Case Study

How a digital platform can transform an insurer’s customer experience

EY teams worked with French insurer, MACIF, to create the foundation for a best-in-class customer and employee service experience.

The better the question

How can insurers deliver a best-in-class customer experience?

French insurer MACIF embraced digital innovation to provide an end-to-end view of client requests and drive more successful engagement.

1

MACIF, a main actor in the French insurance market, as well as the French’s favorite insurance brand1, has 460 branches, for about 4 million visits, 10,000 employees and 5.7 million customers (representing a portfolio of 18 million contracts). In 2022, MACIF agents handled 15 million calls in areas such as health, life and P&C. Traditional broker, rather than a digital-first insurer, its customer experience sometimes lacked consistency across different channels, products and services; some processes were still handled manually.

As part of its strategic plan, MACIF realized that it had to meet these challenges head on to remain competitive. MACIF has set itself the goal of becoming the number one in customer relationship by offering a unique omnichannel experience. It put a stake in the ground, articulating its ambition to offer its customers a best-in-class digital, omnichannel experience.

To deliver this level of service, the MACIF workforce would need an optimized means of distributing phone calls, mail and email that was fully integrated with the company’s CRM system, together with a 360-degree view of the customers’ relationships with the company.

This amounted to a significant business transformation, focused on three key areas:

  • The end-to-end, channel-agnostic capture and treatment of customer requests
  • Ensuring customers immediately get directed to the right solution or person
  • Providing training and support for MACIF employees throughout the transformation

A program of this scale required a partner highly skilled in setting up customer relationship solutions for major companies. EY teams had worked with a number of large businesses using PEGA, MACIF’s current Business Management Platform (BPM) and could bring a mix of digital and emerging technologies experience to the table.


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The better the answer

Information system transformation with a user-centric approach

Through benchmarking, forensic analysis and problem-solving, MACIF accompanied by EY teams, reimagined customer journeys across the business.

2

MACIF recognized the value EY teams could bring to their strategic ambitions; it, therefore, chose EY teams to analyze customer journeys across all areas of the business, identify pain points and establish a common basis of agreement amongst stakeholders on how to deliver a coherent, effective digital journey.

The first step was to define the vision for the customer experience, looking at industry best practice, listening to customers and reviewing employees’ work processes. For each business entity, EY teams were tasked with analyzing the entire customer journey across existing and future channels. Thus, MACIF had identified that one of the main challenges was how hard the company found it to converge towards the same customer experience, due to siloes within the business. For this reason, applying a cross-cultural mindset was critical and allowed all stakeholders to agree on transversal customer journeys. The guidance of the EY teams allowed MACIF's business lines to build these paths in a collaborative way.

This collaboration led to a shift from an “adapt” practice of copying an existing solution into the CRM towards an "adopt" strategy, respecting as much as possible the standard of the chosen solution and thus avoiding the specific. Agile management was key, with the team using a SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) methodology with different increments simultaneously being built, prepared for IT and launched in the business.

Recognizing that people are at the center of any transformation, MACIF and EY teams have worked together to help the change management team build and deliver the training program and materials. For each major delivery, a team was in place to support people, both on-site and remotely.


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The better the world works

An optimized omnichannel experience unlocks value across the board

Customers and co-workers benefit from a CRM platform that provides an end-to-end view of the user journey.

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The focus of this transformation is to make the entire journey for any existing or potential customer as satisfying and seamless as possible – from the first point of contact to subscribing to an insurance policy, putting in a claim or terminating a contract.

MACIF continues its collaboration with EY teams on the delivery of this ambitious project. Work on the first business line, Health and Welfare, is complete. In partnership with the insurer, EY teams have delivered demonstrable value, through users already providing positive feedback on the solution.

Other benefits include better global customer relations, improved service quality leading to a more one-time processing and visibility for the customer.

The new system will improve performance measurement and management, as the new solutions centralize relationships between MACIF and its customers, customer journey workflows and customer data. Crucially, better data means better management and ongoing improvement of the system.

Through simplifying its digital CRM infrastructure MACIF is now positioned to offer an enhanced experience to both its clients and employees through omnichannel journeys, personalized services and a wide range of products and services. EY's support and methodology were key to MACIF achieving its objectives.



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