Faster, Simpler, More Efficient - How ‘Reclaim My PPI Tax’ Beat Their Growth Predictions
Millions and millions of people in the UK have been mis-sold PPI. That’s common knowledge. You’ll have heard about it yourself, in newspaper articles, in radio adverts. But what you might not know is that people in a certain tax bracket have been overcharged income tax and have the opportunity to reclaim tax from previous PPI claims.
Reclaim My PPI Tax wanted to be able to resolve these claims quickly and simply, without making claimants fill out and return forms, or spend hours on the phone. They needed a simple solution to manage an otherwise complicated process, and the technology to support it. Director Morgan Dean knew developing that technology would be complex, and that any tools would need to support evolving processes. He wanted a partner who understood his needs. After doing his due diligence and talking to experts at various software companies, he chose to put his trust in Transition.
The Client
Reclaim My PPI Tax are tax rebate experts. They have a single, simple promise. To claim back your tax in a hassle-free way. That means a fully online process - no physical forms, no meetings, no phone calls. They aim to get clients their money back within six to eight weeks, and boast an impressive, over 90% success rate. Being efficient is crucial for their business model, as they operate on a no win, no fee basis.
Straight away, even before we look at the technological challenges Reclaim My PPI Tax faced, something is clear. There’s no margin for error here. The whole business model is designed around efficient workflows with no mistakes and no delays.
As Morgan explains, the magnitude of this challenge required a very specific development partner:
"I spent around two months e-mailing, doing Zoom calls with companies. The support I needed was not an easy thing to find. Even just working out what to search in Google to find what I was trying to look for was sort of difficult."
"My main issue was that I'm very precise in how I want things to work. Because if we can get the small details correct, it has a massive impact for the company."
"So, it was all about finding the correct partner who understood what I was trying to achieve. It was about finding someone who could meet my expectations."
Two months later, after a call with Jon and Dave at Transition, Morgan had found a partner who understood the challenges he faced.
The Challenge
The primary challenge for Reclaim My PPI Tax was one of automation. A previous company Morgan had started was built around telesales - this needed large numbers of sales staff, and all the expense that entails.
For this new venture, Morgan wanted to automate as much as possible - to reduce expense, stress, and make scaling up a technological challenge instead of a human resources one. As he puts it,
“I wanted to build something once, and then funnel as much data into it as possible. So, it wouldn’t have a limit to growth.”
The first, most pressing challenge then would be to automate the sales process. Marketing through Facebook and Google, then using Reclaim My PPI Tax’s website to gather client information and generate an e-signature with no need for human interaction. But automation wouldn’t stop there. Morgan continues:
“The sales side of things started off very well. But I needed more from Transition. I wanted to improve the automated sales process, and automate the admin side of things, too.”
“I wanted to improve profitability and scalability. I had targets in mind, and automation would let me do that far quicker than a hiring- and staffing-based approach would.”
To fully understand this challenge, our first task, as with any new project, was to understand how Morgan’s business works, in line with our staged software development process.
We broke down Reclaim’s complex workflow into a broad four-stage process:
- Gather Details
- Initiate Claims
- Process Responses
- Manage Outcomes
Making this process as quick, efficient, and cost effective as possible would be key to the success of this project.
The Solution
To meet Morgan’s needs, nothing was off the table. His ambitions were limitless, and so we needed to find new ways to tackle rapidly evolving challenges. Morgan had already been impressed by our ability to be flexible with our suggestions, but it’s our commitment to getting things done that sealed the deal:
“When I was spitballing ideas for the levels of automation I wanted to achieve, Dave reassured me that Transition had already done it for another company. And as we worked together, I kept making more and more suggestions. Dave never once told me ‘We can’t do that.’ If they had not done something before, he said so, and agreed to prototype it.
“Transition’s whole attitude was that just because something hadn’t been done yet didn’t mean it couldn’t be done in the future. The whole approach was based on finding ways to do new things.”
With Morgan on board, we planned out the technological solution for Reclaim My PPI Tax’s challenges.
The primary solution we chose was to set up stored procedures. These are instances of well-defined, prepared SQL code that automatically trigger under certain circumstances and can be reused time and time again. Because the triggers and outcomes were so specific, we needed to fully understand the business to create these lines of code.
We built that understanding by talking with Morgan and drawing on our experience, then we built the code and integrated it into our Adam development platform. This helped us automate processes, even as those processes evolved as Morgan looked to improve and scale his workflows. And because we’d been upfront about the timescales involved, Morgan knew what to expect:
“My process is very complicated. It isn’t a simple workflow. There were a lot of different things going on at different stages. Dave gave us a timescale that was double that of one of the other companies I approached, but that’s the whole point of a learning process, a bedding-in period.”
Once that bedding-in period was over however, and Morgan’s ideas crystallised, we were able to speed up progress immensely.
“Every single day of the week, Transition was constantly getting new work done. And my business started seeing the rewards of all the heavy lifting Transition’s software was doing.”
Alongside automation, security was also a key consideration. By designing the system to allow for different security and role configurations, Morgan can safely outsource certain tasks to third parties - reducing his workload without compromising data security or privacy.
Finally, with the technology in place, Morgan started to see the results he’d envisioned.
The Outcome
Now the full Reclaim My PPI Tax platform is live, and Morgan is convinced he made the right choices, with both choosing to automate, and choosing Transition:
“As soon as we went live properly, we saw the massive benefits of what I’d envisioned and what I hoped to achieve. The simple things, the automated contact, it reduces time, and it eliminates mistakes. Clients are offered more services, which gets them more money back, which drives more revenue for us. The average value of a customer for Reclaim My PPI Tax has gone up, and I can really focus on generating revenue because sales and admin are taken care of.”
Is the automation powered by Transition’s software and stored procedures really helping Morgan meet his goals? The answer is a resounding yes:
“We’ve got three full-time team members and one part-time. And we’re generating more revenue than 40 people managed in my previous business.”
And the relationship isn’t finished yet. Transition will be a core part of Morgan’s efforts to grow his business even further. We designed his platform in a way that it can easily change and evolve with his business, and he’s already looking at his next steps:
“There are always ideas in mind that I want to do next.”
Automating new processes, widening revenue streams, integrating with new partners - there’s a lot for Morgan to do. And he knows how to do it. Constant communication with a partner he’s come to see as indispensable:
“I ring Jon once a day, every single day. The communication is constant. I’m never kept waiting for Transition to respond. That’s really good.”
“I’d recommend them 100%. People ask me all the time, ‘which software do I use?’ I tell them I use my own bespoke technology. They always complain about CRMs not doing the jobs they need them to do while my platform handles complex automations, and I just say, ‘talk to Transition.’”
“Jon and Dave can get it sorted for you, no matter how big or small the job.”
That’s an endorsement we’re proud to receive.
