Agis Turns to StreamServe To Achieve Efficiency
Under the Netherlands' new scheme of managed competition in healthcare ushered in on Jan. 1, 2006, universal public health insurance replaces a two-tier public/private paradigm within a framework of market competition. Anticipating transformation, in 2005 three regional insurers formed Agis (Utrecht), a national specialized healthcare insurer with 1.2 million customers.
Faced with a swell of customers comparing and switching insurers in the new marketplace, Agis project manager Bertjan Teunissen was charged with finding a document management system that would drive improved customer correspondence, and subsequently, customer satisfaction. There were three business drivers for the initiative. "First," Teunissen says, "the many systems of correspondence and document creation had to be streamlined."
The second driver was to expand the insurer's digital archive. "The [existing] digital archive held incoming claims -- we wanted it to contain all output and correspondence," Teunissen explains. "Third, we wanted to generate a single document that could travel in PDF, XML or print without errors or inconsistent outputs. Multichanneling of messages is key," he adds.
Further, Agis required a product that would interface with and leverage its existing content management and archiving platform, EMC Corp.'s (Hopkinton, Mass.) Documentum, as well as other legacy systems. After exhausting the Dutch marketplace, "We then shopped American vendors," relates Teunissen, "examining StreamServe [Burlington, Mass.] and two others." Agis signed a contract for StreamServe's enterprise publishing solution in May 2005.
According to Teunissen, a 10-person in-house IT team prepared for the implementation, which began with customer contracts. "We labored to create infrastructure," he concedes, "connecting to other systems and building an interface with our policy administration system, which is on Unisys in COBOL and not very flexible." The Agis team also built connectors for printing environments and interfaces to digital archives, Teunissen adds.
Then, "We put all financial documents into StreamServe," Teunissen relates. He notes that a business architect designed new correspondence documents, which were voted on by a user group.
As the Dutch market prepared for its transformation, rate quotes surged from 30,000 a month to 300,000, according to Teunissen. The solution to the dramatic increase was "to create a new document stream for the quoting process with StreamServe, instead of a ... cumbersome mail merge," he explains.
"We tested through Sogeti's (Rotterdam) T-Map" test management approach, Teunissen continues. "The biggest challenge," he says, "was making up test data without a system running. When we went live, data was sometimes corrupted in conversion." Still, Agis went live with customer quotes on StreamServe on Oct. 1, 2005.
According to Teunissen, the StreamServe package cost approximately US$350,000 to implement, plus an annual license fee of US$71,000 for five years of use. Currently, Agis processes 10 million to 12 million documents annually on the system. All customer correspondence is automatically copied into a digital customer file, Teunissen notes, improving tracking of customer relationships.
Creating uniform correspondences using StreamServe enabled Agis to save US$285,000 on paper within a year by eliminating prepress proofing, Teunissen says. But more important, customer satisfaction has improved, he relates, pointing to a drop-off in call volume to the carrier's call center in 2006. "People asked more questions about quotes received and fewer questions about misunderstood documents," Teunissen comments.
Company:
Agis (Utrecht, Netherlands; 1.2 million customers).
Lines of business:
Specialized healthcare insurer
Vendor/technology:
StreamServe's (Burlington, Mass.) enterprise publishing solution.
Challenge:
Improving customer satisfaction through more-personal and efficient correspondence.
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