PHILAM LIFE

Business challenge

The initial business driver for the project was to reduce the amount of overtime, increase agent productivity, improve planning, and reduce backlog across several back-office teams, including; new business, claims, underwriting, policy amendments and quality. In total, over 100 FTEs were employed.

To support the digitisation of the front office, the operations management team needed a more accurate way of collecting and analysing incoming work, together with team and agent activities.

The business used spreadsheets developed in-house to record agent productivity based on the manual recording of agent activity. The analysis, however, solely measured the number of cases closed by individual agents. It was believed that additional capacity was available within the teams, but there was no way of capturing how time was spent.

The information available to management only itemised the agent who ultimately closed a case, even though one or more other agents might have worked on the case itself. Consequently, agents who worked on more cases than they closed were allocated a lower productivity rate than they deserved, which in turn had an adverse effect on morale.

The planning activities lacked the granularity and visibility of the historical performance and incoming work data available to team leaders. As a result, the confidence in monitoring how closely the teams were performing to forecast was low and often led to unplanned remedial action when backlogs built up.

Business benefits

The initial benefits were realised within a few weeks into a 15-week implementation program, including  training, AOM certification, and pre- and post-operational health checks.

Real-time information captured through ActiveOps enables team leaders to collaborate, react quickly to changing workloads, ‘load balance’ between teams, share best practices, and identify skills training opportunities. Team leaders now openly share their capacity and workload through twice-weekly meetings, supported by a consistent process, visible and accurate performance data.

Productivity increased by over 30%, whilst FTE costs dropped by 10% and overtime reduced dramatically.

Confidence in forecasts and capacity plans enabled by Workware+ rose significantly, effectively de-risking the business, improving service levels and reducing stress amongst the management team.

The morale benefits were not restricted to management. The department recorded the highest rise in employee satisfaction improvement. Agents are now able to have the full extent of their work recognised and fairly evaluated with opportunities for further training. Employee satisfaction, as measured by Gallup Poll, recorded an improvement from 3.6 to 4.1.

Data gathered by ActiveOps also contributed to the success of the digital transformation project and the combination of the software and the AOM method helped establish a career path for subject matter experts (SMEs) and team leaders.

The benefit highlights in numbers include:

• 50% reduction in overtime – due to the identification of spare capacity
• 30% increase in productivity
• 40% increase in cases per agent
• 10% reduction in FTEs