Insurance giant Admiral Group is set to implement a customer relationship management (CRM) platform as part of an IT overhaul that is designed to speed up time to market for new products.

After a review of the company’s applications in 2007, Admiral decided that it needed new systems to face growing market demands, and enhancing existing CRM software became a priority.

“To play in the market we are in, we need to bring new products and services to customers quite quickly, so the systems behind the operation need scale,” said Steve Webster, IT director at Admiral.

“We also needed a system that is highly flexible and always available, so moving towards a service-oriented architecture model made sense for the company.”

The CRM platform will be rolled out in phases and will cover about 2,500 agents at customer service
centres in Swansea and Cardiff.

The first stage will allow customers to deal with payment and profile updates by May, and functionality will be extended into sales-related areas before the end of the year.

“There were two possible options – we could either have chosen a packaged replacement solution or evolve and extend what we currently have, which is what we decided to do,” said Webster.

“New value-added features such as collaboration, context and customer management are some of the main attractions of the new system, in addition to a high degree of integration as we are going to integrate it into our core database.”

The rollout of the Sword Ciboodle CRM software is the main project underpinning Admiral’s IT overhaul, which will see the complete replacement of other legacy systems over the next two years.