Loyalty assured at Mutuelle de l’Est, thanks to Selligent
For 60 years, Mutuelle de l’Est has asserted itself as a key player in the Alsace mutual fund landscape in eastern France. It is above all a supplementary healthcare insurance fund that also manages the primary healthcare coverage for the professions and civil servants. To enhance the loyalty of the 160,000 or so people it covers, management introduced a call centre in 2006. Selligent was entrusted with its customer relations component.
Jean-Marc SchmidtGeneral Manager
“The time our agents used to spend answering telephone calls can now be dedicated to doing their job. So we gain in productivity and professional quality.”
“Setting up our call centre has been a great success that can be measured in terms of improved service quality, member satisfaction and employee motivation.”
The Mutuelle de l’Est manages the primary healthcare coverage system for the professions, local civil servants and hospital staff. But its positioning is primarily that of a supplementary healthcare insurance fund, offering individuals and groups healthcare coverage that supplements the standard primary healthcare insurance mechanisms. In recent years, competition has intensified in this sector, especially among mutual funds, provident societies and insurance companies. As General Manager Jean-Marc Schmidt points out, “our geographic reach is limited, so our growth depends largely on member loyalty. That is crucial if we are to maintain our position.”
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No answer
“However,” says Operations Director Gérard Spahn, “in the past few years, the telephone traffic had taken on such proportions that our switchboard was swamped. There were times when our members couldn’t get hold of us or couldn’t reach the right person. And our employee motivation was suffering as a result. We had to do something to turn the situation around.” At this point, in early 2005, an idea started to take shape: set up a call centre to manage, initially, inbound calls, respond to member expectations and offer them optimum service quality.
Tight schedules
Right from the outset, in Spahn’s mind this was a company project that demanded everyone’s involvement. So a very tight-knit task force of 12 people from all departments participated actively in each phase of the project. “I demanded that our employees think up the kind of tool they wanted without being locked into a structure determined by the IS department. It was a very enriching experience which provoked widespread support,” he insists. Thanks to the excellent co-operation between the Selligent team and the Mutuelle de l’Est team, the whole process of adapting the system to the needs of the organisation was completed in four months. “Everyone, both in-house and at Selligent, demonstrated a great deal of enthusiasm for the project and a determination to get the job done. Our new call centre was inaugurated, on schedule, on June 6,” Spahn recalls.
For close to a year, Mutuelle de l’Est watched the market, and the idea matured. Then, end 2005, everything happened at once. The Board of Directors wanted the new call centre to be up and running in June 2006. Gérard Spahn had already seen a variety of presentations, and Selligent stood out for its functional coverage and, above all, its considerable flexibility. So, without delay, he contacted Selligent, who committed to complete the project on schedule. “We had only six months and, apart from the CRM aspect, we had to manage the telephony application and the switch to VoIP.”
It should be noted that, historically, each of the Mutuelle de l’Est’s businesses (supplementary healthcare coverage, primary healthcare coverage for the professions and primary healthcare coverage for local civil servants and hospital staff) were managed by a different tool. Since a member could be identified in two of these areas (or even all three), the first objective was to consolidate the data from the three databases so as to have a single identifier in Selligent for each person covered. Introducing this ‘single identifier’ substantially improves the quality of the data, since any future change in a member’s co-ordinates no longer has to be re-entered in the different tools. Then, the specific interfaces between the three systems and Selligent had to be put in place to display the business data they contain in the CRM. As a result, each user now has access to the full file of any caller (administrative situation, history file of benefits, dues, etc.) through a single connection to Selligent.
It’s everybody’s business
Today, all calls from members converge on the call centre. Enzo Masselucci, call centre supervisor, explains how it operates: “When call centre agents receive a call, they search the database for the caller’s file either by family name, member number of social security number. They verify the caller’s co-ordinates and update them if necessary. Then they get down to the actual purpose of the call.” Since the call centre agents have a complete overview of the member’s situation, most of the time they are able to give an immediate response to the question posed. “Our team of multi-disciplinary call centre agents processes around 80% of the questions directly,” he adds. “The remaining 20% are sent to the appropriate department by Selligent. All requests, whether they are handled by the call centre or sent for processing by the department concerned, are stored in Selligent to be used for the monthly statistical reports.”
A complete overview of members
In terms of customer relations, Mutuelle de l’Est is convinced it is responding to an important expectation. “Once again, we are an organisation that listens to its members. We have always aimed to focus on our members and offer them the best possible service. Today, we can confidently say we have achieved that goal,” states Spahn. Indeed, the organisation has become a victim of its own success and has had to increase the call centre’s workforce to satisfy demand. Now, it is a question of going one step further and analysing why people call. Mutuelle de l’Est is convinced that the analysis will help uncover improvement opportunities which will eventually lead to a reduction in the number of inbound calls.
The cornerstone of enhancing loyalty
In general, while the members are the prime beneficiaries of the new platform, the Mutuelle de l’Est employees get a great feeling of satisfaction, too. As Spahn confirms, “after one year, we can safely say that the users, from whichever department, have really acquired the Selligent reflex. Before, they went looking for information in the different business tools; today, they know that Selligent is a single point of entry where they can find all the information concerning a member.” He also emphasises that installing Selligent has relieved the administrative, management and production departments of the onus of the telephone. “The time our agents used to spend answering telephone calls can now be dedicated to doing their job. So we gain in productivity and professional quality.”
Lend me your ear
For Jean-Marc Schmidt, creating the new platform has not only been a purely technical success, but a human one, too. “Our call centre agents are given exhaustive training, they have a very easy-to-use tool at their fingertips, and they work in an agreeable environment. And they rarely have to deal with dissatisfied members. We have reached a point where we can now count on a motivated team that is happy to be here.”
The Selligent reflex
On the strength of the success of this first phase, Mutuelle de l’Est is now looking to expand the use of Selligent to manage outbound calls. This development should provide two major advantages: first, by replacing some mail by the telephone, Mutuelle de l’Est will be able to more easily communicate with its members and speed up the administrative processes; secondly, it should help with campaigns to go after market share. A final word from Jean-Marc Schmidt: “this project was an ambitious challenge. But we enjoyed working with people who were responsive and attentive to our expectations – and who, on top of everything, met the deadlines and kept within budget. Setting up our call centre has been a big success that can be measured not so much in financial terms but by improved service quality, member satisfaction and employee motivation.”
