The importance of daily support for an insurance company from the software supplier’s point of view

For any insurance company, choosing the core software that supports its business is a very important decision, made according to various criteria, including the functional scope of the application, the technologies used, the required infrastructure, the solution’s intrinsic safety, reliability, costs, etc.

Once the Core has been chosen, there will be a period of implementation, culminating with it going into production.

What’s next?

Then we move on to another level in the relationship between the insurance company and its software supplier that only a robust Technical Assistance service can provide: monitoring and supporting daily use of the system and addressing its needs. This is an ongoing task involving proximity/partnership with the company’s IT team.

In this article we share our point of view on the Technical Assistance service, based on Cleva’s vast experience in providing it to all its clients.

Cleva adapts its Technical Assistance service to the client’s needs and adjusts it according to the evolution of their business and their specific requirements.

We aim to ensure specialized resources for the solutions implemented. The aim of these resources is to ensure that the solutions are used optimally, solving incidents that may impact the behaviour and usage of the solution, addressing specific requests and making minor adjustments to the implemented solutions, adapting them to the client’s business and improving their performance.

How do we set up a support team?

We prepare a team for each of our clients, considering aspects such as:

• Acquired services
• Business dimension (volume) – number of users, number of policies and/or number of insured persons, implemented modules, environments to support, and others.
• Service location: On-site at the client’s facilities or off-site at our offices.
• Service coverage – timetable when the support service must be active.
• Service levels – commitments aligned between the client and Cleva which ensure suitable service levels for the operation; examples include response times to requests, incident resolution times, publication of service information, implementation of workarounds, and others.

How do we organise internally to be efficient?

At Cleva, the support services (Service Management, Support and Maintenance) comply with ITIL best practices.

We are organised into 3 levels:

• 1st line – A team dedicated to one client, including the service Manager, the service desk and other technicians to diagnose or solve less complex issues.
• 2nd line – Shared services, teams shared by all clients, organised by area of expertise and that ensure access to specialised resources.
• 3rd line – Product team, which fixes SW bugs and develops small updates at the request of the client.

What do we do to better serve our clients?

Support models have evolved, and clients now demand faster and more effective responses. To meet this challenge, we’ve built dedicated teams for each client, guaranteeing responsiveness and an understanding of each one’s reality.

We continuously prepare our teams to have transversal knowledge in various areas, the insurance business, Cleva applications and technology. We are also committed to passing on knowledge between the project implementation teams and the support teams so that the transition is smooth and has minimal impact on the client.

We proactively monitor the company’s processes. This monitoring allows us to be notified if something has gone wrong. This enables us to act quickly, either to restore the identified situation or to find definitive solutions, thus avoiding the accumulation of situations in the future and mitigating operational risks.

We also promote closer ties with the client, not only with the IT team, but also with the business teams. It’s very important to understand the users’ true needs to guide/promote the best use of the applications.

Upcoming challenges

An insurance company’s competitive factors (efficiency, digitalisation, client-centricity, and others) create new requirements for the Technical Assistance service and challenge us to upgrade the service provision to, for example, 24×7 support and 24×7 system availability, in response to websites and apps that can be used at any time. Preserving and renewing business and application knowledge with a long learning curve is another challenge that stems from the issues of talent retention. The IT market has a vast range of opportunities and remote working has opened an international supply that many people hadn’t considered before.

Cleva continues to actively work to create the conditions to respond positively to this and other challenges as well as to keep its Technical Assistance service as one of the pillars of trust and success with its clients.