Customer service for an ASX-listed insurer

The insurer's Australian-based contact centre operated standard business hours, Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm AEST/AEDT. Call volume spiked overnight and on weekends after storm events and during renewal periods, and the internal team had no way to absorb overflow without diverting senior claims handlers away from complex, high-value files. First-response times on routine enquiries, policy status, excess queries, lodging a new claim, blew out past 24 hours during peak periods, and after-hours calls went to voicemail with a next-business-day callback, a poor experience for a customer calling about a car accident or a burst pipe at 9pm.

The engagement started with a pilot pod of 8 customer service representatives plus 1 team leader, covering evening and weekend shifts only. Over 12 months this scaled to 22 representatives, 2 team leaders, a dedicated quality assurance analyst and a workforce scheduler, split across after-hours cover and first-line overflow during business hours. Complex claims, disputes and anything requiring claims authority stayed with the insurer's Australian team throughout.

Manila was chosen because the Philippines is Corpshore's primary offshore delivery hub for the Australian market, with AEST-compatible working hours that made true after-hours and weekend coverage practical without a costly Australian night shift loading.

Offshore delivery from Manila, Philippines, running after-hours and weekend coverage plus daytime overflow, with the insurer's Australian team retaining every complex claim and dispute.

As an Australian entity disclosing customer personal information to an overseas recipient, the insurer's obligations under Australian Privacy Principle 8 and section 16C of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) applied from day one. Reasonable steps included contractual data handling clauses, role-based system access limited to what each representative's queue required, and audit logging of every account accessed. Accountability for a breach does not transfer offshore under section 16C, so the insurer's compliance team retained oversight and sign-off rights over the Manila team's data handling procedures rather than treating them as a black box. Given the insurer's size, the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme applied, and breach notification procedures were built into the escalation path from the outset. Corpshore's security practices are aligned with the Essential Eight, a recognised Australian Signals Directorate framework, though this is not a certification and is not represented as one.

After-hours call abandonment dropped from around 38 percent to 11 percent within the first quarter of steady state. Average first-response time on routine enquiries fell from over 24 hours to under 4 hours. Cost per contact for the functions handled by the Manila team came down by approximately 48 percent against the fully loaded cost of an equivalent Australian after-hours roster, once superannuation and shift loadings on the domestic comparison were included. Customer satisfaction on the after-hours channel, measured through the insurer's existing post-call survey, rose from 71 percent to 84 percent over the same period. Figures quoted exclude GST, which is not generally charged by an offshore services supplier to a GST-registered Australian business, though this is general commentary, not tax advice.

The insurer kept every judgment call in Australia and used the offshore team only for volume and hours its own roster could never economically cover, which is why the model survived contact with a real storm season rather than just a quiet pilot month.