Capita Case Study

Bringing everyone and everything together

The Story

Capita Life & Pensions is a major supplier of business process outsourcing (BPO) services to the UK Life and pension industry. They run multiple policy systems and deal with multiple suppliers to manage different technologies which led to extra costs and poor customer service. They needed a supplier of software development services to draw all systems together and deliver an end-to-end solution that spanned multiple policy systems using an ESB. 

Challenges

  • INTEGRATING DATA ACROSS POLICIES
  • LACK OF SINGLE USER INTERFACE TO DATA
  • MULTIPLE SYSTEMS ACROSS THE ENVIRONMENT

The One Step to Success

Working in partnership with over 20 well-known UK and international financial services providers and running a call centre efficiently, Capita wanted to reduce costs whilst maintaining service levels for every stage of customer contact across 19 million policies. Estafet’s role was to provide a common front-end to the policy systems so that the call centre could access everything they needed from a single portal.

Working with Estafet provided the independence and clarity we needed to change the approach and deliver a successful project.

The Solution

We needed to understand the common processes and expose services on the policy systems that could support Capita Life & Pension through a common, canonical data model. The challenge was not only technical but cultural: we had to get all the suppliers working towards a business goal, rather than their existing contract.

We formed a middleware layer crucial to supporting rapid requirement churn at either end of the integration flow without incurring a downstream test lag. This drove up the quality across all the teams as bugs were quickly identified and isolated to a  particular component.

Deliverables

  • NEW INTEGRATION LAYER FOR SINGLE API ACCESS TO MULTIPLE LEGACY SYSTEMS
  • SCOPING OF CRITICAL ISSUES WITH TIME AND BUDGET ESTIMATES
  • TESTING & QUALITY ASSURANCE

The Success

We helped Capita Life & Pension identify critical issues and achieve significant productivity gains with a relatively small core of functionality which was extended in subsequent releases.

Creating a common front-end brought Capita’s suppliers together, regardless of culture and technology, reduced the duration of calls, improved customer satisfaction, and left call centre operatives far happier, knowing they could answer policyholders’ queries much faster and more efficiently. 

Outcomes

  • INTEGRATED SINGLE PORTAL SOLUTION
  • AGILE TECHNIQUES TO DELIVER HIGH-QUALITY CODE
  • CUT COSTS AND IMPROVED CALL CENTRE CUSTOMER SERVICE EFFICIENCY