Invest in Technology but make sure it’s smart!

Published On: February 4, 2022

Day 10 without Heating…..

The Gas engineer appears wearing a mask and a shiny uniform for the annual service of our boiler, it’s a Worcester 40 cdi if you are interested.

The smart appearance, with all the tools, including an iPad with detailed diagnostic reporting filled me with confidence, I even offer the engineer a cup of tea!

Alas, our boiler had a broken seal and “is out of commission son”, I’m in my 50s and he was younger but not to worry before he’d left the house he’d reported the fault through to HQ and they’d be in touch. I can also go on to the insurer website and ‘track’ my claim.

As I later found out the App automatically reported it through to the engineering business and a middle business. The engineering business need to provide a quote to the middle business, they then needed to go to the insurer, who needed to approve it and then tell the middle business to authorise the repair. The middle business can then tell the engineer that it’s okay to order the £15 gasket, the middle business are the ones that inform me of what’s going on.

What could possibly go wrong?

I’ll spare you the rest of the saga but it involved me phoning all three parts of the chain, sometimes waiting for over an hour to get through and systematically diagnosing the flaws in their system. The technology should work but it doesn’t because they haven’t changed an out of date system! The claim tracking is a good idea but it doesn’t work.

In essence, if you digitise an inefficient and broken process you get a slightly faster inefficient and broken process and you’ve just wasted a whole load of IT investment. You lose people’s hearts and minds along the way and you often hear people blaming the technology.

At Insure Apps you don’t buy a one size fits all solution, we tailor it to your processes and where your processes have the potential to be improved we demonstrate how and why it could be done a different way. You control the technology and you control the process.

We live in Scotland and in a few hours it is due to be 1 degree centigrade! I suppose it’s one way of demonstrating to me just how important it is to harness technology in the right way. To map the customer journey from start to finish and devise solutions that remove bottlenecks or at the very least make it clear to all involved what’s happening.

I’ve been promised that the heating will be fixed sometime between 8am and 5pm tomorrow, we shall see…

Thank goodness for Erin, who took ownership of the situation on Day 9, thank you for the Erins out there that deliver good customer service, in this case, despite the technology!