When individuals or organisations purchase insurance, they firmly believe in buying a promise. This promise states that if something is bound to happen to a business, a car, a family house or even an individual, the insurance company will protect the person, their family or the business against any financial loss. Insurance is so critical because it steps in when the worst happens. So, customers expect and need their providers to be able to offer the highest level of reliability.
Understanding the insurance technology landscape
There are a multiplicity of factors that can prevent any business from being able to offer 100% reliability, and in our contemporary landscape, many of these factors are rooted in technology. Technology is evolving at a rapid pace, and organisations are under a huge amount of immense pressure to keep up in an effort to provide their customers with excellent service, while ensuring their employees have the right technology to perform tasks. As users become more tech-literate, and as technology evolves in the consumer sphere, there is an expectation that they will receive a cutting-edge experience from business technology that reflects the service they receive from their own devices. A large part of this is that people want to be able to engage with new technologies and clear any technological boundaries without any involvement from IT. This is called self-service.
Another issue that could hugely affect the reliability of any business is the ever-increasing threat of cybercrime—an issue that is evolving at the same pace as technology, if not faster. Recent findings from the UK’s Office of National Statistics (ONS) found that despite an overall decrease in fraud and computer misuse in 2017, incidents involving malware against businesses have increased. 56% of fraud incidents in 2017 were cyber related, with 3.2 million fraud incidents being reported in the UK alone. Business cybercrime as a whole in the UK went up 63% in 2017. The insurance industry is one of the many verticals in direct contact with cyberattacks, particularly while embracing digital channels. Deloitte has identified that insurers possessing large amounts of personal information about their customers, such as credit card and payment data is one specific reason for the increasing number of attacks.
OneFamily: Using Modernisation to Ensure Reliable Service Customers Trust
OneFamily is one of UK’s largest modern mutual insurers, serving over two million UK customers (10% of UK families) with financial services products, including life insurance, savings, mortgages, bonds and ISAs. There are 550 end-user devices within the organisation, ranging from desktops to laptops to mobile devices, which are running on a mixture of Windows, iOS and Android operating systems. All in all, this makes for a complicated environment for OneFamily to manage, and keep secure against cyberattacks.
As businesses are moving further into the digital age, the IT department’s time is increasingly in demand and staff members are overstretched. Organisations need to do everything they can to optimise functionality. Previously, OneFamily was supporting users and devices through an in-house IT service management system, however as they grew, the number of devices routing queries for assistance was becoming a congestion point. With a rapid increase of IT service desk, the service management system has quickly become a major bottleneck on productivity.
Embracing the opportunity for change and modernisation to cope with dynamically changing infrastructure, the IT team explored the option of a solution with fully featured integrated IT systems management. When operational, this system would offer OneFamily a complete IT service desk management, endpoint (device) management, patching, reporting, and ongoing change management. This meant that they would be able to cope and grow with the rapidly evolving technological landscape, while being able to identify security vulnerabilities in the system to defend against cyberthreat.
Another part of OneFamily’s digital transformation strategy is they wanted to facilitate self-service IT for their users. This hinged on the proposed new system having built-in intelligence to recognise and route users’ queries to the appropriate resource within IT. Having used other Ivanti software solutions within the estate, the team commenced evaluation of Ivanti’s IT Service Management capabilities for change and problem management, alongside patch and software management for full endpoint management.
OneFamily concluded its stress testing and opted to install the solution from Ivanti in a phased, three-month rollout. Four years into adoption, the IT team remains firmly in the driver’s seat with users accessing Ivanti’s IT Service Management capabilities for requests and service incident updates. Users happily self-serve, creating incidents and adding extra information fields when prompted. Ivanti’s IT Service Management solution then automatically classifies what level of service is required and then categorises each request into different issue categories to ensure they can be handled quickly and efficiently. The solution both empowers the user and helps to streamline IT.
Patch management was another notable achievement in the solution module rollout. OneFamily needed a simple, dynamic process to manage ongoing updates required for applications and devices. Using Ivanti’s Unified Endpoint Management capabilities, the IT team was first able to “discover” all of the endpoint devices in usage. Then, OneFamily could locate and identify which endpoints required patch updates and automatically install and run them. By continuing with patch management on an ongoing basis, OneFamily are is able to keep track of vulnerabilities and secure them quickly, thus protecting the organisation against attack.
OneFamily used digital transformation to their advantage, to both allow users to enjoy a cutting-edge technology experience and to defend against the evolving cybercrime threat. These results all fit within an insurer’s wider responsibility of reliability for their customers.