When customers call us for support — especially in the case of an emergency, such as an accident, home damage, or property loss — we want to do everything possible to resolve their request quickly.
At Zurich Insurance, one of the largest public companies in the world, our ability to better serve our customers — during their most challenging moments — is core to our business and allows us to maintain their trust.
And what we have found in recent years is that better IT operations lead to better support for our customers.
That’s why Zurich Insurance has been retiring legacy applications and moving many workloads to a unified search-powered platform in the cloud.
This has enabled us to bring new digital services to market faster while improving claims reporting and remote risk assessments. Customer service agents can quickly access contact records and claim history, whereas, in the past, decades’ worth of data was spread across dozens of systems.
By deploying in the cloud with a search-powered solution delivered on a single platform, we’ve been able to do things in multiple ways, adjust course, and be responsive to the business. We have more choices to drive better solutions. Since we started on this digital transformation and cloud journey, it has been much easier for technical teams, like mine, to upgrade applications and scale infrastructure, freeing staff to concentrate on higher-value activities.
In the past, we spent so much time just managing the IT operations of our data monitoring and search platform. Now, my team has the bandwidth to develop more advanced features within our products and be more focused on the business end-users, while we work closely with cross-organisational teams to provide smarter capabilities that benefit our customers.
As a result, customer calls are resolved faster, which significantly impacts overall customer satisfaction.
Our experience is not unique.
In new research from ThoughtLab, hundreds of IT leaders from around the world report that cloud migration and the integration of IT operations improve customer outcomes. In fact, 60 per cent of IT executives surveyed expect that business initiatives to become a data-enabled enterprise in this way will result in improved customer trust and retention.
However, many organisations face challenges in implementing these changes. IT executives report inadequate IT infrastructure, difficulty finding needed data, an inability to personalise customer experiences with data, and challenges with creating consistent digital and in-person customer experiences. All of this can be solved with a search-powered platform that can be deployed in any cloud that is able to put your data to work in real time.
Improving the customer experience is a journey — regular progress across teams is mission-critical. This is made easier when you can capture all of your data in one place and make it searchable and explorable. Find out how to put your data to work in real time to improve your customers’ experiences.
Brian Keegan is an experienced global IT projects team leader and customer-orientated solutions expert and has been a part of Zurich Insurance for more than ten years. With his problem-solving skills, Brian provides innovative solutions to complex technical challenges, even in the most demanding of environments.
This article was written as part of a content campaign with Elastic.
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