Simplyhealth has modernised its data and analytics technology. The health insurance business has begun to use data science to improve customer retention following an-led implementation of a Microsoft Azure data stack and data science skills development programme.
Over three million UK customers access health cash plans, dental, well-being and health insurance services from Simplyhealth, a B corp status business that can trace its history back to 1872.
Dave Exall, Chief Digital and Technology Officer at Simplyhealth says “To meet our strategic ambition to be more data led, we embarked on a project to create a new data landscape and platform. Over a period of 18 months, we have built out a new Microsoft Azure platform.”
Telefónica Tech has deployed an Azure data lake, data warehouse, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, Data Factory and Databricks platform. “Telefónica Tech helped spin up the infrastructure and model out the principal data lake, data warehouse, and platform architecture and design the main business processes. Their consultants came in and worked hand-in-hand with my team to build the platform.”
To enable Simplyhealth to use data science, a hub and spoke model was devised. The data lake and data warehouse act as the first two major spokes for the business, and then the data science provides an additional spoke. In addition, Telefónica Tech implemented Microsoft Power BI to replace an on-premises Tableau technology and trained the Simplyhealth team in data science skills. “They trained the team in the data science processes, such as approach and technical questions to ask,” Bradley says.
“We wanted a trusted partner for that, and we selected Telefónica Tech as a Microsoft Gold Partner, and we have formed a really good rapport with them. The relationship we have built with Telefónica Tech is fantastic and has a huge amount of flexibility,” Bradley says.
Today Simplyhealth has a strong understanding of its customers. “We are able to classify all of our policies into buckets of behaviour and then measure the likelihood of policy lapse as to whether it is a high or low probability, and then look at the behaviours and ask within these what can we do about it,” Bradley says. This means Simplyhealth is able to meet its strategic aims. “Positive health outcomes is an OKR (objective and key results) for Simplyhealth, and if customers are not using the product, we are not helping them,” Bradley says of how benefiting customers is central to growing the business at Simplyhealth. “What we are able to prove with the data is that those customers that engage with the product are much stickier, and that is what our marketing department needed, so they can take proactive action.”
This business outcome was achieved by the integration of data from two separate policy administration systems. Telefónica Tech unified data from both applications to provide Simplyhealth with a single view of its customers. A new cloud computing policy administration system is being adopted by Simplyhealth. The Telefónica Tech deployed data platform means Simplyhealth can easily add new data and new data formats. “Before, that would have been a significant effort,” Bradley says.
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Notable benefits have included quicker membership onboarding and streamlined payment processes. Amie Retallick says, “With access to improved data integrity and automated updates we have found that our member engagement has significantly improved due to our newfound 360-degree view of their data.”
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