An American financial services company has provided insurance, investment, and retirement services to millions of customers for more than 100 years. U.S.-based employees in the retirement business are managing recordkeeping for corporate 401k, pension, and money purchase plans. Within that business, the operations team processes more than 500,000 transactions annually, ensuring customers’ requests are received, recorded, and resolved. To process these transactions quickly and seamlessly, the company turned to SS&C | Blue Prism® Chorus Business Process Management (BPM).

Challenge

The company receives hundreds of thousands of customer requests each year, covering topics from simple, such as address changes to as complex as loan rollovers and death benefit payouts. A significant number of requests arrive by mail or fax, are scanned into the company’s record-keeping system, given a transaction ID, and assigned to an employee for processing. That employee then creates a work item, reviews the request, and manually selects a status to determine the next steps.

The process lacked consistency and required employees to duplicate work in multiple systems. And since work was passed around via email, there was no way to track the completion rate and volume. The company wanted to increase operational efficiency, attain visibility into the status of each request, and collect and report on workflow data.

Solution

The company nurtures a culture of continuous improvement and innovation. They were an early adopter of Chorus BPM and recently saw an opportunity to increase efficiency by instituting a more data-driven process flow. Employees worldwide can now log into one system to process work automatically, which is assigned to them based on their experience level. Since Chorus is integrated with back-office systems, there’s no need to enter the same data into multiple systems.

The operations team knew that to increase efficiency it had to be easy to route work, so they configured Chorus to parse work based on important data attributes. Instead of manually routing each request, process flows were configured to automatically select the next status in Chorus with one click. This allows work to easily shift to the right person anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes. The flexibility to configure Chorus BPM was particularly helpful during the pandemic when users in different parts of the world unexpectedly couldn’t come into the office. Chorus administrators could easily update the process flow to redirect work. The ability to toggle back and forth so quickly meant SLAs were still met.

A well-designed process flow not only gives managers autonomy to redirect work — but it also moves team members to different roles without coming to the Chorus administrator or logging a ticket with IT. Plus, managers have insight into each employee’s processing time and can use that data to increase the complexity of employees’ tasks when they demonstrate readiness. Next up for the operations team is to share these successes with others across the business.