Opportunity
A Fortune 250 mutual life insurance company, The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America was founded in 1860 and celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2010.
The company’s products range from life insurance, disability income insurance, annuities, and investments, to dental and vision insurance and employee benefits. Guardian’s customer service operations support 26 million clients and 24 different business units.
Guardian sought to simplify, modernize, and automate its workforce planning capabilities by moving its deployment of Verint® Workforce Management™ (WFM) into the cloud and extending it beyond its contact center operations to encompass and modernize its back-office functions.
This included the departments focused on preparing a quote for sale, new business and case installation processing, billing, claims, and customer service.
Solutions with Verint
Verint Enterprise Workforce Management™ has purpose-built functionality for both the contact center and back office. Capabilities include work item tracking, extended service goals, and backlog management.
“We realized the contact center is only 20 percent of our staff, while 80 percent of our staff resides in back-office processing units,” says Braden Krumrei, a strategic planning analyst at Guardian. “Every one of those processing units is a direct line to our contact center. So we launched an initiative to expand the scope of workforce planning to include all back-office areas.”
At the same time, Guardian wanted to simplify its data center footprint to drive business transformation, operational efficiency, and innovation in the cloud.
To help meet this objective, Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers greater agility, reliability, and functionality, supporting mission-critical functions such as data analytics platforms, customer portals, and direct-to-consumer services.
Solutions with AWS
Because Verint is an AWS partner, Guardian was able to further modernize its back-office planning function to better understand employee availability, quantify productivity, and support downstream financial planning. The company was also able to completely automate vacation time-off requests.
“We look at everything that Verint can do,” notes Scott Boyd, director of workforce planning at Guardian. “Anything it can automate, we automate.” Verint in the AWS cloud has given Guardian critical data and insights to better align workload and resources.
“Baseline planning in your back-office organization can give you tremendous insight,” explains Krumrei. “The first thing we recognized was that we were incurring extensive overtime due to a lack of planning. Now we are able to vastly reduce overtime, which is extremely beneficial to both employees and the business.”
Benefits with Verint
Following the rollout of Verint Enterprise Workforce Management into its back-office operations, Guardian has experienced better and more consistent performance overall. Beyond improved staff and capacity planning, the company has achieved tighter alignment with financial planning and modeling, which has resulted in improved budgeting accuracy.
Guardian has increased productivity by up to 20 percent across its back-office operations and reduced shrinkage from 30 percent to as low as 13 percent. By staffing to requirements curves, the insurer has decreased its overall staffing requirements by eight percent and reduced overtime by 30 percent – saving millions.
On top of this, Guardian reduced contact center call volume by up to 20 percent through improved back-office quality and efficiency.
“We view workforce planning as an ever-evolving process,” adds Boyd. “Without Verint Enterprise Workforce Management, we would not have been able to expand into our back-office areas as quickly or as extensively as we did.”
Benefits with AWS
Further, by moving to AWS, Guardian has reduced its IT operating costs. In the spirit of simplifying and modernizing its IT structure, the company is using AWS for its acquisition strategy, migrating newly acquired businesses to the cloud to shed legacy infrastructure and technical debt.
Guardian also built a data lake on AWS and Amazon EMR, enabling it to start the process of closing its owned and operated data centers.
AWS has helped Guardian get ahead of insurance industry disruption driven by new technology and changing customer expectations, and enabled the company to innovate and provide services how, when, and where its customers prefer.
AWS’ reliable, secure, and proven infrastructure lets Guardian scale quickly and access industry-leading services to test and deploy new technologies that delight its customers while protecting its assets in the cloud.