In 2016, US-based Japanese insurance provider, insurance110, was in the middle of opening their fourth store location. While the CEO and founder, Yoshihiro Arishika, and his team were navigating the expansion process, they realised their current method of operations would present serious challenges as their number of store locations grew.

First, customer information was only found on paper forms that the customers had filled out. Yoshihiro had to physically visit the different locations and pull out the paper forms to confirm the customer’s status with the staff. Second, the sales data was managed on an Excel spreadsheet shared through Dropbox, which was updated by the staff on a daily basis. Although it was managed in a shared digital format, sometimes important information was accidentally erased when multiple staff members worked on the document at the same time.

The company knew there were going to be more accidents like this as more locations opened and more staff joined the business.

“The solutions we used in the past had issues with speed and flexibility. Kintone was different. I was able to build applications on my own with the layout I wanted, and my staff were able to learn how to customise the forms themselves,” said Yoshihiro.

Another benefit of switching to Kintone came with shifting from the old system to a new one. “The shift from our original operations system to Kintone was very smooth,” said Yoshihiro.

“When using Dropbox and spreadsheets, it took me 30 minutes to understand the overall sales status,” he said. “I had to manually open each location’s spreadsheets, which are stored in separate folders, then check each file. With Kintone, I need to just log in, and the summarised sales report for all the locations is displayed right in front of me on the portal. Within 3 minutes, I would be done with my daily routine of checking the sales status.”

Today, Yoshihiro’s team continues to build apps to streamline their workflow process. “The latest app we built was the Web Inquiry Management app. We get 80 to 90 percent of our inquiries through our website, and prior to using Kintone, we had a staff member share the inquiry with the team using email. Now, with Kintone, we are able to assign which staff member is responsible, and to understand the status of each support ticket and even the tickets not yet handled, all at a glance.” said Yoshihiro.

Kintone helped make not only Yoshihiro’s life easier, but also the lives and work of his staff. The company expanded from three locations to nine over two years. “It’s really changed the game for us,” said Yoshihiro. “With Kintone, we can really focus on what makes insurance110 so great: providing great products with a customer-focused approach that puts people first.”