After a hugely successful 8-week pilot of Idea Drop’s best-in-class innovation management technology, the platform was rolled out globally across 2,000 people with a committed 3-year partnership between Idea Drop and Covea.
With Idea Drop, Covea discovered a completely new way to improve customer success and save costs by harnessing the collective brainpower of their employees.
Challenges & Opportunities
Covea serves millions of policyholders throughout the year and their customers are at the heart of their business. With the world moving faster than ever, companies in every sector have to prioritise agile innovation in order to keep up with the needs and expectations of their customers.
Before Idea Drop, new ideas at Covea were centralised to one functional group and there was no scalable way to innovate across the business. The ways ideas were captured were fragmented, non-inclusive and siloed, with reliance on dated tools such as closed email inboxes and intranets. These lacked visibility and transparency on what was happening with new ideas and projects and prevented wide-scale collaboration unfolding. There was no way of closing the feedback loop or rewarding and recognising employees for the ideas that were proposed and actioned.
“The cultural alignment of working with Idea Drop felt right. Idea Drop’s innovation and customer success team talked in our language and that was as much the selling point as the platform itself”
As a forward thinking company, Covea quickly identified that there is a better way to keep up with the market and improve their already outstanding customer support services than simply leaving it in the hands of the senior management team.
Main Challenges:
- There was a misalignment between employees and Covea’s business strategy.
- There was no clear process in place on how to capture and implement ideas.
- A lack of transparency in the innovation process meant including and engaging at scale was hard.
- Innovation was centralised to one functional group – not delegated across the business.
- There was a lack of collaboration, transparency and communication between departments.
Solution
Covea wanted to encourage and empower their employees to innovate and after selecting Idea Drop a leading global vendor, decided to run a 2-month pilot of the technology. The goal was to create a clear process that would allow the engagement of employees, cascading down strategic company goals in the form of a challenge and ask for their ideas on how to solve specific problems. This enabled them to create a healthy pipeline of innovative ideas that would allow Covea to stay ahead of their competition by improving their services and processes.
Covea decided to run the pilot because they wanted to prove the value first in order to get the confidence that Idea Drop was the right tool to be rolled out company-wide. Because of Idea Drop’s intuitive and lightweight interface, the software was fast to deploy with virtually zero training costs and 100 people were invited to participate in the pilot.
“What we wanted to create within Covea, was a mechanism where people could contribute and share their ideas, and ideally, fill our pipeline with innovative ideas and Idea Drop allowed us to do that.”
Check out the video below to find out why Idea Drop was the perfect idea management tool for Covea
A dedicated Innovation and Customer Success team from Idea Drop assisted Covea throughout the pilot and helped them to adopt the technology and maximise the engagement. The advantages of deploying Idea Drop were obvious very quickly as in a very short period of time, Covea captured 139 ideas which received thousands of interactions, such as comments, favourites and ratings. 22 ideas were immediately implemented during the pilot phase and Covea was able to prove the ROI very quickly as one of the ideas is set to save the company over £2.5m. These results gave Covea the confidence to fully roll out Idea Drop across the whole company.
Idea Spotlight: how one idea is set to save Covea £2.5m
One of the ideas that came out of the pilot was submitted against the challenge which invited employees’ ideas on how to improve their customer support. The challenge was co-authored with Idea Drop’s customer success team and submitted by the senior management as it perfectly aligned with their company-wide key strategic goals: to always be improving on ways to support their customers faster and keep improving their customer satisfaction scores.
The call volumes in the call centre are costly to support and are set to grow in line with the increased customer volumes aligned to upcoming affinity deals. The idea submitted on Idea Drop suggested installing a webchat functionality on Covea’s website so their customers would be able to receive 24/7 support and the call centre would be able to reduce the number of queries which can be simply answered by a bot. That would result in cost savings and also a reduction in repetitive and static requests received by the call handlers.
It is feasible that up to 18.8% of these calls could be satisfied through an automated response from a chatbot with some leading to clarification through a subsequent web chat session. Recognising that it is not going to happen from the outset, there is an assumption that 25% of these calls will be handled by a chatbot.
Total cost annually 25% of the 18.8% of repetitive queries that could be handled by a chatbot
£255,127
Based on the calculations above, the call centre is going to save more than £1.2m over 5 years. Once the web chat functionality is rolled out to other areas of the business that could benefit from web chat functionality, the estimated cost savings from this idea over 5 years is £2.5m.
Key benefits of the chatbot:
- Chatbot provides a 24/7 support capability to customers.
- Improves customer satisfaction score and NPS.
- Cost reduction of £2.5m in handling repetitive queries.
- Call handlers can focus on more complex queries.
The result: Covea has achieved significant success during the pilot and has rolled out Idea Drop globally and company-wide.
Summary:
- Challenges as a way to translate strategic business challenges and goals
- Idea Drop software and mobile app empowered the whole company to share and submit their ideas
- Increased transparency as each idea gets real-time feedback and moves through different stages
- Idea Drop empowered the collaboration between different departments
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