What can utilities learn from the insurance sector about productivity?

Insurance giant RSA knows what it’s like to feel the drag of legacy systems on its cost base and productivity potential. But a new approach to deploying work in its back office and optimising the capabilities of its employees has unlocked breakthroughs in efficiency and effectiveness.

Maximising the productivity of your workforce has never been so important, nor so challenging as it is in the post-coronavirus marketplace.

Companies across many sectors are experiencing an emphatic squeeze on profit margins as the impacts of a pandemic-induced recession hit home. Meanwhile, workers are continuing to operate in less formulaic patterns, working more regularly – if not solely – from home and sometimes at different times of day or for different periods of time, making it trickier to plan how to match workforce resources to incoming jobs or queries from customers than it was in the pre-Covid world.

For many years, the focus of productivity improvement in the utilities sector – as elsewhere – has been trained on the front office and the “sharp end” of customer experience. Now though, as companies dig deeper to find was to survive and – they hope – to thrive in a time of immense uncertainty, they are turning their eyes to previously neglected areas of operations.

It’s a change in focus which Rebecca Henry, director of operations at insurance giant RSA would enthusiastically advocate. Over the past six years or so, RSA has been through an extended epiphany about the potential for business improvement locked up in its back office operations, which cover processes as diverse as renewals, general enquiries, broker agreements and more.

By deploying new technology which has helped it cut through the complexity of these myriad and multichannel processes, and apply different “lenses” – such as a “skills lens” – to the challenge of optimising which jobs to allocate to which individual at what time, the company has raked in massive benefits in increased capacity, reduced backlog and improved issue resolution rates.

Rebecca Henry will speak in a Utility Week webinar on the challenge of improving back office productivity and flexibility in the post-Covid landscape this Friday (11 September) at 12.30pm. Register for the webinar or listen on demand here.

“When we started out, we were responding to pressure from above to deliver our next efficiency gain,” says Henry. “We’re an organisation with a long history, and that comes with a big stack of legacy systems and processes, so we’re always searching for more efficiency opportunities. But even so, at the time, we didn’t really realise that there was a problem in our operations.”

“As we built our new solution and rolled it out, we started to realise just how much we had previously been making decisions about how much resource we needed, who our most productive people were and what our work capacity was on a very emotive, gut-based level.”

In the years since the initial technology was deployed in one RSA business unit, Henry has become a back office optimisation evangelist, taking the solution to other parts of the business and developing its application in a way which has delivered millions of pounds worth of benefits.

From being a sceptic about the ability of technology to make a radical difference to efficiecny and work culture, Henry has been transformed into an enthusiast. She says the platform – which is built to the requirements of each business unit – has given “complete insights into process inefficiencies, true volumes, skills, capacity, and demand by the second.”

Its a level of insight she frankly says she wouldn’t have believed could really be achieved a few years ago. It has “empowered” the RSA leadership team to make intelligent efficiency and resourcing decisions, she claims.

Through Covid, Henry also says that the difference in performance between those back office units at RSA who were equipped with advanced visibility of work flows and the ability to analyse their most effective next step in work allocation has been stark compared to those still operating without these insights.

“While there are other functions at RSA who are keen for the return to office because they say they are losing time and productivity, I’m more than happy for my business areas to be last to get back.”

Indeed, Henry says productivity in her business units, where there are a lot of part time workers, has increased exponentially during the coronavirus crisis. “A lot of people have actually been able to extend their hours thanks to home working,” she says. As a consequence of this, and the ability to use employee resources and capabilities in a smart way, Henry says her business units are due to end the year £30m ahead of the top line projected in their business plan.

In a Utility Week webinar this Friday (11 September) Henry will share further insights into the continuous productivity improvements she is uncovering in the RSA back office, with support from Chris Rainsforth, head of operational best practice at its long term technology partner Verint. Also joining the webinar to offer reflections on how RSA’s experience relates to challenges and opportunities in the utilities sector is Lily Stein, operations manager at Octopus Energy.