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HCL IBS Ltd – a UK subsidiary of HCL Technologies – has become one of the most efficient financial services outsourcing companies in the BPO marketplace. They service a diverse range of over one million policies for leading financial organisations within the UK closed book Life & Pensions marketplace, regulated by the FCA.
HCL IBS has been able to step ahead of its competitors thanks to its original and advanced back-end administration systems: augmented by the OPX solution.
HCL IBS faces the continuous challenge of operating a closed-book revenue stream. The number of active policies on each book reduces over time, and the operating margins on administering the policies are tight.
This, compounded by volatile economic markets, increasingly financially risk-averse customers and changing market regulations all causes a steady attrition to the outsourcer’s margins.
Having exhausted meaningful cost reduction through process and operating model initiatives, HCL IBS decided to find a long-term solution to meet their challenges, which included operational visibility across onshore operations in Romford and Preston, along with offshore processing in Chennai.
The reliance on manual workarounds and a vast product range meant that a robust and flexible platform-agnostic solution was needed to create a common goal and shared vision of the future, with the flexibility to meet the changing face of UK regulations – without requiring complex integration.
HCL IBS engaged with OPX to deliver immediate and sustainable reductions in operational costs whilst improving productivity, utilisation and a reduction in failure demand
The overriding goal was to develop a model that embraced end-to-end transaction processing so that work moved seamlessly from start to finish.
The new model considered prioritisation, estimated effort at a granular level, resource skills and competence, and empowered line leadership to influence the distribution of work by type and queue, rather than manually assigning work.
OPX redefined the organisational structure of HCL IBS – and staff roles within it – to align with the new model.
HCL IBS needed a solution that would help drive the business forward and the real-time management information within OPX became an essential part of the strategic decision-making process.
OPX collates service requests from phone calls, post or e-mail. Transactions are processed – both manual and robotic – and supported by an operational agility dashboard.
The ‘Get Next’ approach prioritises work by what is best for the business and ensures staff are not ‘cherry picking’ tasks. When complexities arise, staff can use OPX’s wealth of functionality to provide a tailored customer experience, all managed centrally in one Operational Insights solution.
OPX gives operational leaders the time to lead. The MI is real-time information displayed in dynamic dashboards driven by roles and permissions. Team Leaders can come into work and immediately see what work is outstanding and what needs to be done that day according to the company’s SLAs, whilst ensuring customer outcomes and journeys are as efficient as possible.
The Team Leader also has visibility of the performance and skill sets of their teams, to help identify where skills gaps lie so they can invest effort in staff growth and attainment and support continued operating model improvement. The OPX Operational Performance dashboards allow Team Leaders to have meaningful staff reviews with real non-subjective data. This Operational Performance data helps feed into staff development plans to ensure continuous skills improvement.
SLAs and KPIs are historically driven around timelines. However, with the FCA pushing for positive customer outcomes and away from numeric measures, HCL needed to capture quality measures and build them into the OPX process to improve customer outcomes. HCL and the OPX team created a culture that promoted these new attitudes to customer outcome and quality, championed by staff at the grassroots levels of the business throughout delivery.
Servicing more than 4000 processes and a huge variation of product and plan types, following on from the successful implementation of OPX, HCL looked to expand the services they could deliver with Scriptflow: an add-on module of OPX.
Scriptflow tells the individual where to go next in a transaction. It’s a signposted system which guides them through a script and process, think business SME defined wizard used by others. By using Scriptflow, HCL reduced their customer journey significantly. It also means that operational staff who are not fully skilled in specific processes can process transactions with minimal training as Scriptflow ensures they adhere to operational and regulatory guidelines.
HCL piloted Scriptflow in their Telephone Surrenders team, where staff administer pension policy surrenders for customers. In the past, HCL only had a very small team signed-off to complete surrenders by telephone and, even when one of these highly skilled agents was available, there was a heavy reliance on reference documentation and supporting programs.
This created a difficult and protracted customer call, often well above 30 minutes in length. Using Scriptflow, HCL were able to cut calls to 8 minutes. By reducing the training burden, telephone surrenders can be offered by any telephone agent, improving customer service and reducing the amount of back-office work generated.
The agents use Scriptflow to determine if the customer and policy meet the telephone surrender criteria. If they do, the agent can complete the request on the call; providing first-point resolution and issuing the surrender policy payment within 2 days.
If Scriptflow determines the customer does not meet all the criteria, it guides the agent through the conversation to collect the necessary details, removing the need to complete a lengthy and unnecessary surrender pack. The customer sends the required evidence and the policy can be surrendered within 3-5 days and paid out within 1-2 weeks, reducing the amount of customer contact.
The multi-site capability provided by OPX allows HCL to process their work consistently across sites in Romford, Preston and India. Users have the same view across any of those sites and their customer output is the same.
The ability to move work seamlessly between sites is of huge benefit: for example, when flooding closed an offshore office at short notice. HCL simply pushed the work and repatriated it back to the UK with a few clicks of a button and normal service resumed with minimal SLA impact.
Far from having a few isolated pockets of excellence, with OPX, HCL has raised the bar across the board.
With OPX, HCL continues to progress functional enhancements, push boundaries, and enhance their competitive edge.
They have seen year-on-year growth and improvements thanks to OPX and exceeded their time targets, cut costs, and assured the highest quality standards.
These savings enhanced the competitive standing and reputation of HCL IBS, resulting in new opportunities and a growing market share.
With the end-to-end complaints processing functionality, HCL can import real-time KPIs and receive detailed root cause analysis, which feeds back into the business for continuous improvement.
OPX improved the throughput of work and increased “right-first-time” processing – resulting in fewer delays, which was a major source of customer dissatisfaction and complaints.
As an outsourcer in the closed book market, revenue on existing contracts reduces over time for HCL IBS.
The cost reductions achieved through OPX have increased profitability and, crucially, allow HCL IBS to compete more effectively for new business with market-leading pricing models: models that would previously have been impossible to create without OPX and its metrics to back up the complex bid processes.
OPX delivers quality assurance controls through peer review, checklists and fully independent quality assurance. These are available to, and tailored for, every process that requires them, and capture volumes and outcomes to facilitate process improvement and performance management.
Corporate Modelling Services (CMS) was founded in 2008 by Alex Allan & Graham Twaddle – experienced and successful innovators in the software space.
Since the beginning, our mission has been to create a practical solution for businesses to alleviate workload and procedural bottlenecks in their back-office, allowing for a perfect synergy between workforce resources and task allocation.
Our team decided to take their collective hundreds of years of business-focused entrepreneurial software development to create a cost-effective, user-friendly, and customisable platform that could help businesses revolutionise their operational productivity and increase capacity.
The result is OPX: an award-winning digital platform that connects and simplifies all your back-office processes into one centralised Operational Insight control centre to transform workforce efficiency.
Once our experts understand your business and workforce needs, we can have OPX up and running in as little as six weeks.
Use our bespoke ROI Calculator to find out the difference OPX could make in your organisation today.