BGL Group chooses Sword Ciboodle for advanced CRM

Major UK insurance broker to adopt new CRM platform in support of business strategy

Sword Ciboodle, provider of customer-oriented business software and services, today announced that it has been selected by the BGL Group as a partner to support the insurance broker's initiative to improve customer service and business process capabilities.

With over two million customers, and with a workforce of more than 2,000 people, the BGL Group is one of the largest personal lines insurance brokers in the UK. In addition to its own brands, including Budget, Bennetts and comparethemarket.com, the BGL Group's affinity arm, Junction, enables established brands such as the Post Office®, Marks and Spencer, RAC and HSBC to offer insurance products to their customers.

The company is transforming its business systems to provide a more agile platform that will support its rapid growth and enable it to respond to a dynamic marketplace.

As part of this initiative, Sword Ciboodle has been selected to deploy its process-based CRM platform, which will allow new brands and products to be quickly and easily incorporated into the BGL Group 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, ensuring that its agents have access to all relevant customer information, regardless of whether customers choose to interact by phone, email, web self-service or posted correspondence.

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 - we work very well together, said Sean Melia, Associate Director, Programme Delivery, BGL Group. 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. We are looking forward to delivering an outstanding solution that will support the future direction of this company.

The project will be delivered in multiple phases, the first of which is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2009 and will see the delivery of a solution for handling new business and sales enquiries for BGL Group's home and motor insurance products. This first phase 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.

Sword Ciboodle's recognised capabilities in enabling its clients to undertake change more swiftly are an important goal of the project. The project will provide the BGL Group with the ability to quickly customise business processes and rules based on variables including brand, product, marketing source, customer and advisor profile, giving the company a unique selling point in the outsourced insurance provider market.
Part of our business strategy is to be able to respond quickly and in a more agile way to change, and we also need a solution that we can take on and develop ourselves following the initial rollout, added Melia. Sword Ciboodle has a strong reputation in both these areas.

While Sword Ciboodle is a new software deployment for the BGL Group, its ability to leverage existing assets by integrating with the firm's existing technologies is another vital part of the deployment. The product will be fully integrated with the firm's proprietary internal insurance systems, as well its more common contact centre integration points such as computer telephony and web self-service.

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, said Kenny Bain, CEO, Sword Ciboodle UK. We are looking forward to delivering a market-leading solution for BGL Group and helping the company achieve its business goals.

About Sword Ciboodle
Sword Ciboodle helps improve the way large organisations interact with their customers. The combination of award-winning, process-managed CRM software and specialist consulting and delivery services help Sword Ciboodle's clients achieve higher revenues from their customers and reduce operational costs. Sword Ciboodle is consistently recognised by industry analysts as one of the world's leading customer-centric technology providers. For more information, please visit www.sword-ciboodle.com.

About Sword Group
Sword Group delivers high value business applications to the world's largest companies globally.

With operations in 37 countries, Sword today employs over 2000 people and in fiscal year ending December 2007 generated $263m in consolidated revenue.
An international leader in the delivery of Business Process Improvement solutions, Sword's skills, infrastructure and experience help our customers across regulated industries optimise performance, increase efficiencies and maximise return on investment.

With flexible delivery options, including On Demand and On Premises, combined with our extensive industry expertise, Sword provides comprehensive support to customers across insurance & healthcare, energy, banking & finance, telecoms, utilities, engineering & construction and government.

For more information, please visit www.sword-group.com.

The BGL Group
The BGL Group was founded in 1992 and has grown to become one of the UK's largest personal lines insurance intermediaries.

Brands within the BGL Group include BUDGET car, van and home insurance, Bennetts bike insurance and carbon-neutral motor insurance, ibuyeco. Junction, BGL Group's affinity business, works with brands like Post Office®, HSBC, M&S Money and Auto Trader to offer insurance products to their customers. The Group also offers a wide range of supplementary products including breakdown cover and legal protection.

The BGL Group has more than 2.3 million customers and more than £600 million GWP. It operates major contact centre operations (Fusion) in Peterborough, Coventry, Sunderland, Peterlee in the UK, and Cape Town, South Africa. The Group currently employs over 2,150 people with its head office in Peterborough.

In 2006 the Group was named 'Intermediary of the Year' (Insurance Age UK Broker Awards) for its outstanding contribution to the insurance industry. In October 2007 the Group was ranked 229th in the Sunday Times HSBC Top Track 250 of Britain's 250 biggest mid-market private companies by latest sales.

In 2007 the Group won the coveted title of Large Business of the Year in the regional Business Awards 2007 hosted by the Evening Telegraph, Peterborough. The Group's affinity business, Junction, won Marketing Campaign of the Year 2007 at the Insurance Times awards.

BISL Ltd, part of the BGL Group, is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority. Registered Address: Pegasus House, Bakewell Road, Orton Southgate, PE2 6YS. Registered in England no 3231094.