The customer Novalis was created in January 2005 from the merging of the MV4 and Parunion company groups incorporating retirement benefit and health cover organizations.   Novalis is specialized in complementary retirement pensions, pension planning, health coverage, and retirement/wage savings. The company is actively developing a social welfare policy. Novalis is a French company that stands fifth for pension planning and sixth for retirement benefits.

The issues and the stakes

In 2004, Novalis recognizing the strong growth of their activities and willing to be as close as possible to their customers’ (companies, employees, retirees) needs and expectations decided their core strategy would be Customer Relationship Management.

That same year, the group took the decision to implement an inbound emails management system following the functional specifications related to its business.

The goal was to improve the inbound emails management (more than 2 000 per month) and to offer their customers a new communication channel that would bring responsiveness and reduce the enquiries response time.

Akio Mail Center deployment

In 2005, Novalis chose Akio Mail Center after examining various solutions in the marketplace.   The Akio system was chosen for its flexibility, usability, but above all, for its scalability, customization, and capacity to fit functional needs.

Among the most appreciated features, Novalis also points out the intuitive interface, the capacity to analyze the inbound emails content with the Artificial Intelligence engine that automatically propose relevant response templates or routes emails to specialized services for specific enquiries.

Customer service agents and department managers located in several sites (Paris and Saran) and working in a skill management environment have been trained on Akio Mail Center to respond to the various internet users’ enquiries.

Hosting of the solution is provided by CIGMAGCA, an information processing center. CIGMAGCA is the project management center for telecom and information services for the three main retirement and insurance organizations : AUDIENS, Novalis, and TAITBOUT Group.

In turn, AUDIENS decided to implement Akio in June 2006 for twenty (20) users to manage their incoming emails.

The benefits

Deployed in less than three weeks in December 2005, Akio Mail Center quickly established itself as an advanced solution to improve treatment and response time to heterogeneous customers’ enquiries such as registration of companies’ new employees, information on employee medical coverage, complementary retirement pension requests, and so on.

In addition, the templates database led Novalis to extend its use in September 2006 to all agents of its two (2) call centers, totaling around fifty (50) operators. Agents use a single and united knowledge database to treat either emails or phone calls.

Novalis currently works on developing interfaces between Akio and the Business Information Systems to automate an information search concerning a customer enquiry. This new functionality will greatly improve email management efficiency.

Sally Crookes, Novalis Customer Service Manager, states. “Akio’s expertise on e-CRM made it possible for us to entrust a strong and functional partner that listened to our needs.  Their ongoing support greatly contributed to the recognizable successful implementation”.