NetApp has been chosen by Autonet Insurance, one of the UK’s largest independent van insurance brokers, to conduct its storage infrastructure refresh, which will help it to provide an improved service for its customers.
With a wide range of insurance products on offer, Autonet has been growing exponentially and now handles more than 1.2 million customer calls and more than 250,000 live insurance policies a year, with a turnover in excess of ?130 million.
Prior to its infrastructure refresh, Autonet found that its website was becoming less responsive, with increased load times. As a result, its customer services were being slowed down, due to limited disk I/O. Internally, teams were also working long hours to service planned downtime and complete necessary infrastructure maintenance.
In conjunction with LIMA, Autonet Insurance opted to upgrade to the latest NetApp All Flash FAS (AFF) with the clustered Data ONTAP operating system. The AFF has bought lightning-fast performance, ten times faster than experienced previously, with an increase of 10,000 IOPS to 100,000 IOPs. In addition, customer webpage refresh times reduced from 15 seconds to sub-three seconds. The cDOT operating system is non-disruptive, meaning the Autonet team no longer needs to deal with downtime, even when adding disks or re-configuring the infrastructure.
For its 600 customer experience agents, this upgrade has resulted in the instantaneous completion of customer transactions, which previously took several seconds. The result has been significant financial savings and increased online sales.
Nik Potts, Head of IT, Autonet Insurance said: “There has never been a time when we haven’t had absolute confidence in both NetApp and its partner LIMA to deliver for us. When considering our next move, we had no real intention of using anyone else. With this new solution in place, we have seen great improvement in our customer experience, both for the agents and for the customers themselves, and this is something that really differentiates us within the market. Thanks to NetApp, we have seen an increase in online sales.”
Elliot Howard, UK&I Managing Director, NetApp said: “We have a very strong partnership with LIMA. Together, we are helping Autonet Insurance to improve its customer experience through a robust infrastructure, which allows it to process a huge volume of data effectively. This was previously a major pain point for Autonet and now the company’s secure and scalable IT infrastructure is helping the team continually improve and evolve the service their customers are receiving.”
