interview-zilveren-kruis_21x9

Jeroen van Eekelen (Zilveren Kruis): “I want to continually improve with a quick learning cycle”

Zilveren Kruis provides the best digital service to consumers in the Dutch health insurance market (article in Dutch). This is evident from WUA’s most recent digital service experience study in the health insurance market from June 2016. Jeroen van Eekelen is a senior online customer contact manager at Zilveren Kruis. A talk about digital excellence and online within the organisation, agile, omni-channel customer contact, switching season in the health insurance market, and the role of online service.

Congratulations, Jeroen van Eekelen! You are the winner of this WUA digital service study. You scored highest on 3 out of the 6 tasks dealing with online healthcare. How important is it for you to be the best?
“It feels like we’re on the right track. When we participated in this study before, and sometimes we won, sometimes we didn’t. And if we’re now back at the top, it means we’re going in the right direction. I think in the health insurance market we’re all working on providing our customers with the very best, that is our joint challenge.

“Of course we look at other examples, where things are going faster with regard to digital customer service than in the health insurance market, like Coolblue for instance. How they do things partly determines how far you raise the bar for yourself. But at the same time, I think you need to listen to and look at your own customers very carefully: how can you best help them in your role as a health insurer? We want to advise and assist our customers in arranging and paying for healthcare, and at the same time we want to help them with vitality. Those are our topics. A digital channel is suitable for that, but personal contact is really important in this as well. We want more dialogue with the customer across all channels, where we have a history of transmission and solving specific questions. Therefore, we need to be in contact at the right time, and understand what is going on.”

You scored highest of all health insurers. What is going so well for you, what has been your approach and focus?
“Recently, we’ve had a strong focus on the customer journey across all channels, and on measuring what the customer does. We gain a lot of information from the questions customers ask when they call us after having visited the website because they can’t find what they need. We’re getting increasingly better at following our customers and understanding why they call. That is essential input for improving the website.

“I used to work for Independer, where they didn’t have an online department. There, everyone is working on online. It was therefore quite strange for me to see an online department at Zilveren Kruis. My goal for the next few years is to remove the online department. You really have to get into the organisation, and the organisation needs to get on board. There’s a tipping point emerging for breaking through silos, and for agile working for example.

“Our teams have a multidisciplinary approach. We’ve hired specialists for interaction design, and in the area of web editing we have started to work much more closely with departments in the organisation where there is a lot of knowledge. As an online department we are much more connected with the entire organisation.”

What is the role of customer research and customer focus in your daily work as an online customer contact manager?
“Under the banner of digital excellence we are working on a different method of collaborating within the organisation. The team focuses on the customer journey, and with this in mind, changes are rolled out throughout the organisation. In this way, you start looking at the organisation through the eyes of the customer: this has raised a lot more awareness for everyone to improve things for the customers, and the approach also shows how different departments need to work together in order to achieve this.

“At a very early stage, we bring the customer in for user tests in improvement programmes. We test innovations directly with the customer in order to be able to further assist them. A/B testing is on the increase, too. The speed of customer feedback is key: I want to continually improve with a quick learning cycle.

“In our online community we actively engage in conversation with our customers about new products, changes, and policies. In this community we test our customers’ ideas. Last year we spoke to one million customers in order to gather input, we invested a lot in this. There is a nice example from last year with regard to diabetes. Some customers wanted to get compensation for a new measurement tool for diabetes, the Freestyle Libre. With this tool there is no longer any need for daily injections. The device was still in the early stages of development at the time, and many customers saw the benefits of it. We talked to our customers and engaged healthcare providers in the conversation, including internists, as well as the manufacturer of these devices. Although the tool can’t be covered through our basic health insurance policy yet, we did manage to provide partial compensation in a study with a rather large group of participants. The online channel facilitated this outcome!”

What is your biggest digital challenge?
“There are plenty of ‘big things’ we could be doing better or differently for the customer. Unfortunately, sometimes these run across our organisation, processes, and products. For example, when it comes to our internal processes that are focused on efficiency. We want to be very personally relevant to the customer and express ourselves in the right way, at the right time. But whilst various processes are standardised, such as letters, we may prefer to call or e-mail certain customers. That would be better for the customer and ultimately for us, too. How to organise this across all channels for all customers, that is a huge challenge.

“Digital isn’t a goal in itself. In many cases it can be very valuable to make personal contact, but in order to be able to do this, a lot of other contact needs to be handled digitally. In some cases, you want to choose a personal approach. In order to excel digitally, you also need a personal touch and help the customer within their own context. Ultimately, the customer’s question must be the main focus, also online. Not our answer. This is something we were doing five years ago; back then, we focused on all the answers, but not the interaction and the customer’s question.”

“Introducing agile working to a large, traditional organisation is also a real challenge. We have made some strides with this, but there really is room for improvement. If agile working is only happening within the online department, it doesn’t mean the organisation is agile. The entire organisation needs to follow. That is a challenge, but in this area we are making great strides with marketing and IT…”

You are responsible for online customer contact with regard to sales as well as service for 3.5 million policyholders. How do you view service in relation to sales? Could service eventually become the new sales in your market?

“In the health insurance market, sales are a seasonal thing. It’s really all about the final two weeks of the year, that’s when it matters most. We are the largest health insurance company in The Netherlands. For us, customer retention is even more important than acquiring new customers. Our customer base rotates, of course, but our primary focus is customer satisfaction. If we have this in order, it’s reflected in the market, and will attract new customers.”

“Let’s be honest, over the past few years, reality has taught us that price pressure in the market causes outflows, so we need to do really well during ‘health insurance season’. We already started planning in April. We’re now very much accelerating our preparations for November and December, when sales really start to come in.”

But… A theoretical question. Would it be possible that you may not need to enter this race during health insurance season by offering extremely good service? That is, using extremely good service to prevent people from leaving you whilst attracting new customers as well?

“The largest customer outflow stems from customers who have the least contact with us. If you’re healthy and don’t really deal with your insurer, you don’t notice us much. We resolve this by focusing on vitality, in addition to healthcare, for all target audiences. That is a very important new element in our proposition. Often we’re not in the picture until there is a bill that needs to be paid. The sooner we become relevant within the healthcare trajectory, for example with a checklist for a visit to the doctor or how to get a second opinion, the sooner and better we can create relevance for you as a Zilveren Kruis customer.”

Are there any cool things in the making at Zilveren Kruis within your focus area? What digital innovations are you working on?

“An important ambition for the online channel is to answer the customer’s question before they ask anything. We want to have the answer ready, based on the customer’s knowledge. Perhaps even actively approach the customer before they approach us. This is where omni-channel plays an important role: customers who have a question can be approached via e-mail, app, or phone. Yes, that can be done without it being creepy, based on needs that are already present. That is rather complicated for us, we really value our customers’ privacy. We are talking about medical things, which can be a delicate subject. That makes it very challenging.”

Read our cases

MIE-Talk-scaled-1-1136×748-c

How ING improves customer journeys in an agile and global organization, using an optimized digital CX.

Read more
t-mobile-thuis-16×9-1

How T-Mobile Home Doubled their Conversion with More Successful A/B Tests

Read more
VGZ Screenshot

How Dutch health insurer VGZ is aiming for friction-free online CX

Read more