In July 2022, Activate Group was listed in the Sunday Times 100: Britain’s fastest-growing private companies. 

It was an incredibly proud moment for my team and I, and a great opportunity to reflect on the part technology has played in our success. Our Claims Management System has always been one of our biggest selling points.  

I think that’s down to four things we’ve really got right: 

1 Flexibility 

We own the system, so we can develop and build on it whenever and however we need to. 

If you’ve ever used an out of the box system, it’s likely that at some point you found yourself limited by its capabilities. 

Having complete ownership of our system means we can deliver bespoke options for customers, matching processes to their individual business needs. 

Our in-house development team work on our system every day, delivering our roadmap and reacting quickly if something changes in the market, or for an individual customer. 

A great example is our industry-first capacity management tool. In the last 18 months demand for repair capacity has increased across the industry. We responded by building a daily capacity tool within our system. 

The tool allows repairers across our network to update capacity in real time, improving the data we have on repair and courtesy car availability and creating a smoother customer journey. 

2 Automation 

I firmly believe technology should make life easier.  

Workflows and automation are game-changers for us and our customers. 

We automate straight-forward, predictable tasks to free our teams up to handle more complex cases and deliver fantastic service. 

Automatic reminders keep us within SLA, and ensure customers are regularly updated. Plus, automation improves accuracy, checking data as it’s entered, and flagging inconsistencies and common errors. 

3 Transparency 

Transparency is a key element of our customer offering, and technology plays a big part in delivering it. 

We use APIs to connect to body shop and customer systems, so we can see what’s happening with a repair and so can our customers. 

There’s no double-keying, and integrated systems significantly reduce the need to call and request updates. 

‘We enable customers and team members to produce customised dashboards to highlight stats and trends that are most important. 

This is delivered through Tableau, an industry-leading business intelligence tool, integrated with our own data warehouse to provide rich insight and analytics. 

All this means that our customers have visibility of individual repairs and overall performance whenever they need it. 

4 Continuous improvement 

For me, this is the most important and exciting part of our technology strategy. 

A development roadmap built around customer feedback, market trends and our own data. 

We work collaboratively with customers and suppliers to identify how we can improve, and use a benefits matrix to prioritise development time. 

We can still be flexible, but the roadmap ensures that we keep our eye on the big picture, and never stand still! Take our recently launched app for example, which is already dramatically improving image quality and repair triage. 

Our technology is always evolving, allowing us to be at the forefront of developing leading insurtech solutions using new codebases like blazor and react as well as microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native architectures. 

I started this blog by talking about how technology has played a key part in our success – as we continue to grow it will have an even bigger part to play. 

A focus on continuous improvement means we’ll keep developing our tech to meet the changing needs of the market and exceed customer expectations.