„There was a real desire to change the way we work, to add a new string to our bow in terms of change delivery.”
Matt Gurney, Program Director
Saga Services
Saga is a well-known, recognized company in the UK that provides products and services for customers over the age of 50. The Saga brand is also known for its high level of customer service and its high-quality, award-winning products and services, including cruises and holidays, insurance, personal finance, and publishing. Saga Services Ltd., the insurance division of Saga, provides a wide range of products, from home to travel to auto, for this same demographic. These unique insurance offerings are tied to an innate knowledge of the market—a market with high expectations for on-demand service that is changing rapidly thanks to technology.
“This demographic has transformed over the last 10 or 20 years,” says Jules Christmas, Group IT Director for Saga Services. “It’s a huge mistake to think that the over-50 population is not digitally savvy. The digital channel is incredibly important to us, and this demographic is the fastest-growing online demographic in the UK.”
Delivering superior customer service levels and innovative insurance products to a technology-erudite over-50 customer base required Saga to rethink its digital platform, moving away from a customized development model to more of a package delivery model, thereby opening the door to omnichannel distribution and communication.
“What we saw with this opportunity, connected to delivering a major implementation, was the chance to really experiment in the ways of delivering change—to break down silos and become much more fleet-footed and agile,” said Matt Gurney, Program Director at Saga Services.
By selecting Guidewire, Saga is on track to transform all lines of business and migrate policyholders at renewal. The insurer will be able to render customer functionality more efficiently, increase responsiveness by reducing time-to-market for new and improved products, and be better placed to follow meaningful customer conversations dynamically. Internally, Saga looks forward to improved operational efficiencies by streamlining and standardizing processes on a modern platform, providing users with a single view of data across the organization and a system that is more intuitive and requires less user training.