Hollard drives customer-centric transformation and AI innovation, saving $100,000+

Challenge

Bringing agility to back-office operations in a customer-centric organization

Hollard, a South African insurance group encompassing life, short-term, group schemes, and investments, is focused on building outstanding customer relationships through innovative solutions and digital channels.

Hollard saw a powerful opportunity to elevate its customer-centric strategy by modernising its internal systems. Many of the platforms were developed through acquisitions and Hollard recognised the potential to unify data and streamline processes for a more connected experience.

Brighton Ravele, Senior Manager, Digital Transformation at Hollard, takes up the story. “Hollard needed a platform that could integrate disparate systems, accelerate development, and empower the team to build solutions that harmonized internal processes for a seamless customer journey.”

Solution

A small team revolutionizes operations with AI-powered workflows

Hollard chose OutSystems and partner Linkit to modernize its back-office, starting with a small team that has since grown, demonstrating the platform's scalability. In less than three years, the partnership has resulted in several key applications including:

• Customer Launchpad (Customer 360 platform): This internal application aggregates data from many disparate back-office systems to provide a unified view of customer information, enabling faster customer service and avoiding "pillar to post" referencing. Used by more than 150 employees, it has handled more than 300,000 searches for customer data.
• Operations workflow / email routing system: This system replaced an outdated Microsoft Dynamics system that managed customer service workflows. With the new solution, requests come via email and are routed accordingly, with almost 48,000 cases processed in just four months. Hollard has recently integrated generative AI into this system using Azure OpenAI endpoints to automatically analyze email content, determine customer intents, classifying and routing incoming email requests to the correct queues.
• Broker onboarding portal: This workflow system streamlines the entire onboarding process for intermediaries/brokers. Previously, the process could take weeks to months due to critical documents getting lost in email threads. The new OutSystems-built system tracks every step of the onboarding journey, ensuring no documents are misplaced and accelerating the activation of new brokers. This efficiency allows brokers to start writing business for Hollard much faster, directly impacting revenue generation.
• Sales platform for underwritten products: This customer-facing platform allows users to fill out questionnaires for semi-underwritten life insurance products, get quotes, and sign up for life cover.
• Claims admin system: This system manages the entire claims process, from claims intake to payment processing. It was built to replace a costly vendor-supplied policy administration system, saving more than $100,000.

Results

Faster development, $100,000+ saved, and a future with AI

The adoption of OutSystems has yielded multiple benefits for Hollard, including considerable cost savings by replacing expensive legacy systems, such as the claims management system, which saved more than $100,000. Another system replacement, providing the ability to track and resolve customer queries quickly, is expected to save approximately $30,000 in licensing costs over a year.

Importantly, the new and improved processes enable staff to deliver a better, more integrated customer experience. By embedding generative AI into its operations workflow system, Hollard has significantly reduced manual effort, achieving 80% accuracy in email categorization and routing.

For Hollard’s lean development team, OutSystems' rapid UI development and data visualization, easy data manipulation, and API creation capabilities helped streamline app development processes, enabling rapid prototyping and quicker validation of requirements with users.

Now, the company is actively exploring OutSystems' Mentor to further accelerate development, expecting to build 90% of simple applications in two weeks, an estimated six-fold faster delivery.