Ardonagh Group Optimises Complaint Management with Aptean Respond

The Ardonagh Group is the UK’s largest independent insurance broker with global reach, powered by a workforce of over 7,000 operating out of 100 locations across the UK and Ireland. Three of the Group’s market-leading businesses, Swinton, Carole Nash and Autonet, joined forces in 2019 to form the Atlanta Group, and the decision was taken to create a unified complaint handling system.

Swinton was using Aptean Respond for complaint management; Autonet was using a different complaint management system, and Carole Nash was using an in-house system, which didn’t have the same abilities in reporting, management information (MI) and data interrogation.

The business identified a number of areas for improvement. Fragmented reporting tools across all three businesses meant the organisation couldn’t directly compare data, making it difficult to identify any trends or issues. The complaint categories weren’t the same, and the way each business was recording complaints was completely different too, making any sort of root cause analysis labour intensive and time consuming.

Operational inefficiency was also an issue for the Group, with all three businesses only processing their own complaints. Seasonal variations in complaint volumes meant that at certain points in the year, some complaint handlers were under-allocated while other areas were extremely busy.

Transforming Complaints

The organisation recognised the benefits of putting all three businesses onto the same complaint management platform. It wanted a solution that would facilitate the shift to a customer-centric approach, transforming the complaints teams into customer advocates and empowering them to challenge and improve the business with the insights captured.

The Right Fit

After the project went out to bid, Aptean Respond was chosen as the best fit. The business had a very positive experience of Aptean Respond with Swinton, having seen tangible improvements to complaint management. The team was very impressed by Aptean’s commitment to future-proofing the solution, with a clear roadmap in place, and the solution’s functionality and ease-of-use delivered the right set of tools and the flexibility to meet the various needs of the different businesses within the Group.

Aptean’s pricing structure was another appealing feature as it’s priced by volume of cases, not concurrent user licenses, which is beneficial to all The Ardonagh Group businesses, particularly the smaller entities who manage lower volumes of complaints but with a large number of potential users.

The solution was rolled-out across the Atlanta Group first. It was up-and-running across all three Atlanta Group businesses by mid-March when the coronavirus pandemic struck. Any worries that the new system would be confusing or disruptive to day-to-day operations soon disappeared and Respond’s cloud platform provided anywhere, anytime connectivity, reducing the challenges of working remotely.

Mid-lockdown, more Ardonagh Group businesses came on-board, successfully consolidating 13 separate divisions onto a single platform.

Operational Efficiency and Enhanced Insight

Respond has brought a much-needed uniformity to complaint handling across the different entities, enabling a move to a workshare model, with a Complaints Centre of Excellence staffed by complaint handlers cross-trained to deal with complaints across all three Atlanta Group businesses.

All frontline staff now have access to the complaint management system, which has driven improvements in consistency of how complaints are captured. Team members are able to record a lot more information than before, but with no negative impact on handling times.

Respond has uncovered new levels of insight for The Ardonagh Group, providing the ability to slice and dice complaints data to suit the organisation’s specific needs. It can quickly and easily carry out root cause analysis at the individual business and group level, identifying areas for improvement and informing business development.

As Carol Banks, head of complaints for the Atlanta Group, concludes: “Choosing Respond as our group-wide complaint management platform has optimised our operations, providing in-depth insight into our complaints data, which we can use to evolve our business. This capability, in combination with our ongoing commitment to customer service excellence, will ensure we maintain our competitive advantage while exceeding the ever-changing expectations of our customers.”

Click here to read the full story about how Aptean Respond helped the Ardonagh Group to optimise complaint management, or alternatively, get in touch with our team of complaints experts today.