Nationale Nederlanden

customer case

Nationale-Nederlanden Pensions: digitizing a complex product

How do you digitize the service around a product that can hardly be standardized? By 'just starting small', switching quickly and continuously fine-tuning. That, in a nutshell, is how Blueriq and Nationale-Nederlanden approach the digitization of processes surrounding their pension products. 'We need software with which we can work flexibly and decisively. That is the added value that Blueriq delivers.'

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Want to learn more about Blueriq's approach and the digitization of Nationale-Nederlanden's pension products? Then download the full customer case.

Re-work and status calls virtually gone

Thanks to the digitization of various steps in the process, re-work and status calls have all but disappeared.

Dynamic processes

By using dynamic processes and smart forms, Nationale-Nederlanden's customers only see choices that are applicable for his or her policy.

Flexibility and decisiveness

Blueriq technology enables modeling instead of programming. This allows you to quickly build and customize applications and solutions.

It was a turbulent time when Nationale-Nederlanden began digitizing their pension products two years ago. The merger with Delta Lloyd had just been completed and the company was in the midst of a re-branding. Still, Matthijs Schrama's team wanted to seize this very moment to digitize the complex product.

"We had to bring together different systems from two companies. Then you might as well take advantage of the momentum and tackle everything thoroughly right away. Both Nationale-Nederlanden and Delta Lloyd were already taking small steps towards digitizing pensions before the merger. It was far from an easy task. 'Pension is a really tricky product,' Matthijs, team leader of the Change Team, continues. 'You're dealing with an indescribable amount of variables; Many of the pensions we manage today were originally set up anywhere from recently to forty years ago. Then think about all those different agreements and arrangements. For a long time we were told 'that can't be standardized and therefore can't be digitized'. But we succeeded - partly thanks to Blueriq.' Together we create a customer journey. This results in a logical process sequence, a clear step-by-step plan, relevant questions and, last but not least, readable texts. Aron and I can then build this quickly and easily in Blueriq. Modeling is actually a better word. The software consists of modeled 'blocks' that you can stack as you please. In this way, we are able to independently transform complex regulations into an accessible digital form."

As a team, you often face delays and changes. It takes adaptability and creativity to deal with them well. I see this in the Blueriq people.

MATTHEW SCHRAMA Team leader Change Team Nationale-Nederlanden

Incomplete forms

Pension holders at Nationale-Nederlanden still handled all questions and changes 'on paper' until two years ago. Customers were sent letters and forms by mail or e-mail. Forms with attachments of more than ten A4 pages were no exception. 'That is, of course, out of date,' says Daan van Beusekom Bastiaans, Product Owner at Nationale-Nederlanden. 'The system was rather error-prone. Employees had to put all the information from the returned forms into the systems manually. The forms were sometimes incorrectly filled out or incomplete. Many customers also called customer service to ask if their form had arrived correctly. So it was high time to digitize the process at the front and back end.

Cut up and build out

To get this digitization process started, the team decided to cut up the entire pension process into small sub-projects. During the forty years that a pension is built up, there are various contact moments when customers have to communicate changes; a change of employer (value transfer), a marriage, a divorce, etc. However, the peak in contact moments is at the end of the process when the pension holder has to make choices about when and in what form he wants his pension to be paid out. 'It is precisely with that target group that we started,' Daan continues. 'In many ways, that was the most challenging group. Not only because it was the most complicated in terms of content, but these are also the people who are almost 65 and generally less digitally inclined than younger people. Again, we didn't take the easy way out. Or rather, we took a pretty big risk. But starting with this group did challenge us to think carefully about everything and keep it simple. We started by setting up the digital process for a small grouping of participants. Roughly 200 of the 2,000 clients who retire within our product domain each month. Clients receive a letter several months before their pension is due to take effect, asking them to submit their pension choices to us digitally via their own My NN environment. From there, we continued to build step by step.

Read more? In the extensive case description you can read even more about our cooperation and the value we add at Nationale-Nederlanden. Download the case using the blue button at the top right of the page.

Want to know more?

If so, contact René Frankena, Solution manager at Blueriq.

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René
Frankena Solution manager