"Offshoring with Intogreat to ensure consistency and sustainability within our organisation"

About AB Phillips

AB Phillips (ABP) is a risk, insurance & financial services business based in Melbourne, Victoria. AB Phillips offers insurance and financial services as well as people management expertise to businesses in Australia.

Featured in this interview is Tania Anderson, the Director of Operations for AB Phillips.

What problems were you experiencing in your business before engaging Intogreat?

AB Phillips (ABP) had been looking at various areas in their business that they needed to focus on.

Their Processing team was certainly an area of concern. The management was finding it hard to attract candidates in Australia, and when they did attract candidates, they found it difficult to retain their Processing staff. Therefore, they had to deal with a lot of turnover occurring in the organisation, which led to instability and inconsistency in their processing function.

This led the ABP management to consider an offshore solution, hoping to find a solution that would enable them to have consistency and sustainability within a team. This would then enable the management to offshore those common high-volume processes within their organisation, and use their onshore team to really focus on their area of expertise that’s really critical to their business.

What specific results have you achieved since offshoring?

Since offshoring, AB Phillips have been able to improve their processes and also ensure that their processes are compliant–meaning, maintaining consistency in how they process within the business.

This also denotes that they’ve been able to service their internal clients, account managers and brokers far more efficiently and in a more timely manner. In addition to that, they’ve been able to build a knowledge management system where they managed all of their processes, which has been great not just for their offshore team but they’ve also been able to leverage off that for their onshore team.

Intogreat talks to AB Phillips’ Tania Anderson

What attracted you so much to Intogreat?

AB Phillips: Intogreat certainly offered a more holistic service compared to other providers they looked at in the market. Intogreat have been able to come into the organisation, truly understand the business, understand their processes and systems.

When AB Phillips were documenting processes for their offshore operation, the team at Intogreat were intimately involved in how that affected their business. As a result, the AB Phillips management were able to attract the right talent offshore to perform such activities.

What has impressed you most since engaging Intogreat?

For AB Phillips, Intogreat have been an excellent partner when it comes to offshoring. Intogreat have worked with AB Phillips from the very beginning and have supported ABP on a daily basis with their offshore team.

Intogreat provide direct management offshore that enables the ABP management to focus on what they need to do onshore. Intogreat have helped ABP establish a great operating rhythm based on their needs, which is what makes for a great offshoring partnership.

Has anything taken you by surprise?

One of the things that has really surprised the management is the caliber of candidates that they’ve been able to attract offshore. The candidates are often degree-qualified and have had experience in other offshore operations.

They’re able to hit the ground running since they’ve got great support at Intogreat. For the ABP management, to be able to attract that high-caliber candidate offshore–it’s been fantastic.

What has been the best part about partnering with Intogreat?

For ABP, the best part about working with Intogreat is that they’ve had an absolutely strong relationship from the beginning. Intogreat have built credibility with the ABP management from the get-go, and truly understood the operations. Intogreat have been working step-by-step with AB Phillips along the way.

Tania Anderson (ABP Director of Operations): “They’ve set us up for success and it’s been a fantastic experience.”

What type of business do you think would gain the most value from using Intogreat?

Tania Anderson: “Any organisation that sees an opportunity within their business for how they can improve what they do. If they can identify, improve processes or systems that they think could be offshored, partnering with Intogreat would be a great start, particularly within our business–insurance.”

The processing tasks that ABP does everyday is a great example of something that’s easy to offshore, executing the same high-volume processes over and over. It was a good start for AB Phillips, and now they’ve diversified across an array of areas in their business–from claims management, to accounting, finance, information technology, etc.