How AXA Germany Saves 48,000 Hours of Sales Productivity with a VPN Fix
AXA’s mission to protect people’s present and future relies on their employees who play a
vital role in delivering on that promise. To do so effectively, they need
secure and seamless access to business-critical systems that enable them to best
serve their clients in upholding the company’s core mission – protecting what
matters.
As a global insurance leader with 15,300 endpoints across Germany alone, AXA faces unique IT challenges, particularly given that 5,500 of those employees are part of the field sales team who are constantly on the move.
With this large proportion of their workforce working outside the traditional office or hybrid
working setting, their reliance on VPN technology to ensure security and efficiency, whilst maintaining productivity has never been more critical. Yet when this VPN technology disrupts the remote salesforce, these issues can put crucial sales motion at risk – threatening overall business growth and profitability. The team calculated that VPN issues represented a loss of 48,000 hours over a six-month period.
Read on to discover how remote actions helped AXA Germany fix a long-term VPN connectivity issue that was putting their sales process at risk.
The Problem
With many employees constantly on the move and relying on mobile devices, often referred
to as ‘road warriors’ - AXA Germany’s team faced ongoing challenges with VPN connectivity. Moving between different networks such as public Wi-Fi, cellular data, and office networks frequently led to dropped connections, latency, and intermittent access to critical business resources.
These VPN connectivity issues led to costly downtime for the field sales team, who depend
on secure access to business systems throughout the sales cycle. Disruptions at critical moments not only hindered employee productivity but also, had the potential to display a lack of professionalism in front of customers, putting relationships at risk.
Beyond the already critical connectivity issues, bandwidth limitations further added to the problem. Employees on the go often struggled with inconsistent internet quality, leading to restricted bandwidth when accessing resources through the VPN. Slow response times especially when retrieving large files or using applications that required high-speed connections caused further frustration for employees and added to their lost productivity.
The Approach
To effectively tackle VPN connectivity and bandwidth challenges, AXA Germany’s IT team first
secured buy-in from senior management. Presenting key statistics and performance insights allowed leadership to make faster and more informed decisions about necessary investments in bandwidth upgrades for specific AXA agencies.
With leadership support secured, the IT team leveraged Nexthink’s remote actions to assess
bandwidth availability across hundreds of external agencies nationwide. This data-driven approach provided concrete evidence to guide decision-making on bandwidth upgrades. By pinpointing weak network areas, the team prioritized improvements where connectivity challenges were most severe to focus efforts where they would drive the greatest impact on efficiency and performance.
The next step was to address the VPN connectivity issues. Using Cisco application logs from
employee devices, the team could track how often the VPN reconnected or dropped, helping to identify recurring issues and allowing the IT team to make targeted network adjustments. Key optimizations included adjusting MTU size and implementing trigger events to automate enhanced stability and ensure a more reliable connection.
The Impact
By reducing unplanned downtime and minimizing the risk of lost customer contracts due to unavailability to business-critical systems, AXA Germany achieved significant cost savings. Previously, frequent VPN disruptions took a heavy toll on productivity, with 3,000 employees facing disconnections over 192 days, this equated to 48,000 hours of lost productivity per year.
With Nexthink, the IT team has eliminated these disruptions, and the field sales team can stay
focused throughout the workday – no matter where they’re working. At the same time, the IT team has seen a significant reduction in service desk tickets related to connectivity and
bandwidth issues. With remote actions in place, the IT team spends less time on manual troubleshooting and more time driving strategic initiatives to support the wider business.
By providing reliable VPN connectivity, AXA Germany ensures that their workforce can operate
efficiently through staying connected to the business-critical systems and resources they need to deliver on their promise of protection for their clients.
Scaling Across the Business
Based on the outcomes and positive feedback from the sales organization, the team is now extending these improvements to other departments of the business. The remote actions are being rolled out proactively to the internal service insurance departments – so if this team face the same VPN related issues, the fix can be automated before it impacts their productivity.
By implementing remote actions across the business, AXA Germany can drive proactive and seamless IT operations to rapidly enhance operational efficiency and productivity at scale across the organization.