Mutual and Federal Leverages SharePoint for ECM Platform
Due to the powerful capabilities of SharePoint, Mutual & Federal’s internal communication processes were streamlined, improving efficiencies, response times, tracking, and feedback.
Mutual & Federal is the longest-serving short-term insurer in South Africa, with a proud heritage that dates back more than 180 years. the FSP currently provides an extensive range of short-term insurance products, solutions, and services to private, commercial, and corporate clients.
It also provides cover for the agricultural, engineering, and marine sectors. In February 2010, the insurer became a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Old Mutual Group – and the only short-term insurance company in the Group. Mutual & Federal has since steadily increased its footprint into new African territories through integration into the Old Mutual Group business in Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria.
Business Challenge
“We support an expansive user network of more than 2500 individuals across the country and into southern Africa, to which we routinely email communications,” explains Mutual & Federal Subject Matter Expert for Digital Product Support Services, Sunitha Erasmus. “These communications are diverse, and might cover anything from marketing communications to instructions for IT updates required by the system. Others may be time-sensitive or require feedback or action. Our challenge was that, where communication was aimed at specific users, groups, or areas within the business, we had no way of targeting only this segment.”
The result was that all users would receive all communication, regardless of whether it was relevant to them or not. Faced with a flooded inbox, many delayed reading internal messages, or ignored them altogether, which meant that important information was being lost. While senders could see whether a message was delivered, there was no way of tracking whether it was actually read.
“We needed a means of streamlining our communications to ensure that the right communication was not only sent to the right people, but that the content was being read and understood. A read receipt only indicates successful delivery; understanding is not guaranteed.
We needed assurance that the content had actually been read and comprehended by its intended audience,” says Erasmus. “Since most communication includes digital attachments, sending out bulk mailers to the entire directory also put pressure on network resources. These were being depleted unnecessarily, due to the number of attachments being emailed to staff,” says Erasmus.
Benefits
Mint helped Mutual & Federal make the most of its existing browser-based collaboration and document management platform. Exploiting functionality from within Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange, users are now able to extract targeted lists of recipients or restrict communication distribution capabilities to a specified group of users.
