Twenty-Plus Years of Active Duty & Sustained Competitive Advantage
A testament to systems that work, is that a number of Certainty Systems client partners have been actively using our platform solutions uninterrupted for over two decades, since well before 'Y2K': through three boom-bust cycles, and counting. Some of those organizations are in highly-regulated industries. Others have grown from a handful of employees to five-figure workforces, from grandfather to son to granddaughter, from dozens of customers to multiple millions.
Those organizations have benefited from the long-term multiplier-effect of stable, efficient and revenue-effective software application development: staying in the business with our customers to experience the short, medium and long-term outcomes of the innovations that we've developed. And, learning and gaining the wisdom of 'what actually works, and what really doesn't'.
The results today are all-economic-conditions battle-tested enterprise operating management solutions: resources that founders, investors, leaders and management can rely on to successfully execute their business plans.
Insurance Distribution Systems & Channel Partner Compensation
A 50-state licensed insurance brokerage began assisting direct-to-consumer businesses in their sale of ancillary insurance and warranty coverages to their core-service customers: travel insurance for individual group members traveling to attend group events, per booking liability protection for home-sharing vacation rental homeowners, property damage coverage, event protection for destination property managers, and more.
Inbound source-data referral and sales transactions were being submitted from over a thousand distribution affiliates across a widely disparate network, in scores of different formats and time-stamps. Because of the myriad of state-by-state insurance rules and approvals, the number of premium-, sales-, referral-, tax- and service-fee paid entities became vast and deep: each insurance transaction spawned dozens of separate micro-transactions requiring strongly-audited tracking, and remittance accounting and management.
Further, the system required the capability to manage and resolve coverage modifications, cancellations, and state-approval-governed premium refunds and commission charge-backs. Finally, the system needed to be the centralized intermediary for multiple back-end claims processing and customer service third-party administrators (TPAs).
The client needed an unprecedented infinite-entity, international, multi-provider, multi-product, multi-currency, multi-lingual, document-fulfilling distribution and service management platform.
To resolve the high-degree of complexity of the resulting transaction flow, the Certainty Systems team designed and assisted in implementing a comprehensive system-wide transaction management platform that integrated thousands of distribution partners, scores of state-by-state-approved products, and dozens of insurance carriers, underwriters and their TPAs.
The solution provides tracking and reporting of sales transactions and derived micro-transactions in order to generate insurance sales ‘bordereaux’ reporting to the carriers and underwriters, commission reporting for the sales and referral network, surplus tax reporting and all required premium trust fund accounting.
In addition, the solution enabled a centralized on-line functionality for coverage-holder claims, customer service and complaints submissions. Today, the system operates as a full intermediary distribution and service management platform that links a range of different carriers and underwriters offering a broad menu of each of their specialized programs, to a vast scope of consumer-facing retailers.
The system enables the insurance brokerage to maintain primary care and control of data for the purposes of underwriting; evidence of coverage fulfillment; management of customer relationships; first notice of loss, and full administration, accounting, documentation and reporting of all receipts and remittances for all parties.
Finally, a major ancillary benefit has been that issuing carriers/underwriters now have virtually real-time insurance coverage sales reporting capability. Rather than waiting 5-10 weeks for sales and claims volume results to be reported and semi-manually consolidated, the new platform automatically enables system-wide outcomes to be reported Next Day. By itself, that capability has the potential to save underwriters millions in operating, fulfillment, compliance and reinsurance costs.
EPM + CRM: Business Requirements & Functional Specifications
One of the largest international conglomerates based in Africa set out to optimize sales, service and customer relationship value performance and results by creating an enterprise-wide workforce / customer performance management process and platform.
Spanning over twenty diverse strategic business units, with nearly forty thousand employees at thousands of sites, and millions of customers, the challenge was to create a solution that would universally serve stakeholder and management objectives, customer relationship expectations and employee aspirations.
Over the multi-year project Certainty Systems team members worked with hundreds of line-of-business, and process and technology support managers and teams, and created an unprecedented comprehensive Employee Performance plus Customer Relationship Management process and technology development and integration plan: EPM + CRM.
The plan included full-scope Business Requirement and Functional Specification documents, including frameworks and methods for unit and individual goal-setting and performance planning; on-demand activity and results management and reporting; individual and team-based sales, referral, service, relationship, and productivity incentive and recognition programs; multi-platform source data and data warehouse integration; technology platform development and deployment; management coaching; and performance evaluation.
The project pre-dated the popular emergence of CRM/ABM by many years, and the subsequent explosion in employee and business performance management by almost a decade.
Faster & Better Data Enables Insight-Driven Performance Improvements
A national consumer services firm, with millions of customers, had nearly 100 disparate data sources; real-time, daily, weekly, month-end, periodic, leads, referrals, quotes, sales, service tickets, portfolios, productivity, surveys, assessments, new hires and job changes, products and price changes, incentives and spiffs, and more. It took two dozen people all week, every week to prepare and aggregate that data for once-a-week, 3-4 days-delayed, workforce and business unit performance reports.
Using Data Manager the Certainty Systems team automated 100% of the entire process to run daily, error-free, in a few hours, with just a single FTE. And, through the Metric and Report Engines the client's workforce and management were able to receive daily, instead of late weekly performance reports. The result was a multiple orders of magnitude improvement in workforce cost-efficiency and performance productivity. And, with daily reporting, sales activity, service satisfaction and customer retention results skyrocketed.
Mass Distribution in Merchant Services Sales
A leading merchant services “super-ISO” engaged Certainty Systems team members in the design, development, and implementation of an enterprise-wide performance management initiative, primarily focused on business development, sales, service, and relationship retention and profitability.
With hundreds of thousands of clients, tens of thousands of sales and service reps, hundreds of sales hierarchies, thousands of products, and specialized and varying pricing and fees for every combination thereof, the complexity of integrating multiple data systems and calculating performance metrics was unprecedented.
The Certainty Systems team developed an innovative approach to enable the rapid-velocity-of-change in the organization’s day-to-day sales and service operations, the frequent changes to the organization entity hierarchies, and cost/price changes, contributing to their dramatic growth in the ensuing decade.
Email Marketing Performance Management & Compensation
A rapidly-growing national email and social-media retail-customer-loyalty SaaS platform engaged the Certainty Systems team to assist their rise to the next magnitude of scale and volume. Their platform was strong on outreach capabilities, but limited in scope and capacity on customer loyalty and workforce and distribution system performance management.
The enterprise needed to not only monitor and reward consumers for purchase activities and loyalty, but also client sales and support staff for service quality and satisfaction, and affiliate partners for their referrals and sales.
The Certainty Systems solution generated multiple streams of sales and service performance metrics/analytics and compensation outcomes, transaction-by-transaction, for thousands of locations, tens of thousands of workforce, and millions of consumers. And, comprehensive customer and affiliate analytics enabled a highly-targeted “customer engagement” relationship strategy that improved loyalty levels, revenue per customer, relationship retention, and customer satisfaction, across all categories.
Automating Tip Distribution, Pay-Outs & Tip-Outs
A nationwide payment card issuer engaged the Certainty Systems team in the design and development of an innovative card-based waiter tip-out platform for a high-volume consumer-serving business.
On the floor in restaurants, bars, and lounges, patrons typically pay bills and tips via credit card, with the totals being reported on a waiter’s shift-end tip report. But, because of their unique service dynamics, tips to waiters were typically paid in cash: this is because waiters need to “tip-out” each other and their support teams (sharing a split of their earned tips) at the ends of their respective shifts. And, when large parties are served by a team of multiple waiters and support staff, the ending large-amount tip needs to be split fairly by the lead waiter to all members of that team (the "tip-out").
When tips are paid in cash, each night’s-end “tip-out” process is manual, cash-based, and conducted by and between the co-workers. But, when the platform is 300+ venues, with 10,000+ participating part- and full-time workers, and 24/7/365 operations, the volume of cash that has to be armored-trucked to the venues to pay tips (because most patron payments are credit-cards) makes the cash-method very challenging, risky and costly: enter debit cards.
Because of the realities of employee staffing schedules, attendance and assignments, multiple-venue employment, workforce turnover rates, and the extensive audit requirements for all transactions, the automation solution had to be extremely, and uniquely, robust in its integration with both the centralized human resource management (HRIS/HCM) and distributed-venue point-of-sales (POS) systems. And, operate in real-time for 24/7/365 workforce access. This was a worldwide first-time implementation of such a solution.
Beyond a simple debit-card replacement for cash tip-outs, the Certainty Systems-designed solution uniquely enabled a “venue-to-employee-to-employee-to-venue” tip-out capability so waiters could equitably, and electronically, receive and re-distribute shares of reported tip amounts to their participating and supporting co-workers: automating both the tip, and the tip-out, processes.
At end of each day, the system settled-out the tips, tip-ins, and tip-outs, and created the automated banking instructions to fund each participating employee’s tip debit card. And, generated all of the required human resource, performance and tax reporting for the company.