nib Travel

nib Travel is the travel insurance arm of the wider nib Group which provides health and medical insurance to over 1.4 million Australian and New Zealand residents. nib Travel operates a number of well known travel insurance brands, including Worldnomads.com, Travel Insurance Direct, and QBE Travel, which it acquired in 2019.

The acquisition of QBE Travel greatly expanded the distribution and sales reach of nib Travel. At the same time, it increased the complexity of its operations. The business had employees in seven offices across five countries supporting multiple brands, and so saw an opportunity to create a consistent approach to how they worked.

nib Travel wanted to standardise its processes and technologies across countries and brands with the purpose of uplifting the traveller experience. It partnered with Salesforce Professional Services to lead this transformation, starting with the consolidation of systems onto one customer-centric platform.

“We engaged Salesforce Professional Services at the start of our transformation journey as we wanted their expertise to get the best out of the platform,” said Katrina Trenkner, Senior Program Manager at nib Travel.

At the beginning of its transformation, nib Travel had 18 disparate systems and seven of these were quickly approaching end of life. The business engaged Salesforce Professional Services to accelerate its transition away from these systems and onto Service Cloud.

Working alongside nib Travel’s business analysts and architects, the Professional Services team helped to design a solution that maximised Service Cloud’s core capabilities and therefore minimised the need for customisation. They also helped nib Travel to simplify and realign its business processes with a focus on reducing manual steps like handoffs between agents.

“Salesforce (Professional Services) helped us to stay really focused on the needs of our customers and presented us with the simplest and best way to do things ‘out-of-the-box’. The approach helped us to move quickly while minimising the risk of change,” said Trenkner.

The team’s agility combined with the ability to design a solution using clicks, not code, enabled the delivery of Service Cloud in just 12 weeks. In addition, average handling time for enquiries were reduced by 25% in the first month alone.

With the initial delivery of Service Cloud, the Professional Services team helped nib Travel to streamline its release and deployment processes. It adopted an approach of workshopping and quickly prototyping new solutions for feedback. This practice supported change management and, combined with initiatives like test automation, helped to reduce release and deployment time by 20%.

“Once we improved our cadence of delivery, we were able to shift the dial and look at how we could shorten customer response times even more,” said Mrs Trenkner.

This second phase of nib Travel’s transformation journey involved integrating Service Cloud with seven back-end policy systems so that agents could quickly surface the information needed to support customers. At the same time, nib Travel worked with the Professional Services team to improve its omni-channel servicing.

Agents now no longer need to navigate multiple systems to find a customer's policy details. Instead, policy details are automatically linked to incoming enquiries. Omni-channel routing means that every enquiry is also sent to the next available agent, no matter if it is an email, phone, or web enquiry.

The result has enabled an additional 20% reduction in average handling time, driving the total reduction in handling times to just under 50%.

In the midst of its transformation, nib Travel were confronted with the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic and at the same time received a significant increase in customer enquiries - from an average of 5,000 per month to around 12,000. Leveraging Salesforce and its increased momentum of change, nib Travel was able to move quickly to handle this increase in enquiries and quickly address customer pain points.

“With COVID-19, we had to move really fast and think differently as a team to help guide the business,” said Trenkner. “As a business, we developed a transformation roadmap detailing the activities we aimed to quickly implement to help reduce handling time when external information was constantly changing.”

One of those additional activities was identifying new types of customer servicing requests where customers had COVID-19 related enquiries and then creating a more automated system to help service these enquiries and reduce handling times. This included developing COVID-19 specific content and frequently asked questions for the website, which customers could be directed to.

More recently, nib Travel has made changes to how it manages complaints and has implemented processes to better understand the customer’s journey and what has led to their dissatisfaction. This has led to greater ownership of complaints and more customer-centric thinking about how the business can improve. As a result, complaint triggers have been identified and addressed, resulting in a significant reduction in escalated complaints.

nib Travel is continuing its transformation with an immediate focus on streamlining claims management. It plans to use Salesforce to simplify the end-to-end process and automate decision making as much as possible. Expected outcomes from this project include a reduction in handling times of between 25-40% and a reduced potential for fraud.

Salesforce implementation partner, Aware Services, is also involved in this part of the project and Trenkner shared that there have been great synergies between their team and Salesforce Professional Services.

“What’s been great about this program is that we’ve been able to act as one team and collaborate really well with the benefit of having different viewpoints and expertise,” said Trenkner. “We can have honest discussions about what’s working and what we need to do better and that’s been really key.”

Trenkner is now working with other areas of the nib business to replicate some of the successes that have been gained through the transformation. This includes turning on omni-channel and automating processes.

“There’s a real excitement now about how we can transform further and everyone is coming to us with new problems to solve. My job now is to build on that passion and support the business to keep innovating and trying new things,” said Trenkner.