Swiss Re's Admin Re®, the closed-book consolidator of life and health policies, has made a £5 million investment in a new cloud-based unified communication and contact centre platform. It will cover three sites and be used by 2,000 office-based employees including 300 contact centre agents. It is being designed, implemented and managed by Olive Communications, the UK's leading cloud-based business communications provider.

Admin Re operates in an industry that is changing. The Pensions landscape in the UK is undergoing significant transformation, and Admin Re is adapting to deal effectively with resulting customer queries. Customers' needs are at the heart of its business model and it continually transforms its systems, processes and people to improve the customer experience. In addition, Admin Re has an ambitious growth strategy in the UK, and is building for future success.

Having already upgraded their core actuarial, finance and IT capabilities along with improved systems across operating platforms, Admin Re recently turned its focus to an upgraded telecoms strategy. After a well scoped and rigorous tender process Admin Re choose Olive Communications as their strategic telecoms partner.

Martin Flick, Chief Executive, Olive Communications said: "Being awarded the opportunity to work on such a strategic project in partnership with Admin Re is a real testament to the pedigree of our team at Olive. This is business critical infrastructure, being delivered to an international financial institution to an aggressive time frame and with very clear objectives and benefits. I'm delighted our approach stood out as being innovative, scalable and cost effective with real context and relevance to the customer's business challenges."

Flick added: "The communications and IT sector is undergoing significant change and those customers with a clear vision about what they want to achieve will gain significant ground over those who resist change in the way they communicate with their customers. Admin Re really took the time to build a list of requirements that were non-negotiable, and Olive is delighted to deliver those requirements in a long term partnership."

The unified communication and contact centre solution will be built on Mitel's cloud-based platform. The 300 seat contact centre incorporates workforce management, voice recording applications and a sophisticated IVR platform all designed to ensure that Admin Re service their customers to the highest standard.

Admin Re's contact centre agents will gain from multi-channel capabilities, with email and calls seamlessly integrated into their daily schedules, giving their customers a consistent experience when they interact with Admin Re using their preferred communication channel. The system is highly flexible and scalable so that other communication channels can also be introduced when required.

The solution will help underpin Admin Re's customer engagement strategy and will help them achieve their goal of delivering a world class contact centre environment. It is a single communication platform for both front and back office functions, allowing Admin Re to build a borderless customer service model, ensuring customer requests are dealt with quickly and efficiently, helping achieve their target of resolving customer queries first time.

The system is located over dual data centres, delivered via a private cloud, making it highly resilient, secure and scalable. The solution will be delivered in the early part of 2015.

Phil Shaw, Admin Re's Chief Operating Officer, said: "We need a system that is agile - to help us scale quickly as a business - to meet both the demands of our customers and to achieve our growth strategy. To do that, we need the very best tools in place to provide first-class customer service, delivered in a way that ensures we can add extra employees and future applications quickly and cost effectively, whilst always remaining cost effective."