APJ Claims free up time from IT challenges using Access Legal Hosting

APJ Claims are a FCA regulated claims management company who focus heavily on quality of service for their clients, ensuring each customer is treated as an individual and with great care and attention. The services provided by APJ Claims are available to all however they specialise in supporting Polish clients, as a Polish based company, by providing linguistic support and liaison services between solicitors and credit companies, ensuring their clients have access to the legal system and can fairly claim the compensation they are entitled to.

We spoke with APJ Claims Director, Martyna Jackowska, who oversees the company’s operations and strategic planning.

What are the strategic goals and ambitions for the business?

“Our main goal is to maintain the high standards of service we provide. We’ve been in the market, operating across Great Britain, for 9 years now and for us, it’s all about customer recommendations. Therefore, we have a strong focus on delivering high quality customer service, consistent staff training and ensuring we’re fully up to date with the new regulations and legislations which come to the market. Long-term, we hope to move into the insurance services space as a broker so we’re able to provide insurance as well as the claims services.”

What were the business drivers that led you to move to a cloud hosted service?

“Being a small firm with growth ambitions, it’s all about technology. I was responsible for maintaining and updating the systems and this was difficult to stay on top off. Computers needed regular check ups and changes so every time we wanted to upgrade a computer, we would have to reinstall our case management systems and connect to the network which was time consuming and required technical IT knowledge. Often, we had to pay for an external IT service providers to come in and update systems or fix things for us which was a sizeable cost to the business.

Further to this, the pandemic gave us further impetus to transfer our systems to the cloud. At the time, we didn’t have a hosted service and it was a real struggle as we need to be physically in the office to continue serving our customers. In addition to this, we needed to create a staff rota for the office and I had to come in every day to oversee the systems and operations of the business. If we would have had a hosted service in place at the time, it would have been much easier and quicker to continue operating because even though there wasn’t as many new claims coming in, we still had clients with pending claims who needed attention and support.”

How has Access Legal’s hosted offering overcome these challenges?

“The hosted services provides us with peace of mind that if something like a lockdown does occur again, we have a much safer and quicker way of accessing our database and system securely, anytime and anywhere. Also, having our systems hosted and maintained by Access Legal means I don’t have to constantly maintain, update and invest money in on-premise hardware and I don’t need to worry about the technical IT knowledge required for the systems as Access Legal manages all that for us. Now, if we have any faults or a computer crashes, we can easily connect to our systems and database on another computer and Access Legal are responsible for maintaining and updating systems which is much simpler and faster. The last thing you want to be doing when running a business is worrying about the technical IT side of the operations, you just want your staff to be able to sit down and get on with their jobs quickly and easily and Access Legal Hosting has allowed us to do that.”

Have you seen clear time savings?

“Before moving to Access Legal Hosting, we were having daily IT challenges which was taking up a lot of time, energy and money to resolve. We were spending at least two hours a week dealing with IT issues so we decided to invest in something that would make this simple, save us time and reduce spend on IT resources and Access Legal Hosting has achieved this. In addition, the services have improved for our staff which is really important when striving to maintain high levels of customer service.”

How easy was the migration from on-premise to cloud?

“The migration took about a day and during this time support and updates were regularly provided and I didn’t have to chase anyone so was very happy with the customer service.”

How well are you now set up for future growth?

“While we are looking to stay primarily office based, the hosted system does provide us the flexibility, in case anything happens, to be able to work from anywhere and update our clients which will support our ongoing commitment of providing the best possible service. Furthermore, as the business grows, the new cloud based service will scale with us easily and if we had to move premises, it would be really simple to relocate, set up the computers and connect back to the system without having to worry about moving servers, wiring and setting up new network connections.”