Leading Caribbean life insurance provider Guardian Group needed to better its operational efficiencies and back-office functions, but it also had to improve its customer experience. Guardian Group tapped Sutherland for its cloud-based solutions to address all its needs, and the solution included a Customer Relationship Management component.
“Companies are looking for the ‘Uber effect’ where customers have on demand self-service tools completed without human intervention,” said Marwan Chouha, Sutherland senior vice president of process transformation. “Sutherland’s approach is different from competitors because we leverage legacy systems to enhance the customer experience through our proprietary cloud-based system.”
Prior to hiring Sutherland, Guardian handled most of its front- and back-office processes with “people power.” The overall Sutherland program needed to transform these processes and to significantly cut Guardian Group’s operating costs. Guardian Group needed to consolidate, standardize and automate manual data entry and processing activities. Doing so would reduce labor costs and errors, eliminate rework, shorten turnaround times, and enhance their overall customer experience.
But to fix its specific CRM issues, Sutherland also provided a cloud-based CRM solution -- data architecture in combination with a packaged application to present and use all relevant customer interaction history, policy and claims information in a unified desktop Guardian’s front-office personnel could use.
“The Uber effect comes when you get beyond screen scraping offered by many RPA deployments,” Chouha said. “Instead we approach the opportunity to best leverage the insights available through your legacy systems, and this is particularly valuable for companies who have grown through acquisitions and are running multiple systems.”
With Sutherland’s approach, there is no need to scrap legacy systems with costly, multi-year implementations. Sutherland deployed this enhanced system without risk to Guardian.
“That’s an amazing value proposition to our clients, including insurance, banking, mortgage and telecom,” Chouha said. “We can structure a deal that requires no capital expenditures and reduces existing operational expenses. Net-net your operational costs are reduced, and your customers much more pleased with their experience in a matter of months.”
And Guardian continues to benefit in a variety of ways.
“Sutherland enables the Guardian Group to think in new ways, to learn quickly and accurately so that we can take advantage of new opportunities,” Guardian Group CEO Ravi Tewari said.
Guardian Group is at the forefront of leveraging process transformation to significantly improve back-office and operational functions, driving operational efficiency and cost improvements across their value chain.