Operational excellence a must

FOR 45 YEARS , ICBL has been charting the course to the future. The streamlining of business practices, improving of efficiency, offering competitive products, and placing the customer as number one have always been a part of the primary practice at ICB L

Rhea Mapp-Bynoe has been with ICBL for the past four years, but had been a part of the industry for more than ten years prior with a large regional carrier of insurance. Today, Mapp-Bynoe is the assistant vicepresident of Project Management and Operational Excellence.

Through Projects and Operational Excellence, ICBL focuses on ensuring that the processes, the people, the technology and the customer experience align to deliver on the immediate as well as the long-term strategic vision of the organisation. This is supported by enhanced data analytics and data-centric decision-making and makes for a more holistic approach.

In describing her role within the organisation, she said: “Initially, my role was focused on projects, automation and efficiency. Once we started COVID, the operational excellence side of the role became more integral. This included direct support to our customer servicing teams and ensuring that our omni-channel structure worked efficiently.”

Before COVID, like most other companies, ICBL’s business model was mostly based on an in-branch experience. At the time, there were multiple ICBL branches that accounted for 90 percent of their customer service; that transitioned to telephone and email communications. Mapp-Bynoe and her team spent a lot of time looking at achieving ICBL’s rigorous standards in this new means of business. Trying to achieve a 24-hour customer turn-around time was one of the big challenges they overcame during the initial stages.

The method of communication changed, but customers still expected as close to immediate or a real-time response as if they had walked into the branch and left with their issue resolved. According to MappBynoe, “We focused on ensuring that we could support their needs. We trained reps across all areas of the business to address the customer requests in a timely manner and the timely resolution helped our customers with the change by ensuring that they had that seamless experience, although it was by phone or by email.”

Mapp-Bynoe is constantly collaborating with other departments within the organisation to enhance ICBL’s customer experience. Ensuring that the teams are equipped with the solutions and tools to consistently measure our service delivery. Through data analytics, ICBL continues to gain a better insight into the customer journey at each touchpoint, whether online, telephone or in branch. This created a need for projects such as the online chat feature, a customer request management system, robotics and process re-engineering that Mapp-Bynoe has pioneered at ICBL. Many of these projects allow for customers to have greater efficiency and self-service.

For Mapp-Bynoe, “As we created more functionality for customers’ self-service, it drove us to ensure that our internal operations aligned through improvements in our process and service model.

“Modern day project management in many organisations has evolved into an operational business excellence space because over time it’s difficult to separate, especially as we get into transformation through process automation and customer service improvements,” said Mapp-Bynoe.

Successful project implementation requires streamlining people, process, applications and performance metrics to successfully achieve the long-term objectives. As the organisation transformed, Mapp-Bynoe’s role has evolved into day-today management of retail operations and support services for life, health and general insurance.

“From our values of continuous improvement, we are constantly looking at what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, how we can improve it, what technology do we need, what training do we need. There are always new options and opportunities for improvement,” Mapp-Bynoe asserted.