BGL Group chooses Sword Ciboodle for advanced CRM
Umited Kingdom - March 3, 2009 - Sword Ciboodle, provider of customer-oriented business software and services, today announced that it has been selected by the BGL Group as a partner to support the insurance broker's initiative to improve customer service and business process capabilities.
With over two million customers, and with a workforce of more than 2,000 people, the BGL Group is one of the largest personal lines insurance brokers in the UK.
In addition to its own
brands, including Budget, Bennetts and comparethemarket.com, the
BGL Group's affinity arm, Junction, enables established brands
such as the Post OfficeŽ, Marks and Spencer, RAC and HSBC to
offer insurance products to their customers.
The company is transforming its business systems to provide a
more agile platform that will support its rapid growth and
enable it to respond to a dynamic marketplace.
As part of this initiative, Sword Ciboodle has been selected to
deploy its process-based CRM platform, which will allow new
brands and products to be quickly and easily incorporated into
the BGL Group portfolio.
The software will also provide a standard interface for the
company's contact centres in Peterborough, Coventry, Sunderland,
Peterlee and Cape Town, South Africa, ensuring that its agents
have access to all relevant customer information, regardless of
whether customers choose to interact by phone, email, web
self-service or posted correspondence.
"After looking at several options, we chose Sword Ciboodle based
in part on the company's excellent pedigree in business process
software, which is vital to this project, but also because of
the strong cultural fit between our two organisations - we work
very well together," said Sean Melia, Associate Director,
Programme Delivery, BGL Group.
"Sword Ciboodle's performance in the 'proof of concept' stage
of our evaluation process was the final confirmation we needed.
Its tooling allowed rapid creation of processes and was quick to
change. We are looking forward to delivering an outstanding
solution that will support the future direction of this
company."
The project will be delivered in multiple phases, the first of
which is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2009 and will see
the delivery of a solution for handling new business and sales
enquiries for BGL Group's home and motor insurance products.
This first phase will include the handling of processes like
quote creation, quote conversion, cross-selling and
correspondence creation. Subsequent phases will see the addition
of customer service processes including mid-term adjustments,
renewals and cancellations.
Sword Ciboodle's recognised capabilities in enabling its clients
to undertake change more swiftly are an important goal of the
project. The project will provide the BGL Group with the ability
to quickly customise business processes and rules based on
variables including brand, product, marketing source, customer
and advisor profile, giving the company a unique selling point
in the outsourced insurance provider market.
"Part of our business strategy is to be able to respond quickly
and in a more agile way to change, and we also need a solution
that we can take on and develop ourselves following the initial
rollout," added Melia. "Sword Ciboodle has a strong reputation
in both these areas."
While Sword Ciboodle is a new software deployment for the BGL
Group, its ability to leverage existing assets by integrating
with the firm's existing technologies is another vital part of
the deployment. The product will be fully integrated with the
firm's proprietary internal insurance systems, as well its more
common contact centre integration points such as computer
telephony and web self-service.
"This is a superb customer win for Sword Ciboodle, as it further
supports the recent recognition by major analyst firms that this
company is a leader in process-centric CRM," said Kenny Bain,
CEO, Sword Ciboodle UK. "We are looking forward to delivering a
market-leading solution for BGL Group and helping the company
achieve its business goals."
About Sword Ciboodle
Sword Ciboodle helps improve the way large organisations
interact with their customers. The combination of award-winning,
process-managed CRM software and specialist consulting and
delivery services help Sword Ciboodle's clients achieve higher
revenues from their customers and reduce operational costs.
Sword Ciboodle is consistently recognised by industry analysts
as one of the world's leading customer-centric technology
providers. Information,
www.sword-ciboodle.com.
About Sword Group
Sword Group delivers high value business applications to the
world's largest companies globally. With operations in 37
countries, Sword today employs over 2000 people and in fiscal
year ending December 2007 generated $263m in consolidated
revenue. Information:
www.sword-group.com.
The BGL Group
The BGL Group was founded in 1992 and has grown to become one of
the UK's largest personal lines insurance intermediaries.
