Comparethemarket.com parent BGL invests in new CRM platform

By Nikki Sandison, Marketing Direct, Wednesday, 04 March 2009 11:45AM

LONDON - BGL Group, owner of Comparethemarket.com and insurance companies Budget and Bennetts, has selected Sword Ciboodle to help it improve customer service and business strategy with a new CRM platform.

A spokeswoman for BGL said that the company has decided to invest in a new CRM system now because "the current climate means that customers are even more focused on value for money in their financial services, which makes customer relationship management more important than ever".

She continued: "The BGL Group is fortunate to be in a strong financial position which has enabled it to invest in a partnership with Sword Ciboodle. We are confident that it will enable us to increase retention and drive better customer insight for future product development."

In addition to its own brands BGL Group also has affinity partnerships with brands including the Post Office, Marks & Spencer, RAC and HSBC to offer insurance products to their customers.

BGL has selected Sword Ciboodle to expand its CRM platform to allow new brands and products to be quickly and easily incorporated into the group's portfolio.

The software will also provide a standard interface for the company's contact centres in Peterborough, Coventry, Sunderland, Peterlee and Cape Town, South Africa, so that its agents have access to all the relevant customer information regardless of whether customers choose to correspond by phone, email, web self-service or post.

Sean Melia, associate director for program delivery at BGL, said: "After looking at several options, we chose Sword Ciboodle based in part on the company's excellent pedigree in business process software, which is vital to this project, but also because of the strong cultural fit between our two organisations.

"Sword Ciboodle's performance in the 'proof of concept' stage of our evaluation process was the final confirmation we needed. Its tooling allowed rapid creation of processes and was quick to change."

The project will be delivered in multiple phases, the first of which will provide a service for handling new business and sales enquiries for BGL Group's home and motor insurance products.

It will include the handling of processes like quote creation, quote conversion, cross-selling and correspondence creation.

Subsequent phases will see the addition of customer service processes including mid-term adjustments, renewals and cancellations.

Kenny Bain, CEO of Sword Ciboodle, said: "This is a superb customer win for Sword Ciboodle, as it further supports the recent recognition by major analyst firms that this company is a leader in process-centric CRM."

This article was first published on Marketing Direct