Property Services Company, MA Assist improves business efficiency by 20%

MA Assist, a UK-based property services company, handles insurance claims, home repairs, and maintenance services for property owners. With customer projects totaling more than £30m annually, the company adopted Tableau to streamline operations, track market trends, and improve customer experiences. MA Assist is now 20 percent more operationally efficient than before. Insurance claim durations were also cut by 15 percent, and the company is now targeting a 20 percent year-over-year saving on the cost and duration of insurance claims.

Customers are the heart of MA Assist, so it is natural for the company to seek new ways to improve experiences for their customers. One of the areas identified was the customer claims journey, or the amount of time it takes MA Assist to manage an insurance claim – from the moment the claim is first submitted to when it ultimately closes. Without the right tools, this process can be slow and cumbersome since the parties involved need to share information between each other.

“We knew that better business intelligence tools would provide the data sharing platform our team needed to coordinate claims more efficiently, reducing claims durations for customers and clients,” explains Jorge Gonzalo, Managing Director, MA Assist. “With Tableau, we can create detailed data visualizations and instantly share them with all parties involved in the claims process, ensuring everyone stays up to speed and greatly reducing administration time on each case.

Jorge added, “In addition to its data sharing capabilities, the insights we can extract using Tableau are much more detailed than anything we were able to achieve before. This allows us to deliver a level of customer service never previously possible, which is reflected in our world class net promoter score of over 70, something we are immensely proud of.”

With Tableau, MA Assist can better monitor and report business performance across all major departments including operations, sales and account management teams, as well as throughout its repair network. Connecting all key data sources together through Tableau provided accurate, up-to-date performance reports whenever required, and eliminated delay-to-insights issues.

“Prior to Tableau we relied on spreadsheets to collate and report on key business performance,” says Jorge. “While sufficient in some areas, the time taken to compile and analyze data led to key insights going unnoticed, or only being spotted too late to be helpful.”

“Now we’re able to see in real-time how we are performing, month to date and year to date, using a variety of customizable Tableau visualizations,” Jorge added. By extracting, collating, visualizing and analyzing data taken from all our core management systems, we can immediately see where improvements can be made across all our processes.”

Supply chain has significant impact on MA Assist’s revenues. Understanding supply chain capacity in real-time allows MA Assist to identify if any suppliers are having capacity challenges and shift work to other suppliers as required. Not only does this improve efficiency throughout their extensive home repairs network, it also reduces costs for insurance clients who directly benefit from these savings.

“Tableau gives us complete visibility into every stage of the supply chain, from the initial customer call, to the surveyor visit, estimates gathered, specialist suppliers appointed, repair work completed and customer sign off,” explains Jorge. “Furthermore, we can analyze data by supplier, client and commercial model, allowing us to quickly spot problems and rectify them.”

Prior to Tableau, MA Assist had two employees dedicated to the production of management information. Now, these same employees have become highly trained data analysts, specializing in the identification of key trends and issues. They can use Tableau to ask more questions that are relevant, drill down deeper and gain a better understanding of the key trends affecting the UK insurance sector.

“The Association of British Insurance recently noted that escape of water claims are growing in value, with the number of rooms damaged and claimed for increasing over the last three years,” says Jorge. “Previously we wouldn’t have been able to do much with that information, but with Tableau we can analyze our own databases to see if this trend is reflected in the claims we have processed. If so, we can tailor our offerings and educate our clients accordingly.”

Jorge went on to say that when, “armed with better information, we’ve improved efficiency by more than 20 percent across all our processes, reinvesting the time saved directly back into the business. Tableau is a valuable catalyst for change, not only within our organization, but across the whole insurance sector.”