UWV stands for Uitvoeringsinstituut Werknemersverzekeringen, which is the Netherlands Employee Insurance Agency. UWV professionally, effectively and efficiently implements nationwide the various employee insurance schemes such as WW (Unemployment Insurance), WIA (Supplementary Incapacity Insurance), Wajong (Young Disabled Persons Act), WAZ (Self-Employed Persons Disability Benefits Act), Wazo (Work and Care Act) and the Ziektewet (Sickness Benefits Act). It also provides employment services and data services. UWV works as a non-departmental public body (NDPB) on behalf of the Netherlands Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment.
UWV has 4 core tasks: Work: keeping clients in work or helping clients into work, cooperating closely with local authorities, Medical and welfare issues: assessing illness and incapacity to work, Paying benefits: issuing benefits payments in a fast and accurate manner if clients are unable to work in the short term or in general, Data management: ensuring that clients only have to provide the authorities with details of their employment and benefits once
As are virtually all government and semi-governmental bodies, UWV is having to make substantial cuts too. By implementing its e-services, UWV is delivering its answer to the challenge to continue ensuring high-quality services but provide them for less money. People also increasingly expect UWV to provide e-services.
How can we implement e-services whilst also making the required cost savings? UWV was facing exactly that question.
For UWV to work in a customer-orientated and efficient way, they need to have a customer-orientated information management system. In order to use individual customer knowledge on all channels, they are also incorporating all the techniques of omnichannel campaign management. A new and exciting challenge for UWV, as its role is inherently unaccustomed to using ‘commercial tools’.
Cmotions was closely involved in helping to create ‘the first citizen intelligence department in the Netherlands’. UWV and Cmotions worked together to bring about the department’s first Fact-Based Marketing successes. These specifically include the following customer-orientated initiatives:
Signals based on Customer Expertise and Business
The MCM dashboard displays volume figures and trends about channel usage and level of digitalisation of customer processes in their respective phases. This makes it clear to see the digitalisation’s footprint and progress. The dashboard should primarily be seen as a signalling tool. If the projection rises, falls or otherwise deviates, it leads to questions to look into what that is. Questions are asked and answered internally. They can also be asked externally by divisions seeking advice on increasing digitalisation or reducing the footprint.
Data and In-Depth Research
Unlocking data from UWV applications to fill the dashboards has resulted in the enrichment of the Customer Expertise department’s analysis environment. This data is not only used for the dashboards. The department also utilises it to run analyses into the level of digitalisation, the development of message flows in its WERKbedrijf division, the correlation between online visits and telephone questions, and more.
Marketing Customer Expertise
The results from these dashboards have been presented to division managers, executives, the quality team and others. Such presentations create an opportunity to explain how CI works, the customer behaviour analyses that CI provides, and to give direction for the questions to ask. This frequently identifies new research questions to incorporate and has improved the collaboration with the divisions.
Formal Assurance
Launching and completing the MCM Dashboard project enabled CI to flesh out the ‘Measurement’ process of the e-services programme.
Kick-Starting New Initiatives
The MCM Dashboard project has had a dual spin-off. Firstly, a new customer contact indicator report is currently being built in partnership with K&S Uitvoeringsondersteuning. It is now possible to oversee the proportion of telephone questions, complaints and objections in each customer phase and district for WW (Unemployment Insurance), Ziektewet (Sickness Benefits Act), WIA (Supplementary Incapacity Insurance) and Wajong (Young Disabled Persons Act). This information is then used to advise divisions on how to reduce the number of service interactions. Secondly, this enriched knowledge about customer behaviour has also made it possible to set up the Data-Driven Services project.
By profiling customers and applying predictive models, Cmotions has significantly brought down the number of unnecessary telephone calls to UWV. We looked at “frequent callers” in particular. Predicting their calling behaviour and taking pro-active action on it has resulted in a drastic reduction in the number of incoming calls from them. Customer satisfaction has increased significantly at the same time. We have also improved the WW (Unemployment Insurance) application procedure with good customer analysis to increase both application quality and customer satisfaction. Senior management receive highly specified reports, giving them a better insight into processes of this kind. Cmotions also developed a self service tool to provide local management with insights into telephone questions and submitted complaints. We saw the volume of incoming telephone calls fall by 17%.
Society is seeing an increasing trend towards personalised, digital services. At the heart of this is recognising clients and knowing their situation, their needs, their preferences and their expectations.
In early 2014, UWV launched its renewed strategy: ‘UWV into 2017’. This plan serves as the basis for the policy priorities of the Customer Expertise department. The services as delivered by UWV need to become like this:
The Data Driven Services project reaches completion in 2015. Cmotions played its part in this by fixing policy priorities into a development plan for the Customer Expertise department, guided by the three points above.