Medical insurance company Exeter Friendly Society (EFS) provides health plans to UK and international customers. In a move to improve customer service and gain better market insight, the Exeter-based company decided to upgrade its business intelligence (BI) tools.

The previous BI solution had been developed in-house and held customer data in several different databases. Collecting, managing and reporting on data were difficult because different departments used different report formats. Staff also had to input all the data into the management system manually, which led to errors in customer information.

“The system certainly had its weak points,” said Mike Moreland, EFS operations director. “We wanted our staff to understand the reports and be able to react to customers’ needs.”

Today, if a customer calls because they have not had a claim authorised, staff can quickly access the data to explain why, Moreland said.

Other factors that also influenced the overhaul of the previous BI system included a need to increase profits through direct sales, improve customer retention, and reduce the time staff required to gather information.

As its first step to finding a new system, EFS called in analyst firm Gartner, which suggested three BI providers who could meet the requirement to build a more consolidated and automated customer management system.

“Gartner analysed our requirements to make sure we approached suitable vendors. It described our final choice, QlikTech, as an up-and-coming and progressive developer,” said Moreland. The other firms on the short list were Business Objects and Cognos, and EFS met with all three to discuss their respective products.

A major factor in QlikTech’s favour was the speed with which it managed to organise a working demonstration of its QlikView product. “QlikTech came in and within 48 hours had a system up and running with live data, a kind of turnaround that is usually impossible for most BI firms,” Moreland explained.

“Our staff particularly liked the ease of use of QlikView’s analytical capabilities,” added Moreland, who took the three BI options to senior users to ask them which they favoured. “Users were particularly impressed by how clearly QlikView displays information,” he said.

The software’s in-memory analysis and reporting tool allows staff to delve into a particular data field to generate reports specific to particular business segments. For example, QlikView can analyse how many complaints have been made and the nature of each, as well as the exact point a data error occurs internally.

After approaching a number of other QlikTech customers for their opinion, the firm made a final decision to deploy QlikView to its 120 users in January.
“The roll out was very easy and we managed it with only limited input from QlikTech. It took 15 working days from purchase to it being up and running in customer services,” Moreland said. “QlikTech is Windows-based software but luckily EFS was already a Windows company.” Moreland added that QlikTech uses databases that are vendor agnostic. “We use Sybase and SQL Server databases, and QlikView has no problem pulling data from these sources,” he said.

The company has kept one technician working part time on the system, looking at ways it can be updated, according to Moreland. “If departments want more information on their screens then he just re-configures the back end of the system,” he said. Users can configure the front end of the systems to view information in a format that suits them.

EFS said that QlikView has met the firm’s objectives, giving it greater awareness of customer requirements. Staff can easily delve into unstructured data, according to Moreland.

“If someone calls up and the phone call is summarised in a note, QlikTech’s product can analyse it,” he explained, adding that the company is now using
the product to understand the needs of existing and potential clients by analysing contact and claims patterns.

In addition to improving the company’s data quality, QlikView has reduced the IT department’s support burden because staff can now generate their own reports. Because the system is so easy to use, it requires minimal training and has greatly reduced the time staff spend extracting and generating reports. This gives them more time to deal with customer complaints or queries, Moreland said.

Through identifying sources of customer complaints, QlikView has aided the company’s compliance with Financial Service Authority (FSA) reporting regulations, especially its Treating Customers Fairly initiative. EFS explained that it can now provide reports on-demand to meet the biannual FSA report submission deadlines, rather than through a formatting exercise in Excel.

EFS is currently in the middle of rolling out QlikView across all business divisions.
“We are just going through a merger with insurance specialist Pioneer Friendly Society, which has expanded our product offering into the income protection area,” Moreland said. “We are using the technology supplied by QlikTech in the merging process to bring completely different sets of data together.”