24 February 2009

As a leading UK specialist in insurance and financial services products for career people, Endsleigh prides itself on its status as an independent intermediary.

When Endsleigh Insurance Services adopted a new business model, it called on CIBER UK to help it improve the productivity, performance, reporting and profitability of its marketing environment.

Endsleigh Insurance Services has rapidly grown to become one of the UK insurance industry’s most respected household names. With around 800 employees and 30 relationship managers in the field, the company has an excellent market reputation.

But reputation is not the sole guarantor of continuing success. With 85 per cent of new sales originating from the Web, Endsleigh wanted to adopt a new business model, making its business more digitally focused using multimedia touch points with a major target on students and recent graduates.

“As a result, we will no longer operate as a branch-based business with bricks and mortar and leases to pay for 119 offices across the country,” says Peter Leahy, head of IT at Endsleigh. “We want to use these efficiency savings to support our relationship managers working from home or remote locations, with new tools and faster access to our core business systems.”

Endsleigh had used Voice over IP telephony to network its branch offices, but with the company’s planned transition to two geographically based service centres, this was no longer cost effective as a communications channel. The company’s data was being stored in various fragmented systems with no uniform way of identifying lead conversion rates for the marketing team. Endsleigh had to spend excessive time and cost on setting up agents on various systems, the number of which also impacted security across the enterprise.

In addition, Endsleigh needed better features to help develop client relationships in the face of changing regulations. In particular, it wanted to offer better service to trading partners including travel agents, which were regulated to sell travel insurance by the Financial Services Authority for the first time from January 2009.

By automating commission payments through Microsoft Dynamics CRM, we have increased one segment of business tenfold without needing extra accounts people to manage the business processes

Peter Leahy, Endsleigh Although Endsleigh has a substantial in-house IT department, its technicians were working on several ongoing projects and wanted to avoid tackling any large new development. They required a solution that was multi-company, and which would integrate with Microsoft Dynamics GP for financial management and other business management systems, including its existing investment in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 customer relationship management (CRM) software.

The company uses an in-house CRM system for business-to-consumer clients that is integrated with its in-house policy administration system. Dynamics CRM is used for business-to-business operations and integrates with Dynamics GP.

In its search for a solution, Endsleigh worked with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner CIBER UK to upgrade its existing Microsoft CRM software to Dynamics CRM 4.0, integrating with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 communication technology. At the same time, the company opted for a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement for low-cost volume licences to provide a low total cost of ownership.

“We wanted to time the upgrade to correspond with the changes in our business model, with the introduction of a cost-effective infrastructure for unified communications by investing in Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007,” explains Leahy. “This was especially opportune in view of the integration we could achieve between Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Previously, we had relied on local area network connections with variable reliability – in future, our people will always be connected to our core business systems.”

Before Dynamics CRM 3.0, Endsleigh had error-prone manual processes for managing contracts between partners and making their commission payments. It lacked a central repository to manage partners and prospects. Having started with Dynamics CRM 3.0, these improvements have been consolidated and further refined.

Now, Dynamics CRM 4.0 helps each sales team at Endsleigh to view information relevant to its division without having to search an entire database. The upgrade provides a suite of powerful marketing, sales and service features, all with a familiar and consistent experience based on Microsoft Office and Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 for the client device.

Due to the integration with Exchange Server 2007, staff will be able to receive push e-mails, an always-on service in which users receive messages to their client device as if they were in an office environment. Furthermore, Dynamics CRM acts as a powerful and intuitive business intelligence system because it integrates information from multiple sources. The solution is also designed to operate with the company’s existing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 collaboration technology as well as other Microsoft technologies and services.

The new implementation also enables each team to benefit from the seamless integration of Dynamics CRM and SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services. This provides interactive personalised business reports, which improve the productivity of staff and, in turn, help them take on a new wave of sales prospects.

Dynamics CRM 4.0 includes several new features, such as simplified workflow and up-to-the-minute reporting, as well as multi-language and currency capabilities. Dynamics CRM can be shaped to support the business and provide a robust environment for future growth. The product comes complete with sales, marketing and customer services modules.

When the credit crunch forced most insurance companies to re-evaluate their businesses, Endsleigh was strongly placed to change its model due to its investment in Microsoft technologies. Its move into digital marketing has been fully supported by the upgrade to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, which has helped automate many more processes and integrated easily with the company’s new unified communications strategy. “This investment will help us to drive bigger, better, and more targeted marketing campaigns using new skills to attract business from our customer base,” comments Leahy.

The CRM software is helping sales executives increase digital marketing successes in line with the company’s new approach to customers. Yet, at the same time, it adds no extra costs to the business or burdensome work for technicians. According to Leahy, this is all the more important now that Endsleigh plans to rely in future on more mobile sales employees backed up by two communications centres. “With the previous systems, we had lost faith in the manual processes and did not feel confident in managing leads and opportunities,” he says. “By automating commission payments through Microsoft Dynamics CRM, we have increased one segment of business tenfold without needing extra accounts people to manage the business processes.”

The integration features in Dynamics CRM 4.0 have helped Endsleigh prepare itself to work through different communication channels to help its partners adapt to new markets. Previously, the business team responsible for affiliated services did not have a reliable communication tool that let it engage with agents – Leahy says it had “hit a brick wall” in terms of taking on new prospects and simply could not manage any more customers.

“We’ve improved the efficiency and accuracy of our frontline sales staff,” says Paul Nicholas, business project manager at Endsleigh. “When they’re dealing with customers, we have a full record of the history. We deal with them in a more prompt and quality-driven way and we have a single source of information for all our customer activities.”

“At a time of rapid business change, Endsleigh has continued to invest in Microsoft Dynamics CRM because it is based on an environment that is understood, not just by us, but universally,” says Brian Henry, head of sales for financial services at CIBER UK. “The seamless integration of Microsoft products is a critical factor in our future growth strategy. The similar look and feel of Microsoft products means that not only is integration simple, but fast adoption is also guaranteed. Together with SQL Server 2005, Dynamics GP and the Active Directory service for identity management, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 will improve group-wide efficiency and help Endsleigh employees convert prospects into valuable clients.”

“Upgrading to the latest version of Dynamics CRM, clearly shows that we have faith in both the Microsoft solution and CIBER UK as our implementation partner,” adds Leahy. “The scalability of the solution, supported by the fact that we’ve used previous versions, reinforces our decision to select this product.”

A further benefit of the implementation is that it enables Endsleigh to support flexible working for staff. “The killer benefit for me, as well as the organisation, is improved business continuity with greater flexibility of working,” says Leahy. “With unified communications, Endsleigh employees can easily transpose their working environment for their home environment. If an incident occurs, our employees now have the ability to access their Office SharePoint Server 2007, e-mail and telephone, as well as our Dynamics CRM system. This has led to better offline working, making us more responsive and effective as a business.”

“Overall, the transition has been relatively seamless,” concludes Rebecca Smith, business project manager at Endsleigh. “As business project managers we’ve been involved in implementing a number of third-party solutions written by external software houses, such as a letting agency system and a tenant reference system. But Dynamics CRM has proved that with easy-to-understand technology and a committed business partner such as CIBER UK, implementation is a hassle-free process.”

This article first appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Finance on Windows magazine.

Add a comment