Cholamandalam MS General Insurance Company Ltd (Chola MS) is an Indian insurance firm and a joint venture between the Murugappa Group, an Indian conglomerate, and the Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Group, a Japanese insurance company.
The firm produces a range of insurance products, including accident, engineering, health, liability, marine, motor, property, travel and rural insurance for individuals and corporate insurance.
The company achieved a Gross Written Premium of Rs. 13465 million in 2011 – 12 with 93 branches and over 6,000 agents across the country.
Disconnected workforce are impeding collaborations and engagements
Chola MS teams are spread across the regions and the dozens of tools they used in the past made it difficult to connect with other teams or collaborate with outsourced providers.
Different teams would be using their preferred tools and it added friction for these departments to connect with each other as the technology stacks grew and become cumbersome.
Beyond the communication struggle, finding information was not only challenging, but often impossible, with answers buried in email threads and private conversations.
Connecting the decentralised workforce
Chola MS picked Collaboration to bring all these scattered groups onto one common platform.
“While email is static, isolated and limited, Collaboration is dynamic, collaborative, secure and open. Now everyone uses Collaboration. It has everyone there and it’s consistent for everyone.” Says Vamseedhar Soma, Deputy GM – Corporate HR
Successful customer service requires collaboration.
With Collaboration, the employees can pull in more people and it becomes a collaborative discussion to solve a problem or answer a question.
Because of Collaboration, Chola MS is able to see activity almost instantly as an organisation, triage events if needed, determine the severity, then pull other people in.
While there is an 81% adoption with a 62% DAU reported; there was a lot of effort performed to drive this usage and adoption.
The core focus was to drive this change throughout the organization and hence the Lewin’s 3 stage change management model was followed.
A few of the actions performed to drive change management have been mentioned below:
- Townhalls
- Constant communication
- Formal policy for communication
- Road shows and events
- Online contests through app
Chola MS employees have taken Collaboration as a source of innovation when it comes to improving employee experience by using the Task feature to the next level.
The team used it as a tool for driving project management across different levels.
There were groups formed for various task forces and tasks were allocated to track the work output along with the time taken to complete the task.
This helped Chola MS team to track the employee’s achievement on a real time basis and enabled higher collaboration.
“Using Collaboration really helped us cutting down the response time. It has also organised all our conversations, files, and information in one app. It helped us with scaling and feeling connected to one another across remote offices and remote teams. Emails use to take up too much of our time, the cost was high, and the search functionality was poor. And conversations on WhatsApp ended without a solution. Collaboration was the ideal solution for us that helped us solve all these problems.” …Vamseedhar Soma (Chola MS)
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