With over two million customers, and with a workforce of more than 2,000 people, the BGL Group is one of the largest personal lines insurance brokers in the UK. In addition to its own brands, including Budget, Bennetts and comparethemarket.com, the BGL Group's affinity arm, Junction, enables established brands such as the Post Office®, Marks and Spencer, RAC and HSBC to offer insurance products to their customers.

The company is transforming its business systems to provide a more agile platform that will support its rapid growth and enable it to respond to a dynamic marketplace.  As part of this initiative, Sword Ciboodle has been selected to deploy its process-based CRM platform, which will allow new brands and products to be quickly and easily incorporated into the BGL Group portfolio. The software will also provide a standard interface for the company's contact centres in Peterborough, Coventry, Sunderland, Peterlee and Cape Town, South Africa, ensuring that its agents have access to all relevant customer information, regardless of whether customers choose to interact by phone, email, web self-service or posted correspondence.

"After looking at several options, we chose Sword Ciboodle based in part on the company's excellent pedigree in business process software, which is vital to this project, but also because of the strong cultural fit between our two organisations - we work very well together," said Sean Melia, Associate Director, Programme Delivery, BGL Group. "Sword Ciboodle's performance in the 'proof of concept' stage of our evaluation process was the final confirmation we needed. Its tooling allowed rapid creation of processes and was quick to change. We are looking forward to delivering an outstanding solution that will support the future direction of this company."

The project will be delivered in multiple phases, the first of which is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2009 and will see the delivery of a solution for handling new business and sales enquiries for BGL Group's home and motor insurance products. This first phase will include the handling of processes like quote creation, quote conversion, cross-selling and correspondence creation. Subsequent phases will see the addition of customer service processes including mid-term adjustments, renewals and cancellations.

Sword Ciboodle's recognised capabilities in enabling its clients to undertake change more swiftly are an important goal of the project. The project will provide the BGL Group with the ability to quickly customise business processes and rules based on variables including brand, product, marketing source, customer and advisor profile, giving the company a unique selling point in the outsourced insurance provider market.

"Part of our business strategy is to be able to respond quickly and in a more agile way to change, and we also need a solution that we can take on and develop ourselves following the initial rollout," added Melia. "Sword Ciboodle has a strong reputation in both these areas."
While Sword Ciboodle is a new software deployment for the BGL Group, its ability to leverage existing assets by integrating with the firm's existing technologies is another vital part of the deployment. The product will be fully integrated with the firm's proprietary internal insurance systems, as well its more common contact centre integration points such as computer telephony and web self-service.

"This is a superb customer win for Sword Ciboodle, as it further supports the recent recognition by major analyst firms that this company is a leader in process-centric CRM," said Kenny Bain, CEO, Sword Ciboodle UK. "We are looking forward to delivering a market-leading solution for BGL Group and helping the company achieve its business goals."