Insurance firm Aviva is using idea management firm Wazoku to power its Customer Cup, a global tournament that looks to find the most innovative and customer-orientated ideas from its 31,000 employees every two years.

The Customer Cup sees teams competing to submit ideas to improve the Aviva customer experience. In the latest tournament, Aviva wanted to encourage employees to collaborate on ideas, automate the processes and administration of the Customer Cup and make it easier and simpler to take part.

After reviewing a number of options to achieve this, Aviva selected Wazoku’s Idea Spotlight Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), that allows organisations to create internal or external communities for ideas, innovation, feedback and insight.

“The Customer Cup is designed to encourage our employees, at all levels, to make a difference for our customers by looking at our business as it is today and see how we can make it significantly better,” said Jan Gooding, Aviva’s group brand director. “Using Wazoku will make the Customer Cup even better – its flexibility and ability to easily handle huge volumes of users and ideas encourages more collaboration amongst teams and helps people to inspire each other.”

Idea Spotlight is a flexible tool that allows any business to engage a community to help solve a variety of complex challenges and issues. This can be cost reduction, new product development or employee engagement, any business challenge in fact, large or small.  Ideas are submitted into the easy-to-use and fully-branded system, and people can discuss, develop and vote on the best ideas.

As a cloud-based system, Idea Spotlight is fully scalable and allows Aviva to handle the volume of entries from around the world. Teams will be judged on the benefits of their idea and the positive impact on their customers. The tournament concludes with the Grand Final that takes place between 18 and 20 May 2015, with the chosen finalists presenting their ideas live to the Executive Panel of judges in Warsaw, Poland.

“The financial services industry has a reputation for being conservative when it comes to new ideas and approaches but Aviva has shown that it is blazing a trail when it comes to innovation,” said Simon Hill, CEO, Wazoku. “Capturing ideas on such a global scale requires the right tools for the job and Idea Spotlight gives Aviva’s employees the platform to easily submit ideas and collaborate with each other across countries and we are confident this will be the most successful Customer Cup yet.”