Maritime Life Assurance Company (formerly Aetna Life Insurance Company of Canada)

Maritime assures prompt customer service with SYSB-II

What could your company do with an extra hour of productivity each day from your employees? What if you could squeeze another hour of "prime time" from your 8-to-5 routine?

Maritime Life Assurance Company has done just that with SYSB-II, the VSAM file-sharing solution from H&W. The company is realizing benefits that extend beyond employee productivity and into improvements in customer service.

Maritime's data center, located in Toronto, Ontario, services more than 70 branches throughout three time zones across the North American continent. Each day, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., Maritime's Individual Insurance Administration System was taken from its users for batch processing.

The problem

During this time, the client information system was completely unavailable. Underwriters were prevented from making changes to their policies.

The results

Approximately 100 employees were required to fill the time with other tasks, and customers were told “the system is down; we'll call you when it's up.” The impact on prompt customer service was made even worse as employees found themselves playing telephone tag with policyholders.

The solution

Minimize the batch window.

"SYSB-II," said Bonnie Allen, Senior Application Specialist from Maritime's data center. "We set it up to run every day for a month. I would put in production data and cause it to fail just to verify everything was alright. It did just fine. Then we installed it in our production environment."

In a short period of time, Maritime stress-tested SYSB-II, installed it in production for its application entry program, and extended SYSB-II's use to a second application, with equally impressive results.

Using SYSB-II has improved customer service and employee morale for Maritime. Now branch offices can get the information they need at any time during the day; employees can immediately respond to customer requests without the need for call-backs or telephone tag.