Building loyalty among policyholders

With 4 million customers, Matmut is a leading insurance group in France. It offers a broad spectrum of products and services in property and casualty insurance, health insurance, loans and wealth management while handling millions of existing contracts. “All of these products and services target different professions, but the common denominator is the relationship we have with all of our customers, whether they’re individuals, independent professionals or companies,” said Fabrice André, Program Director, Transformation of the CRM Group at Matmut.

With 6,400 employees — more than 4,000 of whom are directly involved in customer experience — Matmut has embarked on a big project called “SMART” to transform its customer journeys and offer its customers a more personalized relationship. Launched three years ago, this project involved overhauling the insurer’s CRM system and agent workstations.

This transformation required an all-in-one contact center solution that would enable Matmut to pool internal skills so it could manage tasks relating to contract formation, renewals and claims. It chose the Genesys Engage™ on-premises solution to orchestrate its customer experience flows.

“We currently have 2,800 employees — stakeholders in customer experience who are spread over our 480 local branches — and four contact center platforms. These platforms all work on the same Genesys system to address all stages of the life of a contract, from the marketing of insurance contracts to their day-to-day management. And the deployment of Genesys Engage functionalities is expanding to nearly 600 employees who specialize in compensation processing,” said André.

When the Genesys solution is extended to other Matmut business units, more than 4,000 employees will benefit from its omnichannel capabilities.

“We have always wanted to work omnichannel within the Matmut Group,” added André. “Thanks to the Genesys solution, we can apply this strategy by maximizing the connections between digital and telephone flows, for example.”

“It is because we are committed to a big transformation project for our group that we have chosen the Genesys solution,” said André. “Whether it is physically welcoming customers or managing internet or telephone flows at the front or back office, we want all internal stakeholders to benefit from a robust and shared solution that handles all flows.”

Pooling flows to strengthen agent efficiency

At the heart of the SMART project was the desire to gain a 360-degree view of customers. In executing this global overhaul, Matmut integrated its Salesforce CRM system with Genesys to facilitate seamless access to customer information.

The company’s information system has historically been built on specialized solutions by channel (such as Alcatel on IPBX voice) or on internal developments, such as cold-flow management. So, Matmut didn’t have an omnichannel business software package to easily manage activity across all its channels. Its employees often lacked visibility into communications flows.

Planning the transformation proved to be complex, particularly in handling the volumes of voice, web and email interactions. But Genesys has made a big difference in how work is distributed, with tasks largely handled in “push mode” with Genesys Intelligent Workload Distribution.

“During the preparatory work in defining our customer journeys, the issues of expanding and pooling channels were important,” explained André. “The ability of the Genesys solution to address all current and future flows is a proof of efficiency for us.”

A gradual deployment for a successful ramp-up

The pilot project, which covered 150 employees and a small group of customers, tested the Genesys solution under real conditions. It also allowed Matmut to measure the benefits of the solution for both its customers and internal teams.

“We carried out a first pilot in April 2019 on a few agencies, on a telephone platform in Normandy and on a few back office management units,” explained André. “Mixing activities between phone time and back office processing was a strong expectation of our employees.”

During the deployment phase, the IT team did everything it could to support employees, particularly in the use of the agent interface, which provides access to the key elements for processing an interaction. Training support and product demonstrations proved critical throughout the project, especially during periods of lockdown when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020.

When face-to-face presentations were no longer possible, Matmut developed videoconference sessions. “We have set up a training environment specific to each deployed population: call simulation, back-office processing and so on,” said André. “The training on the Genesys interface was carried out the day before the start of real production.”

The Genesys Workforce Engagement Management application now enables planning management and proper team sizing. It estimates the volumes of activities in advance, proposing optimized schedules that take any constraints into account. It also enables Matmut to verify the adequacy of its forecast according to its workflows and team schedules. And a function for shift bidding has been set up between employees.

“Today, for users of the contract management back office, the routing of complex requests is carried out according to the skills of the employees,” said André. “The task and resource planning tool used on our contact centers allows us to improve the anticipation of our actions.”

A centralized unit within the contact centers now plans the communications flows, supervises them in production and guarantees service quality while respecting the insurer’s business objectives.

All of this has contributed to improved results, particularly an increase of 15% in phone efficiency along with significant improvements in the processing times for policyholder internet and mail requests.

In the future, Matmut plans to create a wider distribution of outgoing calls and establish new contact channels to further strengthen its connections with customers.