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Keeping it Personal, Thanks to Automation
October 2006In the highly competitive European insurance marketplace, Paris-based Groupama Insurance Co. Ltd. has built a reputation on the personal touch and close relationships it develops and maintains with customers. However, the carrier, which has been in business for more than a century, needed more efficient ways to work with its growing roster of customers. For decades, Groupama relied on customer support and contacts provided through its network of agencies. As business grew, the carrier sought to better capture and provide information in a more consistent and automated fashion, while still retaining the important relationships that had been built between agents and customers.
Through business growth and mergers, Groupama became a leading mutual insurance company in France, with eight million customers and annual revenue of close to 13 billion Euros. The company now has more than 26,000 employees across France alone, as well as an additional 4,000 across nine other countries.
Groupama provides personal health insurance to local authorities in France, and also provides auto and group life insurance.
Groupama recognized that significant changes-in both workflow and technology-were required to improve the responsiveness of its contact centers. "Growth in the business created a need for more specialized call centers, and this entails intelligent call center technology," says Patrick Hinschberger, manager of system and network infrastructure for Groupama Rhone-Alpes Alvergne.
For example, two of the company's 11 regional divisions-Groupama Loire Bretagne and Groupama Rhone-Alpes Alvergne-dealt with customers via networks of field agencies. Loire Bretagne has 230 such agencies, while Rhone-Alpes Alvergne has a network of 400. These agencies were normally the first point of contact for customers, with whom they had developed highly personalized business relationships. However, these field agencies were becoming overwhelmed as the volume of Groupama's business increased. Agents found it difficult to maintain required standards of service quality.
Direct calls to Groupama's regional centers were also rising in volume. Calls to the Loire Bretagne unit, for example, were averaging more than 35,000 a month. All calls had some level of urgency; some were general inquiries from customers requesting information about policies or claims, while others were asking questions related to damage claims caused by storms or automobile accidents. With more and more customers to attend to, the organization was increasingly incurring delays in answering queries, as well as subjecting callers to longer and longer waiting times on the phone.
Of particular concern to Groupama's managers was the ability to handle, as quickly as possible, sudden spikes in call volumes that follow disasters or other incidents.
"We had no dedicated disaster platform in place, and we clearly had a significant load-balancing issue and couldn't react quickly enough in times of crisis," says Cédric Strugeon, technical operations manager at Groupama Loire Bretagne.
The company's goal was to migrate incoming calls to its corporate contact centers, and in the process, reduce waiting times and manage requests as quickly as possible though all major communication channels. At this point, about 95% of customer contact to Groupama came via phone, while 5% came via e-mail, Hinschberger says.
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