How customer feedback became a daily reminder for 800 Helan employees
A Belgian health insurer kept its customer intimacy culture alive through a merger, with 800 employees acting on feedback every day.
Helan 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: it 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 across very different operations. Sofie Bruggeman leads customer experience strategy from inside the marketing team: making the surveys work, getting the numbers in front of people, writing the quarterly reports the business units actually read, and helping every department act on what customers say.
Eight hundred of our employees see customer feedback every day. That's the food for the customer intimacy culture we've built at Helan.
Sofie BruggemanStrategic Expert Customer Experience, HelanWhat they needed to solve
In 2021, two equal-sized health insurance funds were merging into one. Almost everything inside the organisation was changing, and the customer experience vision had to survive that transition without losing speed. The team had four problems to solve.
Helan competes on service in a market where most players lead on price. The CX strategy had to be preserved across two cultures and two operating models without losing focus.
A dashboard only the research team reads is a dashboard nobody reads. Feedback had to land inside the daily work of back office teams, team leaders, and unit managers.
Managers whose performance is tied to satisfaction KPIs tend to challenge the data first. The team needed a way to walk them through the feedback and build trust in the signal.
"Act on this and customers will be happier" rarely moves a budget. The case had to be made in financial terms: act on this and you protect retention, upsell, and cross-sell.
How Helan uses Hello Customer
Sofie keeps surveys short and qualitative. The goal is feedback the business units can act on without spending a week analysing it.
Negative feedback is routed to team leaders, who use it to coach the employee who needs to follow up. More self-directed teams give employees direct access to their own customers' feedback.
When a score shifts on a touchpoint, Sofie goes straight to Key Driver Analysis to see which topics carry the most comments and what is impactful right now, in minutes.
A quarterly satisfaction report goes to each business entity. Units read each other's scores and use them as benchmarks inside the group.
A separate forum where Sofie sits with business managers and walks them through the comments in detail, building confidence that a 100-customer signal in a million-member base is still worth acting on.
Results
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 an explicit goal. They invested time in reading the comments and set up a small team to act on the score. Over the next year, CSAT rose 10 to 15 percent across multiple measures.
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 runs as a daily input in the work of every employee with a customer-facing role.
More from Sofie
It's a constant reminder for our employees that customer satisfaction matters. They see it every day. They've become passionate about getting feedback and acting on it. That's the food for the customer intimacy culture we have at Helan.
Sofie BruggemanStrategic Expert Customer Experience, HelanEight hundred of our employees log into Hello Customer. Team leaders use it to coach. Our back office indemnity team set CSAT as their goal and moved it 10 to 15 percent in a year.
Sofie BruggemanStrategic Expert Customer Experience, HelanCustomer satisfaction only becomes a culture when every employee sees it every day. A number in a quarterly slide will not change a single behaviour.
Sofie BruggemanStrategic Expert Customer Experience, HelanHealth insurance is a low-involvement category. People rarely switch, but when they do, they're gone for years. Hello Customer is how we keep 800 employees focused on the customer every day, so we don't lose anyone we could have kept.
Sofie BruggemanStrategic Expert Customer Experience, HelanSee what feedback could do for your team
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