Swiss Re extends one-stop service delivery from employees to customers with ServiceNow

Swiss Re recognizes employee satisfaction is key to building strong, lasting customer relationships
Insurance is a relationship business. The better employee satisfaction is, the better customer relationships will be, and excellent customer relationships are a key differentiator in a commoditized industry. That’s why Zurich-based Swiss Re—a leading, global reinsurance company—is embracing trailblazing changes to provide a next-generation employee experience.

“We have over 14,500 employees. If you look at the size of our business that’s a relatively small number, which means our employees are very important to having good business transactions,” says Stefan Sieger, Swiss Re’s Head of Customer Experience and Digital Delivery for Group Operations. “Our employees are really, truly knowledge workers, so my team has to make sure they can focus on their work and are not distracted by operational and administrative processes.”

Early success with ServiceNow leads Swiss Re to adopt an enterprise service management approach
When it first partnered with ServiceNow 10 years ago, Swiss Re had multiple IT service management tools and many different processes across multiple locations. To consolidate IT systems, streamline operations, and improve IT service levels, Swiss Re chose ServiceNow IT Service Management. It soon became the company’s single system of record, replacing 20 legacy tools.

“After the initial implementation of ServiceNow IT Service Management, we realized some expected and unexpected benefits, including a massive increase in transparency, which helped us to understand what our support organization is delivering to our employees,” says Ashish Agarwal, Director, Head of IT Application Management.

The initial successes with ServiceNow led Swiss Re to adopt a true enterprise service management philosophy—underpinned by the promise of supporting simplification and consolidation initiatives to improve employee satisfaction.

Swiss Re removes friction with self-service, making it easier for employees to do their job
With so much intellectual property wrapped up in its workforce, Swiss Re’s employees are vital to its success. Its employees make it a very different company and retaining them is a priority.

Swiss Re leadership knows it has to make employees’ lives easier and better to maintain its position at the industry forefront and meet ambitious goals. The philosophy of treating employees as customers is founded upon one question: “How can we make it easier for employees to do their jobs?”

Stefan believes that if you work for an enterprise, you should get the same service experience at work as you do in your private life. Therefore, his team is focused on making it quick and easy for employees to get what they need from Group Operations.

“We want to focus on the ease of interactions, removing any friction, and giving employees an easy way to work through internal processes,” says Stefan. 

Stefan continues, “Our one-stop shop, powered by ServiceNow, is called ContactOne.”

With ServiceNow, Swiss Re consolidates 7 employee service centers covering 90% of its business services
Prior to the ContactOne deployment, Swiss Re employees had to use seven different service centers to resolve business issues, which impacted the organization’s productivity and employee NPS scores.

Today, ContactOne combines the seven service centers into a single, centralized destination serving 170 business services. It covers 90% of business services across the enterprise—encompassing human resources, legal and compliance, information technology, communications, global business solutions, corporate real estate, finance operations, customer experience, and digital delivery departments.

ContactOne—powered by ServiceNow—helps Swiss Re improve employee experience and reach productivity targets
“ContactOne streamlined the way we provide service and helped us achieve our annual productivity aspiration of 3% for Group Operations,” says Stefan.

A team of just 45 service agents supports 14,500+ employees, with 66% of the 660,000+ service inquiries received each year resolved through self-service. These service agents now use some of their newly-acquired capacity to create knowledge base articles to further enhance the efficacy of ContactOne.

“Before we had ContactOne, when we wanted to onboard a new employee, we had to talk to five different units, using six different channels. And then we were not sure whether or not everything would be ready on the day the employee started,” says Stefan. “Now, it’s one-stop shopping. And, our NPS for the Contact One services jumped by 30 points in the first 18 months following the introduction of ContactOne.”

“ContactOne is not just a portal for us, it is a big enabler,” adds Ashish. “It makes it super easy for employees to ask for the services they need. They don’t have to worry about the complexity—they can focus on their work and provide value to their clients. By combining everything into one service center, we can offer our employees a truly one-stop shopping experience.”

Since becoming a ServiceNow customer, Swiss Re Group Operations has experienced a continual improvement reporting of 90% in service performance. The service performance rating is based upon the following criteria: availability, reaction time, resolution time, ticket volume, and improvement by channel.

Swiss Re extends the benefits of ServiceNow to external clients to facilitate premium revenue stream
Following its combined successes within Group Operations and from the ContactOne initiative, Swiss Re extended the benefits of its ServiceNow initiatives to its external clients by applying the same learnings and achievement that were enjoyed by its employees.

“After the ContactOne experience, we thought, ‘Why not offer the exact same service to our external clients?’ We leveraged our investment made in the Now Platform to provide that same high-quality customer service to our Magnum clients,” says Stefan.

Swiss Re created a software solution called Magnum to facilitate one of Swiss Re’s premium revenue streams: life and health insurance. Ashish says, “Magnum is an automated underwriting solution and helps our clients to underwrite life policies.” Magnum helps streamline the application and underwriting for more than 14 million applications a year.

ServiceNow® Customer Service Management is used to monitor Magnum and manage customer issues. “With Magnum, whenever Swiss Re clients have a problem we can support them and get them back to business,” says Stefan.

Swiss Re plans to continue its digital transformation with ServiceNow as its operational backbone
Ashish describes the three unique benefits Swiss Re gets from ServiceNow: “First, as a platform ServiceNow brings newer capabilities, which work in an integrated way. Second, is the time to market for quickly building applications. And third, is the relationship that we have with ServiceNow employees, who have a collaboration mindset. We can jointly solve business challenges with the Now Platform.”

Swiss Re plans to continue its cross-enterprise digital transformation with ServiceNow as its operational backbone by deploying ServiceNow® IT Operations Management and ServiceNow® Security Operations.

Swiss Re also has prioritized increasing cognitive capabilities for using machine learning for everyday work, better experiences, security incident response, vendor tiering, and customer service issues using ServiceNow® Virtual Agent.

Swiss Re is a broad user of ServiceNow. “We have successfully transformed how we serve employees and continue to explore how we can serve customers to differentiate ourselves from our competitors. With the Now Platform, the sky’s the limit,” concludes Stefan.

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