Professional Pensions spoke to Diligenta chief executive Daniel Praveen as part of an exclusive series of interviews with some of the finalists and winners of the UK Pensions Awards. This is what he had to say…
What have been your main achievements as an organisation over the past 18 months?
Over the last two years, we have transformed the customer experience for the 18 million UK life and pension (L&P) policyholders that we serve on behalf of our clients. By leveraging the TCS BFSI digital platform, we have digitised the majority of "moment of truth" journeys for our customers and the industry. A recent example of this is the platform analytics solution we launched in partnership with the Phoenix Group to enable insights and data driven decisions for their workplace pension clients.
Over the last eight months, operational resilience in a Covid-19 environment has been a key priority for our clients, and our robust operating model and technology platform has ensured that customer experience and outcomes for the millions of customers and advisers we serve has been sustained - and, in fact, improved in many areas with the introduction of anytime, anywhere digital solutions.
What do you believe sets you apart from your peers and contributes to your successes?
Over the last 15 years, Diligenta has successfully modernised and transformed L&P administration across the industry, leveraging the TCS BFSI digital platform powered by TCS BaNCS. Our service delivery model focussed on improving customer experience, our digital technology platform and the deep contextual knowledge and experience of our teams, which focuses on customer outcomes, coupled with our track record of accomplishment of delivering transformation 100 % of the time, makes us unique in the UK marketplace.
Through our partnerships, clients have consistently been able to achieve over 95% policyholder/CSAT scores. Our customer services helped to achieve ten times fewer complaints than the industry average -- with fewer than 220 complaints per million policies. We developed a paperless bereavement claims process that helped one client reduce overall TAT from 54 to fewer than ten days.
How has your business dealt with the challenges of Covid-19?
Our swift transition to remote working because of Covid-19-induced lockdowns was facilitated by TCS's secure borderless workspaces (SBWS) operating model, which enables remote access for employees, sets up a suitable cybersecurity framework, and ensures all service delivery management practices.
In collaboration with our clients, we enabled 95% of remote working across our service locations within seven to ten days. In response to Covid -19 business context, we launched a document utility solution enabling customer and adviser to securely send & receive documents electronically. We tailored and strengthened our risk controls to ensure no adverse impact on customer services.
Further, we have deployed a number of employee support services to assist our staff during these challenging times.
What are the key challenges facing your pension scheme clients at the current time and how are you helping them address these issues?
We are working with our clients to deliver a world-class scheme administration service. As a leading platform service provider, we see challenges faced by our clients' pension schemes as opportunities to innovate through operational and technology solutions. For example, we are establishing a journey-based experience service center across our clients, which ensures delivery of end-to-end customer experience and outcome-based service delivery.
It has been a challenging period for our pension scheme clients in terms of processing contributions and leavers, handling their furlough payroll adjustments and pay scheme contributions, regulatory reporting, etc. We are addressing these challenges through increased focus on ensuring tailored service approaches for vulnerable customers, pension scams/fraud prevention by leveraging continuous trainings and digital tools in customer interactions.
How will you continue to improve your services to pension scheme clients over the coming year?
We continue to make significant investment in our people and our technology platform. Our focus is on deploying our digital operating model across our client services to deliver industry-leading customer experience.
We're also enhancing the adviser, benefit consultant and employer propositions so that they have access to insights and data anytime, anywhere and are further able have a simple, intuitive and reliable service when they need to contact us.
The time is right to bring digital innovation to the pensions industry, and Diligenta is committed to being the trusted partner to help our clients get there.
Diligenta was shortlisted in the Third-Party Administrator of the Year category of this year's UK Pensions Awards. Find out more about the awards here.
About Diligenta
Diligenta, a UK-based FCA-regulated subsidiary of Tata Consultancy Services, is a leading provider of business process services for the life and pensions industry. With more than 18 million policies already under administration, its aim is to transform its clients' operations, utilising its industry-leading platform and digital capabilities, and to support its clients to launch new products and propositions.
