Skandia to revolutionise customer communications with Thunderhead

Finance giant to save equivalent of six financial directors-worth
of resources each day

London, UK – October 23, 2007 – Skandia UK, the provider of long-term savings products, has selected Thunderhead NOW, the document generation platform, to help revamp and streamline customer communications, such as correspondence and policy documentation.

Thunderhead NOW replaces the existing in-house proprietary document generation solution. The old system required IT expertise to build a new template every time a document was created or modified. With Thunderhead, the communications teams within the Customer Services Division will be able to create, format and manage personalised correspondence on their own desktop, while staying within brand guidelines and maintaining an audit trail.

Thunderhead NOW will underpin Skandia’s internal initiative - ‘21st Century Correspondence’. The project is designed to increase engagement with customers and prospects by improving the clarity and speed-to-market of all external communications, via email, post or the extranet.

Skandia expects Thunderhead to cut down the number of existing templates – which produce contracts, commission statements, policy schedules, client transfers and planned letters – by 85 per cent when the technology goes live later this year. Staff creating personalised correspondence will be able to rationalise the number of templates, as Thunderhead allows them to utilise pre-approved content across all documents, rather than creating each template from scratch.

“Once fully implemented, Thunderhead technology will help us save up to six financial directors-worth of resources across the company on a daily basis,” said Timothy Mann, Customer Service and Technology Director at Skandia. “Most importantly, Thunderhead NOW removes the IT bottleneck, and gives control to the person who actually has contact with our customers.”

“The interface is intuitive to use, so minimal training is required and we are confident that user uptake will be high,” he continued.

The first implementation stage, which aims to standardise and streamline document production for the Fund Supermarket part of the business, has just gone live. Now the majority of correspondence, such as policy documents and terms of business, from four teams based across two continents, is produced by Thunderhead’s scaleable platform.

“Overall, we are storing over 10,000 complex templates to produce all the different documents we need for the business, and this number was growing. Using Thunderhead we believe we can cut this down to a fraction,” he concluded.

“As financial providers find themselves in an increasingly competitive and regulated market, there has never been so much pressure on them to get their customer communications just right, in terms of timing and quality,” said Glen Manchester, CEO of Thunderhead.

“Skandia appreciates the value of using technology to ensure open, clear and understandable communications, and this implementation will give them the competitive edge.”