ERGO Insurance

The challenge

ERGO Group AG is an international insurance company based in Düsseldorf, Germany. The company has about 40,000 employees and is one of the largest primary insurers in Germany and Europe. In its native German market, ERGO is one of the leading providers across all insurance lines.

The company’s goal is to make insurance as simple, fast and convenient as possible for its customers. Accordingly, ERGO seamlessly combines expert advice with modern mobile and online services. This gives clients the flexibility to decide how and where to contact the insurer.

The solution

Hyland's Content Composer is the all-in-one solution for ERGO’s customer communications management. Every year, the insurer generates more than 30 million documents. The crux of Hyland’s success is reliability. ERGO's processes — from mass printing to individual correspondence, from the application to the policy, to the settlement of services — run reliably via Content Composer. 

Web-generated documents

The combining of various consulting and sales channels enables customers to obtain information from their advisors and the web. Consumers access information directly from ERGO's website or secondary portals and can immediately finalize an insurance policy. Both channels must be reliable. Moreover, customers in the digital age are used to such processes being completed without delay. They expect to reach their goal after just a few clicks and entries, and to generate a finished application online.

Digital engagement and delivery

It's crucial for ERGO that Content Composer allows them to create, manage and deliver content to their customers digitally. For example, clerks, consultants and representatives use the tool in batch mode. Initially, they generate cover letters that require preconfigured text blocks. Then employees can add variables and/or modules to the letters or create documents for the digital customer file. Content Composer processes these documents, filters and sorts them according to certain key figures, applies OMR codes and creates different print batches.

Overnight, Content Composer sends the documents to the print shop, which prints them and distributes to customers. Content Composer’s automation capabilities streamline the batch process, creating significant gains in efficiency.

In the digital insurance business, it is equally important that customers can obtain information related to their preferred insurance directly on ERGO's website and then generate an application in real time.

“This works flawlessly — with Content Composer everything is possible,” said Benedikt Gast, head of the company’s IT-AE Docuservice.

A customer can click through their required features and wait a maximum of 6 seconds after having selected the “I want an offer” button to receive a finished PDF with the insurance offer, terms, conditions and all other necessary documents.

“Today, the customer expects such processes to run in real time,” Gast said.

ERGO has mapped all the company’s health insurance tariffs in a single document. All individual features are stored in workflows, ensuring that the customer is guaranteed to receive his or her desired tariff in PDF format. This way, Content Composer generates millions of PDFs, customer files or documents, maximally scalable, without losing time and with high flexibility.

All functions — simple operation

Despite all of the possibilities, Content Composer is easy to use. Business department employees can control the design of the documents autonomously, without IT team assistance.

“For administrators or users alike, all tool processes are easy to understand and to use,” said Gast, who also praises the flexibility of the software. He said Content Composer can be adapted to individual requirements, and not only in the case of health insurance.

“Whether we need parallel processes or we have to add servers for more scalability or we have special document design requirements, nothing is a challenge for us now,” Gast said.

This operation includes the convenient connection of third-party systems via Edcom, which controls the flow of modules or scripts into the document. With Content Composer, ERGO simply defines conditions (“If the customer is age X and already has insurance Y, only text module Z can occur at this point.”), integrates XML files with numerous specifications and incorporates these conveniently into the documents via drag and drop. This also includes the integration of suitable images in the internet documents or the addition of formal letters for mailing.

It’s done very simply and effortlessly in the background. And if workload peaks occur, Content Composer can easily be scaled by adding capacity.

Further digitization in the future

Content Composer works in step with official compliance guidelines such as GDPR. ERGO is planning to use Hyland as the central tool for further document creation.

“We are working on integrating even more documents from the HTML world, so that more content can be easily displayed on the customer’s screen — then he or she generates fewer documents, including PDFs,” Gast said. The close collaboration with Hyland ensures future-proofing, which is also essential for ERGO.

“We can use many standard solutions, but we also have the option of customizing to suit our requirements,” Gast said. "And all this without having to contact IT support. The simplicity of the software makes it possible. But if a new demand does occur, we get instant support from Hyland.”

The difference

Content Composer provides a comprehensive solution for customer communications management. By creating and managing personalized communications and omnicast delivery, Content Composer helps companies strengthen the customer experience.

Content Composer integrates with enterprise applications and office productivity software. It provides powerful creation, distribution and management tools to improve efficiency, productivity and consistency.

Explore Hyland for insurance firms