AXA Belgium

AXA Belgium brings together 3,200 brokers, 450 bank agents and 3,500 employees to serve 2.9 million customers. In 2017, with a strong ambition to develop customer experience and customer-centricity across the organisation, AXA partnered with us to design their first customer experience strategies — and, just as importantly, to isolate a design-and-deliver methodology they could carry independently across the company, with the right quality, insights, skills and ambition.

A three-step approach, at a glance:

• Step 1 — a POC defining the car claims customer experience strategy and journeys
• Step 2 — prioritising and road-mapping the car claims experience with the teams
• Step 3 — fine-tuning the methodology and transferring it to AXA's teams via car insurance underwriting

The challenge: build customer-centricity AXA could carry on its own

The goal wasn't a single customer journey — it was to seed customer-centricity across the organisation, with an ambitious target: a 40% decrease in operational costs through a smarter, more digital and better-orchestrated experience. AXA wanted to design its first CX strategies from underwriting to claims, and at the same time isolate a repeatable design-and-deliver methodology adapted to its own DNA, so it could spread customer journey work across the company without depending on us. The deliverables also had to be strong enough to unlock investment from group headquarters. We ran the whole thing in collaboration with AXA's teams, over a 12-month period.

Step 1: a proof of concept on car claims

We started where the experience matters most — claims — and used it to prove the method:

• Methodology and deliverables definition
• As-is customer journey analysis and benchmarking
• Car claims strategic orientations
• To-be customer journey design

Step 2: prioritisation and road-mapping, with the teams

A strategy has to become a sequence of decisions the business owns. So we built the roadmap alongside AXA's own people:

• Methodology and deliverables definition
• Transversal roadmap analysis
• Roadmap building with a team of operational managers and business analysts
• Business prioritisation with management leaders

Step 3: fine-tune the method, then transfer it

The final step turned a one-off success into an in-house capability — using car insurance underwriting as the vehicle to transfer the know-how:

• Methodology and deliverables fine-tuning
• Targeted segment qualification and quantification
• Omnichannel sales strategy, and customer experience per touchpoint and segment
• Key mockups for the digital journeys
• Team know-how transfer and coaching — to reach autonomy in designing and delivering CX strategies across all lines of business

Why it worked: a specific journey, and a method to repeat it

We delivered on two levels at once: a strong customer experience strategy and roadmap for car insurance — targeting a 40% reduction in operational costs — and an AXA-specific methodology the teams could reuse across the company. The deliverables were strong enough to unlock group-level investment to fund the transformation, and became the starting point of a genuinely customer-centric organisation. Because we co-built it with operational managers, analysts and leaders, and coached them to autonomy, the capability stayed inside AXA. First a proof of concept, then a method that spreads.

"As it was the first time at AXA Belgium that we really started to create customer journeys in a very explicit way, we chose to work with Belly & Brain. They brought us exactly the skills we did not have in-house at the time. They helped us both on the design of a specific customer journey — now being implemented step by step — and on the creation of an AXA-specific methodology that enables us to spread customer journey development across many areas of our company. Thanks to Belly & Brain, we were able, quite rapidly and impactfully, to put our company in a customer-first mindset, with a solid methodology underneath and first visible results on the claims journey they designed for us." — Gunter Uytterhoeven, Chief Customer & Data Officer, AXA Belgium