Technology is at the core of everything we do at Simply Business

While there is little debate about technology being at the core of many organisations, for us at Simply Business, this really does ring true.

Technology continues to change the way we work at Simply Business, how we architect our systems and how we do business.

In this article, we look at some of the ways that technology is enabling and empowering our teams to innovate and evolve.

Technology is an enabler for driving change at every level of our business. Advances in cloud technology, networking infrastructure, teleconferencing and machine learning, to name a few, continue to transform how our business interacts with customers and how we organise our workplace. Yet technology is not an end in itself. As we've grown, the business has adapted to embrace the changes that such enabling technologies can bring. Bridging the gap between the business and technology teams is becoming ever more important.

Connecting remote teams

Technology teams today are often distributed across different geographies, as companies tap into expertise in remote as well as domestic talent pools. In recent years, the technology team at Simply Business has grown significantly and continues to expand. Connecting global teams and the challenges posed by long-distance communication has become easier through technologies such as cloud-based enterprise communication and networking.

When we reconfigured our offices in 2018, we equipped each meeting room and team pod with telepresence technology to cultivate an immersive working experience for our product development teams. Regardless of location, our teams are able to work seamlessly across almost any connected device, wherever they are in the world.

Teleworking technologies such as teleconferencing and integrated collaboration software means our remote teams can be present without physically being present, a significant enabler for our agile workflows.

Enabling customer value

Insurance is the staple of our business; it's a complex area, and ensuring our customers get the right cover is imperative. We've built systems in-house that interface with cloud-based web services, high availability infrastructure and communications platforms to connect customers with the right providers, for the right service, in an intuitive and timely way. Something that a few years ago would have taken highly-skilled brokers is now available at our customers' fingertips.

Empowering teams to better serve our customers

Making sure our customers are well-cared for is fundamental for any business - especially a brokerage service like ours. That ethos also extends to our internal customers.

The SB Tech team has built an in-house telephony system for our customer call center. Using cloud-based communication platform services, we're able to integrate event-driven technology with messaging, voice and SMS services. Customers get routed through to available call centre consultants immediately they become available. Moreover, using detailed analytics on high versus low traffic volumes, we can adapt our call centre services to meet demand.

As a customer-centric business, it's important that when we do call customers, it's at the best time for them. By embedding AI-powered, event-driven design in our systems, we're able to use data to connect with customers at the right time, on the right channel, to more effectively serve customer needs. In this way, we're able to use technology to empower our staff to assist customers when they need us the most.

Building resilience

We've combined cloud-based infrastructure, DNS web services, load balancing and containerisation to leverage innovative technology that ensures our systems are built, designed and run for high availability, performance and security.

Technology at the core of the business

Technology is one of the central pillars of our business; but it's the relationship between the business and the technology team that sets us apart from other organisations. We're not only regarded as custodians of our platforms and growth plans, but as pioneers for pushing boundaries. This cohesive relationship between the business and the technology team is what drives us to make life better for our customers, our colleagues and for ourselves.

While insurance is at the heart of our business, technology is the pulse that keeps it beating. We can only anticipate the transformations that future technologies will bring and I am proud to be part of that journey!