Wawanesa Insurance Partners with Praecipio to Streamline Broker Requests
- COMPANY: Wawanesa Insurance
- INDUSTRY: Insurance
- LOCATION: Canada
- SOLUTIONS: ITSM, ESM
Overview
The Canadian insurance industry relies heavily on an expansive broker network to sell policies to consumers and businesses. Wawanesa Insurance, one of Canada’s leading providers, was grappling with outdated systems—primarily Lotus Notes and group email inboxes—to handle more than 2,500 daily broker requests.
To modernize operations and improve service delivery, Wawanesa’s broker team partnered with Praecipio to implement a new solution leveraging Jira Service Management and SmartHandler. Their key goals were to:
- Improve visibility into broker requests
- Streamline how requests were triaged and managed
- Establish a baseline for SLAs to measure and improve performance
- Standardize request-handling processes across teams
Challenge
Wawanesa’s legacy process for managing broker communication was highly manual and inefficient. Teams relied on printing broker emails, physically routing paper for approvals, and storing documents in filing cabinets. This process created bottlenecks, overwhelmed office printers, and led to inconsistent service levels across regions.
This lack of standardization also made it difficult to measure team performance or understand where delays were occurring. The organization lacked the infrastructure needed to scale or respond effectively to broker needs.
Wawanesa had considered leveraging ServiceNow to create this solution, as it was already present for their IT Service Management teams. Difficulties around the additional cost and complexity of the configuration that would have been required made leveraging ServiceNow difficult.
Solution
Praecipio developed a solution centered around Jira Service Management, integrating it with SmartHandler to automate email intake, triage, and assignment. Wawanesa opted into this approach alongside their ServiceNow deployment due to JSM’s comparable ease of use and potential for rapid scalability into other areas of the business.
Here’s how it worked:
- Email Intake & Routing: Team mailboxes were redirected through SmartHandler, which used lookup tables to analyze email content and origin. Based on this data, SmartHandler routed each request to the correct team and region. The “from” field was preserved, consolidating multiple inboxes into a unified system.
- Workflows & SLAs: Jira workflows were built to manage tasks with predefined SLAs that automatically applied based on email source.
- Dashboards & Reporting: Teams now had access to real-time queues, dashboards, and reporting tools to monitor performance.
- Scalability: As usage grew, Wawanesa expanded their JSM deployment to accommodate increased ticket volumes.
The platform has since processed more than a million broker requests.
Results
The changes were significant. Employees reported a substantial improvement in how broker requests were received, prioritized, and resolved.
Key Metrics:
- Over 75,000 tickets processed per month
- 12 teams on-boarded
- 1,000+ individual users involved
Business Outcomes:
- Greater visibility into work items and performance metrics
- Automated workflows eliminated reliance on paper and manual handoffs
- Consistent tracking of KPIs, including ticket volumes, response times, and resolution rates
- Improved reporting capabilities for management and executive teams
- Faster response and resolution times led to a better broker experience
- Streamlined ticket escalation between teams
- Enabled teams to move away from email and Lotus Notes entirely
“Before Jira Service Management, we were printing off every single email from our broker network and had a manual workflow for pushing paper into filing cabinets. Our printers were so busy that teams had to book time with them! Now, automation helps us triage and handle urgent requests quickly, improving communication between underwriting and brokers.” - Senior Manager | Wawanesa
What's Next
Wawanesa has since expanded these service management practices to non-technical teams such as:
- Claims Management
- Remittance Processing
- Quote Development
- Underwriting Escalation
- Direct to Customer (U.S.)
Praecipio has implemented similar systems for other insurance providers, including Canada Life, Johnston Group, and HUB International.
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