With 145,000 staff members,offices in 51 countries, and over 90 million customers worldwide, AXA Insurance is one of the biggest insurance companies in the world. Niko Vogel, product owner in the business process management group at AXA, spoke at the 2023 CamundaCon NYC about how Camunda is helping simplify the work of AXA’s clerks, meaning they can serve customers faster and more efficiently.
Customers usually contact AXA through email, letter, and fax. There are a number of functional business processes these inquiries could fall into: life insurance, car insurance, etc. This is called an unstructured inbox process. As a result, AXA’s clerks have to extract the information from the customer request so it can be routed to the right department. Only then does the work begin in order to fulfill the customer request.
It’s very common that a customer request can take more than one business process to fulfill. For example, if the customer says they’ve changed address, there might be an additional process, as moving addresses could alter home insurance needs. And of course, the final process is communicating back to the customer by either letter or email, explaining the result of their query.
This arrangement does work, but it’s more complicated than it needs to be. AXA, like many companies, has a legacy system that has neither REST services nor SOAP services, and no connective tissue between the applications that its clerks use to fulfill customer requests. This makes the work much more difficult.
No automation and no standardization
In his presentation, Vogel walked through an example of a legacy process at AXA. Clerks essentially use one big process, but to execute it, they have to use a number of smaller applications. In the case Vogel illustrated, the clerks had to use nine different applications, be closely familiar with each of them, and copy/paste information from one to the other on a crowded monitor. As his slides demonstrate, that workflow isn’t easy.
The following image is a screenshot of AXA’s legacy system in COBOL.
Clerks have to read customer letters and copy the content manually into the legacy system. A successful clerk at AXA will know lots of three-letter commands by heart to quickly enter the data where it needs to be.
With very little automation and not enough standardization, making changes was complicated, and clerks had to memorize lots of procedures and workarounds. The impact of this legacy system was increased risk of mistakes, lots of IT work to make any changes, and long training periods for new clerks. Vogel also pointed out that when they had large new projects, not only would it take a lot of time to complete the project from a technical perspective, they sometimes weren’t sure that they could even deliver them at all.
Looking for a solution that would offer more automation and reduce existing problems, AXA landed on Camunda.
Simplifying the workflow
Vogel’s team had the goal of replacing the nine applications in the clerks’ workflow with one encompassing application. With Camunda, he hoped to use automation to assist the clerks with handling customer requests.The overall aim was to help them provide better, faster services to customers.
A key learning for Vogel’s team was to start small and expand. So they started with two small processes: a travel health proposal and a supplemental proposal, which were both handled by Camunda. After the clerks reacted positively to the MVP, AXA proceeded to expand 15 different processes as part of a full health insurance proposal.
The business has experienced a lot of benefits since Vogel’s team began this project. For example, the new UI is much easier to use.
Clerks can see whether interaction is needed, if for example a process is unable to answer all a customer’s questions. The clerk can easily view all the data, such as all the content taken from a customer’s letter and what steps have already been taken in the process. Everything the clerk needs to do their job is right there in front of them, along with easy- to-understand hints and guidance on what the process should be.
Before Camunda’s involvement, all 45 million of AXA Germany’s annual processes had to be handled by clerks manually. Now, AXA enjoys more than 50% automation across its processes. In a single travel proposal, there is now 100% automation. These days, a clerk really only has to look at the customer queries that a routine process can’t decide on. There is less manual work, and often, manual work is reduced to one click. The best part—AXA has reduced the time to handle a customer request by more than half.
And as Vogel enthusiastically pointed out, AXA isn’t finished automating all their processes yet. They expect that the results will be even better in one to four years.
Watch Niko Vogel’s presentation at CamundaCon NYC right here.
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