Cloud gives Sun Life competitive edge
Cloud gives Sun Life competitive edge
By Chee Sing Chan | May 4, 2009
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Challenge:
A need to improve services, customer experience and information access to customers, agents and partners
Solution:
Portal platform with multiple applications and interfaces running on SalesForce.com
Benefits:
Fast rollout, minimum up-front investment with pay-as-you-go model and common flexible platform to develop further capabilities
A scan of the competitive landscape and an envious glance at the online offerings from banks left Mark Ross, VP and CIO at Sun Life Financial Asia, in no doubt that the insurance company needed to upgrade its customer service capabilities.
He noted that today, very few insurance firms have even a smidgen of the real-time access to account information and other online services that banks offer as a standard to their customers.
Ross noted that most interactions in the insurance industry were through either call center operations or traditional paper-based communications.
Sun Life in Hong Kong committed to seeking ways to get an edge over competitors and adopt some of the online capabilities that banks offered today. From here, Ross and his team decided to address the issue of “customer persistency.” This refers to the level of engagement Sun Life has with its customers which is measured in frequency and depth terms. With the economy as it is today, the need to enhance engagements so that customers are retained is a top priority.
Getting online
To push customer service up a level, Sun Life wanted a common Web platform to give customers, internal users, insurance agents and partners such as banks, a portal to access critical information securely and at all times.
Sun Life evaluated the options available and quickly decided the cost involved in building this in-house would be far too high and time consuming.
Ross noted his Canadian counterparts had almost 100 staff on their in-house project and realised the development and security needs would have been overwhelming for the Asia team.
“Even before the financial crisis it would have been difficult to convince the management of the large outlay required for an in-house system,” he said. “But after the crisis hit it wasn’t even worth considering—it had to be a cloud-based offering.”
Cloud computing providers are defined by the ability to deliver IT services on a model where the service provider manages much of the infrastructure and maintenance of the system, while the client merely specifies needs, usage requirements and consumes a service-based offering.
Custom fit
Ross and his talented team of existing staff drawn from multiple countries worked with Salesforce.com after reviewing several cloud providers to create a web platform to present data to all stakeholders.
All customer data currently resides on Sun Life’s proprietary contact administration system—the lifeblood of the company, noted Ross. From here, internal users, customers and partners can now access a copy of this information via the portal which sits with Salesforce.
The creation of the portal required the IT team to work with Sun Life’s various business units and the marketing staff to ensure the interface was appealing, easy to use and fitted the needs of each stakeholder.
The net result is that customers can now access their policy information 24 by 7 and get immediate updates on coverage and policy status, while agents can follow up on client policy developments and check on commissions as well the progress of ongoing transactions.
The data that resides with Salesforce is only a copy, with the original data being retained on Sun Life’s system to ensure integrity. Updated data is copied daily and Sun Life has put in place stringent data security controls before agreeing to this process.
Breaking boundaries
The development of the platform took just over four months and was live by end of 2008. “If we had produced this in-house we would have taken possibly a year to complete such an exercise,” said Ross.
In addition to the value that customers, agents and partners have gained from this, Sun Life reaps operational efficiencies as it moves to a more “self-service” model for customer services meaning call centers are less taxed. The IT team itself has now found a common platform to help consolidate disparate data sources and present information in a variety of formats to users, be it senior management or front line staff.
“The portal’s flexibility has enabled us to build new capabilities and applications on the fly and link data from other systems and databases,” said Ross.
Sun Life pays for the Salesforce platform purely on a usage basis which makes the system scalable, easily-repeatable for future rollouts and involves low maintenance.
“The greatest thing is we have enabled this complex capability with very few additional resources and now we even have a off-shore center of excellence to help expand this to other markets,” Ross added. “This is Sun Life’s first initiative using cloud computing and has given us a whole new approach to developing new capabilities and delivering services.”
Plans are in place to roll out the system across its remaining Asian operations.
