Eight hundred of our employees see customer feedback every day. That's the food for the customer intimacy culture we've built at Helan. The back office team that took it very seriously lifted their CSAT 10 to 15 percent in a year.
Helan Group is Belgium's third-largest health insurance fund, formed in January 2022 when Partena Ziekenfonds and OZ merged into a single organisation with around one million members across Flanders and Brussels. The group does more than reimbursements. Helan runs childcare crèches, household help through service vouchers, home care, maternity care, and youth holiday camps under the Heyo brand.
About six thousand people work for Helan. They sit across very different operations: mutuality back offices reviewing claims, daycare staff, household help coordinators, home care teams, and a marketing function that connects the dots between business units.
Sofie Bruggeman leads customer experience strategy from inside that marketing team. Her job, in her own words, is to make sure the surveys work in a correct and effective manner, get the numbers in front of people, write the quarterly reports the business units actually read, and facilitate every department to act on what customers say.
In 2021, two equal-sized health insurance funds were merging into one. Almost everything inside the organisation was changing. The customer experience vision had to survive that transition without losing speed.
The team had four problems to solve:
1. Keep the customer intimacy model through a merger of equals. Helan competes on service, in a market where most competitors lead on price. Through the merger, the CX strategy had to be preserved across two cultures and two operational models without losing focus.
2. Get the numbers in front of people who would actually use them. A CX dashboard that only the research team reads is a dashboard nobody reads. Helan needed customer feedback to land inside the daily work of back office teams, team leaders, and business unit managers.
3. Win the confidence of critical managers. Managers whose performance is tied to satisfaction KPIs tend to challenge the data first. "Can we be confident these numbers are correct?" was a standing question. The CX team needed a way to walk managers through the feedback in detail and build trust in the signal.
4. Connect feedback to the business case in euros. Telling a business unit "act on this and customers will be happier" rarely moves a budget. The CX team needed to make the case in financial terms: act on this and you protect retention, upsell, and cross-sell.
Making the business case in euros is still a struggle. I think it's a struggle for a lot of customer experience people.
First, the dashboards and survey automation fit the work the CX team actually does. Setting up surveys, selecting the right customers, keeping them short, getting the numbers into the quarterly reports each business unit reads. None of that requires an IT project or a CX consultant. The CX team runs it together with the data team that makes sure the correct data flows into the platform daily.
Second, the platform works in the daily lives of non-experts. Helan now has roughly 800 active users across the organisation. Most of them are not CX specialists. They are front office and back office workers, team leaders coaching their teams, and managers tracking how their unit is performing. The platform had to be usable by all of them, including the research function and every team that works with customers.
The team adopted Hello Customer in 2021 and built five working practices around it.
1. Short surveys built to lead to a decision.
Sofie keeps surveys short and qualitative. The goal is feedback the business units can act on without spending a week analysing it.
2. Coaching tool for team leaders.
Some teams have negative feedback routed to the team leader, who passes it to the employee who needs to follow up with the customer. Other teams, more self-directed, give employees direct access to feedback on their own customers and let them follow up themselves.
3. Key Driver Analysis when a KPI starts moving.
When a satisfaction score shifts on a specific touchpoint, Sofie goes straight to Hello Customer's Key Driver Analysis to figure out why. Which topics carry the most comments? What is impactful right now? It gives her a first read on a moving number in minutes.
4. Quarterly reports the business units use as benchmarks.
Sofie writes a quarterly satisfaction report for each business entity at Helan: mutuality, daycare, household help, home care, the Heyo youth camps, the care materials web shop. The business units read each other's scores and use them as benchmarks inside the group.
5. The Feedback Club: Sofie set up a separate working forum called the Feedback Club, where she sits with business managers and walks them through the customer comments in detail. The aim is to have a mutual understanding of customer feedback & create a burning need to optimize the customer experience in a consistent way for Helan, build manager confidence in the data: to show that signals from a few dozen customers are the tip of an iceberg, that the meaning sits in the pattern rather than the volume, and that a 100-customer signal in a 1-million-customer base is still worth acting on.
The back office indemnity team set CSAT as a goal and moved it.
The back office indemnity team, the second line that handles the most difficult customer files, started with the lowest satisfaction scores in the organisation. Its team leaders decided together to treat CSAT as their explicit goal. They invested time in reading the comments, understanding what was driving satisfaction, and setting up a small team specifically to act upon the score. Over the next year, CSAT rose by 10 to 15 percent across multiple measures: customer satisfaction on email, customer effort score of reimbursement and birth customer journey, and NPS from anyone who came into contact with the team.
800 employees inside one shared view of the customer.
Helan now has up to 800 active users inside Hello Customer, mostly customer-facing roles across the back offices and business units. Each team uses the platform at its own maturity level. Some run their own exports and views. Some keep their own scores and targets. All of them are looking at the same source of customer feedback.
Customer intimacy survived the merger.
The original reason for picking Hello Customer in 2021 was to keep the CX strategy alive through a merger. Five years on, the customer intimacy culture has stayed intact and is operational across the business units. Customer feedback now runs as a daily input in the work of every employee with a customer-facing role.
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