Is your organisation fit for the digital future?

Changing customer needs

How customers inform themselves about insurance products, how they communicate, receive advice, and make purchasing decisions has changed fundamentally in the digital age.

This gap between customer needs and the range of services offered by traditional insurers opens up opportunities for new providers such as Google, Oscar, or Knip to enter the insurance market. The battle for customer sovereignty is already in full swing. New providers are trying to slip in between customers and traditional insurers, which threatens to degrade the latter into an easily substitutable risk and cost carrier.

The key to success

At hpo, we are convinced that in the long term, survival is only possible for those insurance companies that

• clearly differentiate themselves from their competitors by creating a unique customer journey aimed consistently at customer needs in the digital age;
• significantly improve their performance by implementing a high-performance organisation with minimal complexity, lean processes, straightforward interfaces, and clear responsibilities.

We suggest a four-step model.

Our approach

1. The strategy is at the beginning of all measures. It sets the direction in which your company is heading. With the support of hpo, you can design your industry model and anticipate or actively initiate changes. This leads to clear and differentiating positioning of your company in the value chain.
2. Together we develop or sharpen your value proposition. The goal is to align your service offering 100% with customer needs and to eliminate non-valueadded services.
3. We represent the critical processes required to deliver the value proposition in a business process model. The various touchpoints along the customer journey (red) are shown at the top level. Below this are the service creation (green) and procurement processes (yellow).
4. Based on this model, we work together – objectively and comprehensibly – to develop your future-oriented organisation, including the corresponding responsibilities and role profiles.

Your benefit

• With the unique, consequent focus on customer needs, the customer journey effectively differentiates you from your competitors.
• Your company, business unit, or department gains effectiveness and efficiency with minimal complexity. The organisation is scalable and able to react flexibly to market changes.
• Thanks to the consistency of processes and responsibilities, your organisation is capable of learning and can develop continuously.

With more than one million private and over 100,000 corporate customers, Allianz Suisse, with its approximately 3,600 employees, is one of the leading insurance companies in Switzerland.

Aim of the project

Development of a high-performance organisation in the area of personal injury with the aim of

• consistently focusing on customer needs and eliminating non-value-adding activities;
• increasing specialization and professionalization in critical areas such as medical cost control, legal services, case management, etc.;
• establishing a consistent business process model with simple interfaces and clear responsibilities.

Approach

For about three and a half months, we accompanied the personal injury division with the following process steps on its way to becoming a high-performance organisation:

• Based on the new strategy, the customer-centric value proposition was developed, and non-value-adding activities were eliminated.
• In a series of interdisciplinary workshops, a new business process model was developed according to the principle of case leader (client) and experts (contractor). The client is accompanied by the case leader from A to Z on his customer journey. Experts such as legal services, case management, etc., are deployed by the case leader in a targeted manner, tailored to the situation and the need for expertise.
• Twelve workstreams were formed to detail the new business process model, each of which dealt in depth with one topic, such as the interface between case leader and case management (expert).
• The results from the twelve workstreams were finally consolidated, and the new organisational structure could be derived in a way that was comprehensible to all those involved.

Customer benefits

Thanks to the new high-performance organisation, Allianz Suisse is well on its way to

• effectively differentiate itself from the competition based on customer-centric case management along the customer journey;
• realize recurring cost savings of several million Swiss francs per year.