Customers give their feedback regarding long-term care insurance and health insurance

What is it that mostly concerns you with regard to the topic of care? And what can we do to combat the rising costs within the area of private health insurance? At the most recent meeting of the ERGO Customer Advisory Council, we once again gathered lots of valuable input from our advisory council members.

Last Wednesday, the ERGO Customer Advisory Council met for the first time at the Cologne location. The topics of focus were private health insurance and long-term care insurance. Patron Silke Lautenschläger (currently still member of the Board of Management for Customer and Sales Services) addressed the topic of digitisation and, in particular, the further development of the ERGO customer portal. The challenge was motivating customers to not only register on the portal on a one-time basis but to actually manage their insurance digitally over the long term. The objective is to reduce the administrative burden for everyone, to dam the flood of paper and to shorten the processing time for damage claims.

Recently, the council members in the mailroom got to know about the current situation. Here, 20,000 documents are processed daily: That is an alarmingly steep amount of paper.” In this respect, everyone agreed: “There has to be another way in the future – preferably digital, of course.”

A second topic of focus at the morning meeting was the structuring of rates within the comprehensive private health insurance sector. “We would like find a way of calculating rates for the future”, is a wish expressed by the customers. “They’ll really have to come up with something.” Among other things, the participants would like to be actively directed to more affordable rates when it comes to increases in contributions. “That's what I expect from a service provider such as DKV.”

In the afternoon, the council members got a glimpse into the inner workings of the Customer Service Centre. Among other things, the participants looked over the shoulders of the employees as they went about their work and also got a short glimpse of future developments in Customer Service. What's more, the council members got a chance to try out the live chat with their colleagues from the Customer Service Centre.

This was then followed by two workshops, where participants worked intensively on concrete ideas: On the one hand, Uwe Schnödewind (DKV Special Service) talked with the participants about options for reducing rates in the private health insurance sector; on the other hand, Birgit Lange (Product Management DKV Supplementary Insurance) and Heike Linden (Management DKV Health Services) put a new approach for long-term care insurance up for discussion. In both workshops, the council members provided valuable feedback regarding approaches to solutions and further developments from the customers’ perspective.

Altogether, the members of the Customer Advisory Council and the organisers were very satisfied with the meeting. The next Customer Advisory Council meeting will be taking place in May, 2018, but this time with additional formats in order to provide the customers with even more room for cooperation. We look forward to our customers’ feedback.