guess you said you were three almost four years in now. So, what’s the view of operations now within the business?
John: Well, I’m going to say the cliché thing, which is it’s a journey. So, we haven’t got there yet. That’s not self-preservation. Those of you who listening to this podcast and thinking well he wants to stay in the role for a bit longer. But no, genuinely come a long way. I think what’s really interesting is the goalposts also move. So, once you’re approaching getting there, the goalposts have moved, so you’ve got to keep on going further and further and further. So, I genuinely think, and I’ve referred to this before already, the new technology it’s that that’s creating a huge opportunity, in particular things like conversational AI. We want to use those technologies and I think the pace which change is happening means we’ve got to keep up with it.
So, in terms of now, well we’ve reached one of our destinations or part of our destinations along that journey, and now we’re going to look at what happens next and leverage those technologies and then obviously look at how the group grows. We’ve got some very exciting plans to grow further and get bigger in the UK marketplace, insurance marketplace. This is going to just support that. So, the opportunities to apply the model more widely and build it as we acquire new businesses and work with new people and building their best practices into that model is super exciting. So that’s how I feel. That’s the junction we’re at right now, but we’ve still got plans to… We’ve got a lot more to do, that’s certainly the case.
Bhavesh: It’s interesting that you mentioned… It’s probably a good segue to, as you say, think about the technologies you can use now moving forward, the conversational AI you mentioned earlier on in your answer there. Any particular technologies that you see that you are coming across, that you think are getting really excited about the impact it could have in operations?
John: Yeah, I mean I’ve touched on the one already, haven’t I, that’s exciting? But it’s a bit of a perceived caution as well. A lot of our customers still prefer to make a phone call, the majority. We obviously continue to build out our digital estate so that the portals are more accessible, more usable, we have minimal dropouts, those sorts of things. That’s all happening right now. But conversational AI presents an amazing opportunity because it means that you can start to, obviously those of you’re familiar with it, you can talk to the machine and it allows some customers who would like to dispense of the niceties and so on in dealing with a person, they can do that. Some customers who may be actually going through a difficult time in their lives, such as a bereavement, they can also not have to repeat that same thing. You don’t want to particularly talk to multiple people, utilities company when you’re going through that process, when you’ve lost a loved one.
So, it opens up the window for lots of different things. Plus, then there’s also agent assistance that finds as well. I’ve seen a lot of that stuff. We’ve been looking into that technology for over two years. We’re on the cusp of really moving forward with that, and I think that’s going to really going to move the needle. But it’s the pace and the way you go about deploying it. It’s failed fast, learn, keep on applying. The first day is the worst day in the AI world is the quote I really like to use. It’s going to be the same. It’s going to be the same. So, we really need to move that game forward and deliver those benefits because it’s really great from a customer point of view, and it’s great from a business point of view. More time to service those customers. More routes to service those customers and channels to come in through. Social media growing very rapidly, not new clearly, but growing very rapidly. Those allow us to access that space much more effectively and much more efficiently as well, without compromise to the customer experience.
Back to what I said at the start, great customer outcomes, we will never compromise those, and that technology can really help them move. There’s other things as well, but I think that’s probably the best. That’s probably the one that’s top of mind right now and it will be for a lot of other people viewing this podcast.
Bhavesh: No, absolutely. I mean totally, AI, particularly with the conversational stuff, has the potential to be very transformative for ops and for ops to finally be able to deliver some of the things they’ve always wanted to do but never been able to fully do. But I think it’ll be really interesting over the next couple of years what’s going to happen. Before we jump into the final question, which is connected, I did want to ask you, you’ve been through many of these transformational exercises across your career, but in this particular instance, the Atlanta journey you’ve been on, what’s been your proudest moment?
John: Wow, that’s a good one. Goodness me, I’ve got loads. I mean, lots of moments with… I’ve got a very strong team, so lots of proud moments as the team have evolved and built that capability and come to where we are now. I think I’d have to go back to the big picture, not because it’s a political response, it’s more a case of I just believe this is right. So, I think for me, when we came to the end of our third year, which end of last year, that’s basically where… That was my proudest moment because not only did we really deliver a huge amount of benefit, over what we expected, but we’ve seen all of… The vast majority, it’s not always exactly so, but the vast majority of those milestones they’ve been delivered. Then seeing the way, the model’s grown, seeing the… I’d love to share the results with you, but seeing the results that we got out of it in terms of from a customer and an efficiency perspective, just absolutely phenomenal. That was a really, really proud moment. There’s no doubt about that.
I’m sure my team would agree that to have gone through that and to come out the other side in a much better place and with a model that we know we can grow, we know we can flex, we know we can plug in new acquisitions more quickly and build our integration capability on top of that. So, it makes me very proud as a leader and as an ops person through and through.
Bhavesh: That’s fantastic. I ask all my guests that come onto the Ops Game Changer podcast just to look in the crystal ball. We’ve touched on it in terms of a little bit of the conversational AI, but I genuinely believe that ops in the next four or five years is going to be transformative. I think there is a lot of disruption and change coming with new technologies. So, if you have that crystal ball, with all your experience that you’ve got in ops, what’s your prediction? What do you think the next five years are going to look like?
John: Goodness me. I wish I did have it because I’d probably go and buy a lottery ticket or something. But no, that’s a really good question. I think without going back around AI again, I think there are some dangers in there as well, so that we need to be aware about. But it’s the pace that’s really exciting. It’s the pace that we’re going to get to because when you’re deploying things that are AI enabled, the AI itself helps you to deploy it, which is just remarkable really. So, there’s so many opportunities there.
Digital services as a whole I think is a massive opportunity. I think that for Atlanta, that’s also a big game for us as well, that we’re probably not as far advanced as we should be at this stage, but we’ve got a lot of things in trying to take us in that direction, and that’s absolutely fundamental. So, I think the next, what would you say, three to five years, I think it can see us advancing in that digital world massively. I think the way in which we interact with our customers will be a lot more flexible. It’ll be a lot more one and done. I think the information flows that we’ll have, the data we’ll have, the ability to assess and manage and evaluate. Our performance will be just through the roof. So, we’ll be able to get those [inaudible 00:27:15].
We already have some of that through voice analytics. We get so much more insight through voice analytics and other such technologies that allow us to better understand where the opportunities are and that fine-tuning. There’ll be no low hanging fruit left. We’ll be just needing to climb the ladder further, up that tree to find more improvements. But certainly, the technology is going to help us massively. Conversational AI has got to be at the forefront of that, that particular part of the ops revolution.
I’ll say one last thing, which, and I think we know where this quote came from, but one of the things I really do think is going to be a big challenge over the next few years is the machines will do an awful lot of stuff. We have very, very good people that are very good at empathizing with our customers. Keeping the humanity with those people I think is fundamentally important because I think we need to be doubling down on that and leveraging that and making sure that customers do still… Those who want to be heard and need that support will still feel you’ve got real people in Atlanta, other businesses, that are there to support them when they need us.
Bhavesh: Yeah, John, I think you make an incredibly valuable point there because I think in the overexcitement of what’s possible, you look at the bottom line and what costs you can get out the organization and the efficiencies you can make, but actually you can’t put a value on the customer experience and the customer feeling valued when they engage with your brand and that human element. It’s going to be really fascinating to see how brands balance that and how they… Some will go completely one way and others will go a completely different way. I think there will be a space that will form and that that’ll be right for whichever brand that you have. But I think one of the things that you did mention in there, which I also believe, is going to be particularly for operations, I think, would be transformative, is just having access to data that allows them to make better decisions. I think that would be a really interesting journey over the next couple of years as well.
John: Insight, yeah, without a doubt. We’re already advancing in that space hugely. Being able to, again, use the technology to generate the insights, which I know is on your agenda as well. So, I think that’s a fantastic use case we’ll be able to get to the customer because we spend so much time, without laboring it too much, because we spend so much time and resource finding those nuggets and then dealing with them, addressing those problems, leveraging those opportunities. The future will be a lot more about execution, delivery against them rather than actually finding them, so I think that’s super exciting.
Bhavesh: Totally, totally. Well, listen, John, thank you so much for jumping on the Ops Game Changers podcast. A fascinating journey that you guys have been on. As I said earlier on that whole idea of keeping the secret sauce, still while maintaining the operating model, I think as a marketer, I find that fascinating. That’s a real interesting balance. Very similar to actually what we just talked about, the AI bit, how do we make sure that AI doesn’t lose the brand essence of the brands that you are working with or any brand that you’re working with?
I think the challenges that you’ve been through and the things that you’ve addressed by building that operating model, with the guardrails that we talked about, I think operations leaders who are listening or viewing this podcast will hopefully relate to some of those challenges and take some advice from what you’ve achieved into their own organizations. So, thank you for sharing your amazing story and hopefully others have managed to get something interesting off the back of our conversation.
So, a big thank you to our listeners for joining us, and please do check in for more episodes of the Ops Game Changers and hear more fascinating insights from the likes of John and other operational leaders who’ve overcome some amazing challenges in order to drive productivity, boost their performance, and ultimately drive business impact. So, thank you for listening and bye for now.
