English
An interview with Blue Prism insurance customer Old Mutual – part 2
In part 2 of our interview with Old Mutual leaders, Tags Moodley and Kusheel Amritlall, they talk about moving through the Blue Prism waves of value towards business transformation, and their vision for the future insurance operating model.
You can view the video interview from Blue Prism World 2021 here.
Blue Prism:
As you know, at Blue Prism we look at automation as three waves, starting with efficiency and productivity, then moving on to business performance, and finally peaking with business transformation. Where would you say you are on this scale?
Tags:
We started off in a place where we were really focusing on efficiency. I think we moved from good to great and now I think we're in a state where we're moving from great to greater than. And that's really putting us in that space of business transformation. So, we’ve moved from that space of efficiency gains to real customer-led and customer experience focus. Everything that we do in line with our business philosophy and our strategy is really putting customers at the center of everything that we do, focusing a lot more on the ‘why’ are we doing things and making certain that we continuously amaze customers with our service and our advice.
Kusheel:
In terms of in terms of how automation supports that, and in terms of the phases of how we've looked at this, you have the conventional initialize, industrialize, institutionalize. We've been following those stage gates in terms of how we treat the capability and the maturity of the capability. In terms of output and benefits and what's really being seen as tangible benefits - yes, we started by looking at service productivity and efficiency gains and it still is an important criterium for us. But I think as we move into that more expanded institutionalized type of capability, the prerogatives and imperatives of different lines of business become different, and customer experience becomes something that we’re driving holistically as a business with almost all of our strategic teams, with the efficiencies and productivity gains happening as a consequence.
And really, it's around driving that centralized customer experience - that segment of one that Tags mentioned - simplifying Old Mutual’s complex nature using automation, and creating those sorts of authentic, seamless, frictionless experiences with customers. That's where we think we are now in that transformation phase. Going back, understanding where things could have been done better, expanding to different parts of the business where we can apply these technology technologies and techniques in proper strategic ways. And I think that's more on the transformation side but without losing the goal of gaining efficiencies and productivity.
Blue Prism:
Tell us some examples of how you want transformation at scale to look for Old Mutual in the future.
Kusheel:
Being there from the start and as a really early player in the insurance space and in the African space, it's been a really interesting journey to take something that was a proof of value concept and taking that concept and understanding the full capability and unlocking its full potential. That means driving it at scale and we’ve seen positive results such as having over 200 bots in production, releasing millions of minutes, and upticks in customer experience targets.
But what it means for us from a maturity perspective is continuing to drive that automation mandate throughout the business and extending our reach to other functional areas. It's also been about complementing our simple automation with cognitive automation techniques. And that means introducing new skills and complimentary technologies that suit the Blue Prism automation set. And what that's allowing us to do is one: develop new skills and our team; and two: move into this world of leveraging data, really leveraging the idea of hyper-personalization to drive these frictionless automated experiences.
So for us it’s scale, it's about embedding these cognitive automation complementary technologies, it's about moving into more reactive types of DevOps worlds where we can make many changes very quickly and respond to customer needs very quickly, which is very relevant in these times. And that's what it means for us to see full automation at scale.
Tags:
I'll take a little bit of a different slant on the way I see the world right now. I'm a big follower of the Renaissance. It’s a period where the world saw some creative improvements in a very short space of time that helped propel us into the future. I do believe that the world is in its own version of a renaissance right now and almost at an inflection point. It’s absolutely exciting, the number of technological advancements that we have, and it's about how we all take that and use it to help propel ourselves forward into the future.
I do believe that by working together we will achieve greatness. I would say as well that one of the inflection points for us was the partnership with Blue Prism just over two years ago, in terms of our journey and where we were transforming. We've seen such great perpetual growth in that space that I can only dream of what the next couple of years are going to bring on this journey and I'm excited.