Micro Focus
Renew Insurance

Renew Insurance
Success Story

Renew Insurance automates business processes with Micro Focus Reflection® software.

"I have used several terminal emulation solutions in the past, but none of them had the flexibility and ease of programming that Reflection offers."

DEREK ROBERTS
Systems Director
Renew Insurance

At a Glance

Industry

Financial Services

Location

United Kingdom

Results

  • Improved user productivity
  • Created more efficient processing of insurance policies
  • Improved accuracy

Overview

Renew Insurance specializes in providing high-quality, low-cost home, car, van, and motorcycle insurance. Owned by Hastings Direct and headquartered in Newmarket, Suffolk, the company offers a wide range of insurance policies from a large panel of expert insurers. They also offer numerous financial products via major service providers. Seventy employees serve the requirements of more than 60,000 customers.

To increase the efficiency of their business processes, Renew implemented Reflection software.

Challenge

Like other insurance providers who process large volumes of data on a daily basis, Renew Insurance wanted to be able to respond quickly and accurately to customer needs. To that end, they wanted to reduce the time employees spent on day-to-day administrative tasks such as data access and report generation.

Renew founded their business on software supplied by Cheshire Data Systems Ltd., an industry-leading insurance software provider. The CDL “Classic” system is a long-established, terminal-based system. According to Derek Roberts, Renew systems director, the goal was to find a terminal emulation solution that could seamlessly integrate with this core sales platform and improve user productivity in the process.

Solution

Roberts found what he was looking for, and more, in Reflection terminal emulation software.

Reflection supports a variety of operating environments, security architectures, and virtualization technologies. Based on Microsoft .NET and integrated with VBA, Reflection delivers complete customization freedom.

“I have used several terminal emulation solutions in the past, but none of them had the flexibility and ease of programming that Reflection offers,” Roberts said. “We have a number of repetitive processes—for example, policy confirmation, and end-of-day report generation—that drain on our resources. Using Reflection, we automated those processes quickly and easily, which has improved staff productivity and data entry accuracy.”

According to Roberts, setting up the scripts to automate repetitive tasks could not have been faster or easier. Reflection establishes scripts based on the replication of keystrokes required to complete an action. “With Reflection, time consuming actions can be completed much faster and more accurately,” he said. “Employees have more time to focus on strategic tasks and business development.”

Reflection’s scripting capabilities have streamlined three key tasks:

  • Processing of insurance policies. In the past, two full-time employees had to manually check a customer’s financial records before confirming a policy. Today, these checks can be performed by Reflection. For example, the Reflection script can scan the screen, looking at the input and action dates, to see whether the diary had been closed off (in which case the policy would be processed) or was still open (in which case the case would be flagged for further action). If there is a discrepancy with the script, then it is highlighted and transferred to one of the account handlers for resolution. Thanks to Reflection, Renew employees are 20% more efficient than they used to be and can handle more policies per head than the industry average.
  • Production of daily reports, such as cash sheets and financial summaries. In the past, employees had to spend valuable time running off daily reports. Today, Reflection scripts, which run in the background after hours, produce reports that can be stored in a folder for analysis the next morning. The scripts can also produce summary reports, consistently formatted, for external suppliers.
  • Creation of monthly Bordereaux reports. In the past, Renew employees had to manually produce monthly Bordereaux reports of written risks and collected insurance premiums—a tedious process that was highly susceptible to human error. Today, with Reflection scripts, these reports can be created within a couple of hours instead of a couple of days.

“The bottom line is that Renew Insurance needs fewer accounts staff than comparable organizations,” Roberts said. “And that means they are able to concentrate more on serving our customers’ needs.”

Results

As Renew Insurance’s business continues to grow, the company will continue to rely on Reflection software. “One of the reasons Hastings Direct acquired us was because of our IT efficiencies,” Roberts said. “We are now looking to roll out the Refection solution throughout their call centers, to help bring them up to the same level of efficiency that we have reached.”

Renew Insurance is also in the process of developing an application with .Net that uses Reflection to link to the telephone system. As a result, customer and campaign information will appear on the screen when a connection to the customer has been made, further improving staff efficiency.

“Reflection has been a key element in the success of Renew, and we look to further unlock its potential moving forward,” Roberts concluded.