Specialist insurance intermediary, Rothwell and Towler, has over 40 people working in their customer services department, handling between 700-1,000 customer inquiries a day. Recent growth demanded a more reliable IT system

The Client

Rothwell & Towler Ltd is a specialist insurance intermediary, providing travel insurance services to consumers throughout the UK. The firm is known as one of the leading providers of travel insurance policies for travellers with pre-existing medical conditions. Established in 1973, the firm has expanded in response to a growing travel insurance market and is now part of the Crispin Speers & Partners group. Rothwells has over 40 people working in their customer services department, handling between 700 – 1,000 inbound customer inquiries a day. Whilst the majority of customer advisors are based in Rothwells’ Exeter head office, others are home-based or located in other regional offices.

The IT challenge

“The online channel is essential to our business and we need a reliable and resilient IT service so that our call centre agents can provide a responsive service to our clients,” explained Managing Director, Martin Rothwell.  “We are writing over 30,000 insurance policies a month and some can be quite complex.”

Orca has been Rothwells’ IT partner for over 10 years and has supported the firm’s growth strategy. As the firm’s business has expanded, the demands on the IT system have become greater and it was becoming obvious that the IT system needed to be upgraded in order to provide the scalability and flexibility for its future IT requirements. 

The IT Solution

Orca recommended migrating to Microsoft Office 365 for better integration across the range of different business applications and also to support remote workers more effectively. In-built security was another benefit of Office 365 that was a top priority to ensure protection of sensitive customer data and regulatory compliance, for example with GDPR. Rothwells uses the standard Microsoft Office applications, such as Outlook, Word and Excel, as well as insurance specific systems.

“As our long-term strategic technology partner, Orca really understands our business and has helped us to plan our IT strategy to support our expanding business,” said Martin Rothwell. “They planned the migration to minimise the impact on the day-to-day business activity. The migration took place over a weekend and by Sunday morning, the email system was operational – which meant that we were ahead of schedule.”

“Orca project-managed the migration, including upgrading the server and moving all of our data and email to the new system. They liaised with our in-house IT team, Internet Service Provider (ISP) and telephone network provider to facilitate the smooth running of the entire system. Orca’s engineers went beyond their initial remit and even helped to resolve some telephony issues – so that by Monday when our team came into work, the new IT system was working effectively. Orca helped to iron out some initial teething problems such as helping staff to get used to a slightly different user interface. And the most important thing is that on Monday, our customers had no idea that a major system upgrade had happened over the weekend. Everything worked as it should do and we are delighted with the result which has helped us to become even more efficient to handle our customers’ insurance needs.”

Future-proofing with a new IT platform

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