Topdanmark expands process automation with ServiceNow

Topdanmark delivers insurance solutions backed by a strong IT infrastructure
Topdanmark is Denmark’s second largest insurance company and one of the few Danish providers to combine life insurance, non-life insurance, and pension fund offerings. The company’s variety and quality of insurance services have earned Topdanmark more than one million customers, as well as 50% of Danish farms and one in six Danish businesses.

Customer confidence is everything in the insurance industry, as customers are often in a vulnerable state due to the loss of a loved one, damaged property, or at the end of their careers. Topdanmark strives to let customers know that they are in good hands with every sale, claim, and contact.

Topdanmark’s IT team works to continuously improve service efficiency
To provide high-quality, friendly, and efficient service, while handling more than 300,000 claims and one million phone calls annually, Topdanmark requires the highest level of IT service. Three-quarters of Topdanmark’s 400 IT employees are focused on development, helping the company continuously improve service efficiency and bring new customer-facing features to market.

Topdanmark views IT as a competitive advantage. To make the most of its internal talent, the company is transforming into a nimbler, service-focused organisation. Its development teams are adopting an agile development model, and IT is automating more processes to improve time to market for software, hardware, and services. However, Topdanmark’s legacy IT service management (ITSM) solution could not scale to meet the company’s ambitions for process automation.

Topdanmark seeks to expand IT process automation with outsourced IT service management
The company’s goal is to accelerate the delivery of systems, software, and services through automation, especially when request volumes are high, reducing the risk of manual errors in critical workflows. This entails including more services in the service catalog and improving the end-user self-service possibilities, by making information or services available to users to solve minor issues themselves. Topdanmark is also considering how to present more software as a temporary service instead of using traditional, installed software.

The strategy regarding outsourcing an IT operation is simple. Outsourcing is considered when it is more cost effective; therefore, Topdanmark routinely seeks a cost analysis of different areas, and has already outsourced minor services when it saves money. The same strategy applies to development. If it is possible to buy an affordable, standard solution that can fulfill business needs, Topdanmark does not develop it in-house.

“To keep service levels high and improve our efficiency as well as effectiveness in some areas, we needed a more flexible IT service management platform to support our goal of continuous improvement,” says Anders Nielsen, Product Owner of IT Service Management and Security at Topdanmark.

“Many of the improvements we wanted to implement weren’t possible with the tool we were using because we couldn’t track assets and configurations separately,” says Anders. “Asset lifecycles were tied to specific configurations. We also needed to address steps in our ordering process that would stall while waiting in a manager’s inbox for approval.”

Topdanmark now processes most access requests automatically
Granting software developers and other users temporary or permanent access rights was one of the processes that needed automation. IT staff receive thousands of emails every month related to user access requests for new or expanded permissions, but users had to move on to other tasks until access was granted.

“For example, if a developer needs access to the claims management system, three people have to approve that,” says Anders. “There are cases where an employee needs software or a new feature quickly in order to help our customers so we need approvals to be fast and easy.”

On average, Topdanmark processes 3,000 access requests every month and 2,900 of these are handled automatically. This means the necessary approvals are generated automatically and when the request is approved, the access is automatically granted to the user.

ServiceNow removes barriers, resulting in faster service delivery to end-users
To remove roadblocks and advance automation, Topdanmark moved to ServiceNow IT Service Management. Topdanmark worked with Devoteam, a ServiceNow Preferred Services Partner, to deploy the solution. “We have a great partnership with Devoteam,” says Anders. “The engineers are experienced and skilled, allowing us to make the best use of development time. It was easy to customise existing functionality in ServiceNow to implement the exact workflows we wanted.”

Users now submit requests through the Now Platform, initiating an automated workflow that includes inventory and system configuration checks along with the required approvals. Software such as Microsoft Office can be delivered within 30 minutes. If a keyboard, laptop, or printer is in stock, it can be delivered the same day. With better visibility into stock and automated alerts when inventory is low, Topdanmark can make better decisions about the hardware it keeps on hand.

Anders continues, “It’s also a more accurate and secure approval process. Because it’s automated, no approval can be accidentally overlooked. It’s also documented, so we can prove that we took the required steps.”

Topdanmark developers and employees benefit from high-quality, efficient processes
ServiceNow also helps Topdanmark achieve its goals for agile development, allowing developers and other IT employees to be more efficient. Developers can request a customised virtual workstation and get it in hours through a fully automated process, with all necessary software and updates installed. Deployment approvals and access requests are automated as well—all contributing to continuous delivery of new customer-facing software and features.

Instead of manually processing thousands of access requests a month, IT employees can be more proactive in helping the business. “We constantly strive to improve our employees’ job satisfaction, and ServiceNow helps us do that,” says Anders. “We have very high service levels, and there’s a high level of satisfaction with our department throughout the company. We get a lot of compliments because the improvements are obvious.”

ServiceNow helps Topdanmark compete in a dynamic market
With ServiceNow, Topdanmark IT can keep service levels high in order to help the business maintain and improve its position in the Danish insurance market. Today, the insurer can:

• Empower employees to provide faster, more responsive service to customers
• Improve operating and development efficiency further
• Deliver software virtually, within minutes, as well as physical hardware within hours
• Optimise hardware inventory levels

Topdanmark will continue to optimise processes with ServiceNow wherever time and costs can be reclaimed. “Today, our default mindset is to automate with ServiceNow,” says Anders. “We haven’t run into any limitations.”

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