Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Collaborative Support Solution to Resolve Problems Faster, Raise Employee Satisfaction
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Financial Services
Customer Profile
Pacific Life provides life insurance products, annuities, mutual funds, and other investment products to individuals and businesses. Based in Newport Beach, California, the company has 2,500 employees.
Business Situation
After purchasing a document records and management solution that includes tight integrations between Microsoft® and Meridio products, the company also wanted a collaborative support offering.
Solution
Pacific Life chose the Collaborative Support Solution from Microsoft, a unique offering combining Microsoft support leadership with tightly orchestrated Meridio and Microsoft problem resolution.
Benefits
Faster problem resolution
Increased employee satisfaction
Cohesive team collaboration / “Getting our needs met quickly, not having to coordinate and work with multiple companies—we expect those to be the biggest benefits.”
Scott Johnson, Assistant Vice President HR Technology, Pacific Life
Pacific Life Insurance Company provides life insurance products, annuities, mutual funds, and otherinvestment products to individuals and businesses. In 2006, the company purchased a solution to more efficiently manage electronic documents and automate its compliance with records retention policies. Pacific Life turned to Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 and Meridio® eDRM. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 handles core document management, and Meridio provides transparent records management to facilitate compliance. Because of the tight integrations between these products, Pacific Life wanted a support offering that would combine a primary Microsoft support touchpoint with issue coordination between Meridio and Microsoft. Microsoft and Meridio crafted the Collaborative Support Solution to provide a single Microsoft contact point for all issues, resolve issues faster, and increase employee satisfaction.
Situation
Founded in 1868, Pacific Life provides life insurance products, annuities, and mutual funds, and offers a variety of other investment products and services to individuals, businesses, and pension plans. The company counts more than half of the 100 largest U.S. companies as clients and is a member of the Insurance Marketplace Standards Association (IMSA), which promotes high ethical standards for the sale of individual life insurance and annuities. Based in Newport Beach, California, Pacific Life has 2,500 employees.
In early 2006, Pacific Life chose software solutions from Microsoft and Meridio, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, to help it better manage its many electronic documents and records. The solution included Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, as the centralized point for users to access, manage, share, and interact with documents and records, and Meridio® eDRM, a solution to help Pacific Life employees systematically comply with its records retention policies. Currently, documents “are in multiple locations,” says Scott Johnson Assistant Vice President, HR Technology, Pacific Life. “The most common places people store documents are in network file shares, hard drives, and e-mail folders.” In addition, there was no companywide records retention system in place. “In most cases, individual users are responsible for managing their documents,” says Johnson.
Meridio provides a solution that is very closely intertwined with the Microsoft Office system. The product in effect adds a seamless “compliance layer,” in the form of additional functions, to Microsoft Office products. “In order to meet compliance and records retention policies in the organization, Pacific Life needs to make every information worker a compliant worker,” says Becky Thomas, Vice President of North American Operations at Meridio. “And the Meridio solution integrates with the Office suite to establish that.” For example, users might see extra menu options on existing Microsoft Office desktop applications—including SharePoint Portal Server and Microsoft Office products like Outlook® 2003 messaging and collaboration client, Word 2003, PowerPoint® 2003 presentation graphics program, and Excel® 2003 spreadsheet software. Documents, e-mail messages, slides, and spreadsheets might specify “Save to Meridio” or “Declare as a record.”
The tight integration between the two products provides convenience to Pacific Life employees, who are used to the Microsoft Office desktop environment. However, it also creates challenges for all those supporting the solution. Scott Johnson of Pacific Life says, “It can be difficult when you’re working with multiple companies to try to identify where one partner’s responsibility ends and another’s begins. It can take a while to work through that process.”
“Due to the nature of a multivendor solution,” says Thomas, “where each product adds another point of failure, it can create challenges in being able to triage issues properly. The customer’s concern is, ‘Who am I going to call if I have a problem?’” Pacific Life wanted to know that when support was needed—regardless of where the issue originated—it would be resolved quickly and efficiently.
Solution
After Pacific Life had purchased the solution, Microsoft and Meridio joined forces to offer Pacific Life the option of a Collaborative Support Solution. The first support offering of its kind by either Microsoft or Meridio, the Collaborative Support Solution would provide Pacific Life with one support number, and one company to call—Microsoft—for swift and integrated resolution of all issues spanning the Microsoft-Meridio solution.
Johnson says, “We decided to opt for the Collaborative Support Solution for a number of reasons. Because of the fact that we’re going to do so many things with the solution and so many of our business processes are going to change, we were willing to purchase that additional level of support that adds real value for us.” Because from a typical user’s perspective many of the functions of the two products are closely intertwined, Johnson says, “We wanted to make sure that we avoided a situation where if we had a functional or a technical issue, we’d have to spend time educating two parties on where their products overlapped.”
With this solution, if Pacific Life has an issue, they call one 800 number. Thomas says, “Meridio has trained both Pacific Life and the Microsoft support group who will be supporting the solution—so that they will very quickly be able to identify where a problem is and more quickly get it to resolution.”
Once a problem meets set criteria, Pacific Life escalates it to a dedicated Collaborative Support Solution representative at Microsoft. The Microsoft-trained support team will either do direct resolution or escalate further to Meridio, depending on the nature and severity of the problem.
The offering effectively “connects the dots” between two very mature and successful support organizations: Microsoft Services Partner Advantage, which provides extensive services to assist independent software vendors in more successfully developing, deploying, and supporting solutions using Microsoft technologies, and Microsoft Services Premier Support, which provides Microsoft customers with designated account management and technical support to maximize technology investments and meet business needs.The Collaborative Support Solution gives Pacific Life the best of both services—close collaboration between Microsoft and Meridio, and a single, dedicated support resource.
Erik Benjaminson, Practice Manager for ISV Partner Services at Microsoft, says, “We’ve connected these two support organizations to provide the superior support experience that Pacific Life requested.” This solution meets the needs of a specific kind of customer, says Benjaminson. “The prerequisite for this is that the customer has a Microsoft Services Premier Support agreement and prefers to leverage their relationship with their Premier Support Technical Account Manager in a multivendor solution.” The software partner also needs to participate in a Partner Advantage agreement. Microsoftis testing the Collaborative Support Solution in a pilot environment “to meet the needs of both partners and customers in the interest of wanting to provide an outstanding support experience for highly leveraged and integrated software solutions,” says Benjaminson.
Pacific Life will start converting its first users to the new solution in August 2006. Johnson says, “We went through an extensive proof of concept last December, where we made sure that the combination of products did everything we expected it to do.” The proof of concept went “exceptionally well,” he says. As the solution is rolled out in stages to all 2,500 employees at Pacific Life, “That’s when we expect that the support agreement will be really beneficial for us. Because the two products have to talk to one another, work with one another—knowing that Microsoft will be our dedicated advocate whenever we need it really adds value for us.”
Benefits
“Getting our needs met quickly, not having to coordinate and work with multiple companies—we expect those to be the biggest benefits,” says Johnson. The close collaboration between the companies is expected to greatly improve overall employee satisfaction.
Faster Problem Resolution
The biggest benefit for the Pacific Life IT department is the time that will be saved in resolving issues. “Having to educate two separate companies on integration points between their products—I’ve done that and it can be difficult,” says Johnson. “This support solution will make our job a lot easier, because Microsoft is guaranteed to be our advocate in that space.” With the amount of cross-training and collaboration between the two companies, Johnson says, “We are confident we will get quick turnaround time on all of our support needs.”
Increased Employee Satisfaction
Pacific Life has already minimized the time and labor associated with logistics and administration by signing only one support agreement, with Microsoft. Johnson says, “It really helps us out internally, to not have to manage multiple contracts.”
The simplicity and convenience of having one phone number to call to resolve a problem provides great comfort to Pacific Life employees. “It’s about having one contact who takes over responsibility for things and says, ‘Our goal is to make your life as easy as possible’—that’s really what this is about for us at the end of the day,” Johnson says.
Cohesive Team Collaboration
The close collaboration between Meridio and Microsoft increases confidence at Pacific Life that the solution will carry the company far into the future. “I know that they are working together to make sure that future product releases have been planned and tested together. They’re making sure the functional things they want to do with the integrations are working,” Johnson says.
Overall, Pacific Life has been very impressed with how aligned Microsoft and Meridio are in their approach to helping the company succeed.
Microsoft Services
Microsoft Services helps customers and partners discover and implement high-value Microsoft solutions that generate rapid, meaningful, and measurable results. As the consulting, technical support, and customer service arm of the world’s leading software company, Microsoft Services enables the successful adoption, deployment, and use of Microsoft solutions and technologies for all customers, from the individual to the enterprise.
For more information about Microsoft Services, go to: