Insurance in Less Than 20 Minutes

The Background

Visana prides itself on its customer promise of “all-round good care”. More than 820,000 individuals are privately insured with the Swiss firm, alongside 14,000 companies. Every day, the insurer processes around 32,000 documents and pays out up to CHF 12 million in treatment costs. Service comes first and customers benefit from this commitment by receiving their policies within 20 minutes, and receiving agreed benefits within an average of eight working days.

Visana stands for competence, quality and reliability. The company sees itself as a guarantor of its customers’ financial security. This extends to keeping premiums as low as possible, through efficient administration. Visana is also committed to continuously developing its own business model and making active use of digital opportunities.

In 2015, the company decided to further develop its technical infrastructure, to accelerate workflows and improve the customer experience on its digital channels. Following software selection, Camunda was integrated and deployed in Visana’s product stack in 2016. Today the workflow automation tool orchestrates the Visana core system, the customer management system (CRM) and the health check, as well as the entire incoming mail process as a document management service, both in the application process and in claims processing.

Since 2018, Visana has been using Camunda Optimize to visualize workflows to improve process quality, identify resource bottlenecks and manage capacity planning.

The Dashboards: A Real-Time Overview

The wealth of available data offered by Camunda provides great added value to the business. Visana takes advantage of this to analyze workflows and improve the quality of processes.

Initially, the company developed its own dashboard for this purpose, which prepared the key figures generated by Camunda and presented them in a way that was easy to understand. Every change to an existing report, or the creation of a completely new one, resulted in considerable programming work. But the real-time view of the processes offered an enormous advantage. For example, technical colleagues were able to recognize a technical error in a process at first glance. However, the large number of meaningful reports and the resulting costs placed disproportionate burden on IT resources.

Visualizations provided by Optimize

With Optimize, Camunda offers an extension that is easy to implement and enables the creation of demand-oriented dashboards with just a few clicks. This leaves the door wide open for further improvements within the overall system.

Visualize and Improve Processes

Today, Camunda Optimize provides all real-time observations in Visana’s workflow process models and serves as a tool for both monitoring and future process optimizations.

The visualizations provided by Optimize allow Visana to identify bottlenecks, for example, determining how many documents have to be received and processed and at which times of the day.

Today, the company uses this information to plan capacity and check whether organizational adjustments might be necessary to ensure smooth processes, even at peak times. In particular, Optimize enables the specialist departments to control whether service targets can be met, such as a customer’s policy being created in 20 minutes, or whether benefit payments can be transferred after an average of eight working days.

Optimize’s heatmaps clearly show whether individual process steps are overloaded. Patterns are also easier to recognize, such as in which regions or via which input channel does most mail arrive? What is the common denominator for cases that take longer than agreed to process? The color-coded heatmap visualization also relieves the departments of the task of having to interpret columns of numbers themselves.

Guided by its strong values, Visana is constantly expanding the range of functions and fields of application of Camunda Optimize.

Changes Step by Step

Camunda Optimize makes visible what was previously invisible, and this has an effect on the focus of many employees.

Visana expects to make fundamental changes to roughly 25% of job functions to realize the potential of a fully functional workflow automation system. The use of Camunda and Optimize facilitate daily work and relieve the specialist departments of less demanding tasks. Visana attaches great importance to ensuring technology enhances employee’s work and enables them to concentrate on the tasks that add the greatest value, and employees know exactly how to use the time gained through automation.

Today Visana’s vision, that everyone understands the two central service promises, is paying dividends. Camunda and Optimize are bringing the advantages of digital transformation into the workplace, and helping Visana and its employees deliver an unrivalled customer service experience.