How Groupama digitized over 200 Claims Processes in 6 months (+50% Efficiency)

It was a sunny Tuesday in the middle of summer. Groupama, the #1 legal protection company in France, had been a Penbox customer for just a week. They were one of our first major French clients. I asked Pierre to debrief me on the onboarding meeting.

"Groupama wants to develop everything in-house. They want to maintain full autonomy. And the deadline is December." - Pierre told me.

I reviewed my notes on the project. Groupama aimed to digitize 200 legal protection claim processes. These processes ranged from handling disputes with employers to contesting online purchases. The Excel sheet detailing all the cases was 26 pages long when printed.

I thought the chances of success were close to zero. At that time, our solution was less mature and, to be honest, somewhat buggy. Nonetheless, Groupama was unequivocal: they wanted to handle all the coding themselves, with us only available to answer a few questions.

We want to address our #1 issue with customers.

Let's go back to what led us here. A year before we met, Groupama Legal Protection wanted to improve customer satisfaction. They had lots of complaints about the collection of documents. It was a very frustrating process for their customers.

When you call on your legal protection, you have already taken some steps to solve your case. As a result, your claims handler is asking a lot of questions to understand your situation. And then sending you very long follow-up requests for a lot of documents. Customers often did not understand why so many documents were needed, and the process was a nightmare, involving at least 10 emails exchanged per case.

Customer surveys flagged this as the #1 issue. Groupama organized round tables with customers, handlers, and legal experts to better understand the problem. Handlers, not being legal experts, sometimes asked for the wrong documents or missed essential ones. As a result, legal experts had to contact the customers again when opening the case.

Implementing a document checklist without success.

Based on these observations, the team decided to take a standard approach: they created a document checklist for handlers to use during calls.

Unfortunately, this did not resolve the issue. The checklist was not consistently enforced. When it was used, handlers struggled to adapt it to the specific case of the customer. This led to continued requests for documents that customers found confusing.

The format was too static, both for employees and customers. Also, the exchange was still by email. This did not address the limitations of email inboxes, such as attachment size limits.

Searching for a digital solution. And finding one.

Groupama started researching an alternative solution. They needed a digital case management tool with an advanced form builder.

Their customers would access a personal space to share their documentation. This would be done without a login or with a simplified login experience. Groupama wanted to provide a unique link where all documents would be saved in real time.

Additionally, they wanted a solution that would help them rationalize their 200 use cases. To do this, they needed to be able to build advanced conditions on the form. Traditional branching offered by typical low-code solutions would not fit their needs.

ℹ️ You can visit our website if you want to know more about Penbox. However, this article is about the incredible implementation journey Groupama had. Let's dig into this.

Digitizing 200 cases in 3 months

The task was set: in 3 months, implementing a document of 26 pages describing 200 cases in a new solution.

The first step was to rationalize the list. Groupama explored the advanced logic capabilities of Penbox and realized they could regroup their 200 use cases into 35 forms. This was already a significant win.

By the end of the summer, they started developing their first 2 forms and shared them with the business. Over the next 3 months, they maintained a pace of developing between 1 and 2 forms per week. Building a form required, on average, one hour per day of a legal expert's time.

They did not know it was impossible, so they did it. By December, they had developed 35 forms, rationalizing 200 cases.

First go-live with two handlers, with very positive results.

Would the hard work pay off? Time for the moment of truth. Right after they developed their forms, they went live with two handlers.

For the pilot phase, Groupama decided not to invest in their IT infrastructure. Instead, they used the Penbox application and Outlook extension to create and handle their cases. This allowed them to start the project in all autonomy from a business point of view.

Feedback from the customers was immediately positive. They instantly reached a completion rate of more than 60%, despite the forms being quite long. Some forms requested more than 30 questions and documents.

The objectives of the pilot were also to get feedback from the legal experts. After handling 300 cases with Penbox, the results were positive. Experts treated cases 50% faster. Centralising all files simplified the treatment of complex cases. More on the results in this article.

Feedback and revising all forms.

After the pilot, Groupama consolidated all the feedback received. They added logic to address instances where documents were misrequested. This allowed them to fix the issue once and for all in the solution.

Workshops were organized with legal experts. For each form, they analyzed submissions and how legal experts handled cases afterwards. They challenged whether the documents requested in the first phase were necessary. This way, they reworked all their forms to yield even better performance.

Integration into IT system and go-live with 30 handlers.

The final step for full roll-out was integrating Penbox into the IT system. Concretely, this means adding two buttons to Groupama's systems. The first button allows users to select the right case from the 35 created. The second button generates and receives the unique link.

Groupama was able to implement the change in a single release. Six months after Groupama created the first form in their development environment, all handlers had access to the solution.

If you believe Groupama had an impressive implementation time, keep reading. They also set records in roll-out time. During the next three months—at the time of this writing—Groupama managed more than 4,000 cases with Penbox. They collected more than 26,000 files. None of those files cluttered any mailbox, nor did they need to be manually converted to PDF.

The results.

Here is a breakdown of the results Groupama achieved in just 6 months:

• 200 cases in 35 processes: 
  Groupama rationalized its 200 cases into 6 times fewer processes. This was achieved through excellent business analysis skills and the ability to create advanced conditional logic.
• Implementation in 6 months (including pilot): 
  Groupama produced 1 to 2 forms per week for 3 months. After a successful 3-month pilot, they decided to go live.
• Full roll-out and 50% efficiency gains: 
  Only a few days after the full roll-out, every front-office employee was using Penbox. They experienced a significant increase in productivity on cases completed by Penbox, with efficiency gains of up to 50% on simple cases.
• No more customer complains: 
  By implementing Penbox in only 6 months, they managed to reduce their #1 complain to zero. The document collection process is no longer mentioned in their customer surveys.

Want to dive deeper into the differences between handling legal protection claims and other types of insurance claims? Discover why legal protection requires a unique approach and learn more about the innovative solutions Groupama used to transform their processes.

Read our next article: 3 Reasons Why You Should Handle Your Claims Differently in Legal Protection