Pohjantähti redesigned its insurance claims process around users

Pohjantähti is a customer-focused insurance company that provides personal service online, by telephone and through nearly 30 branches from Helsinki to Rovaniemi. Together with its partners, the company offers comprehensive insurance services to both private and corporate customers.

Pohjantähti is owned by its customers and has its head office in Hämeenlinna. The company employs more than 400 people, around 100 of whom work in claims services in Hämeenlinna and Tampere. Pohjantähti aims to be a refreshing exception in the insurance industry and brings this ambition to life every day in its interactions with customers and colleagues.

The collaboration originally began with First Goal in spring 2021. First Goal has since become part of IQI. IQI has supported Pohjantähti in developing smoother customer service and seamlessly integrated systems.

A system upgrade became the largest transformation in the history of Pohjantähti’s claims services

In spring 2021, Pohjantähti began preparing to replace an archiving system that had reached the end of its lifecycle. It was already clear that the workflows used in claims handling also needed to be improved. Claims advisers were required to copy and paste information between systems, and there was no practical way to bring together the different communications associated with an individual claim.

“Many of the problems were relatively small in themselves, but they were repeated constantly in our employees’ daily work.”

Johanna Taivassalo
Claims Director, Pohjantähti

Users were involved from the outset

From the beginning, the Pohjantähti team recognised that the combination of work queue, customer relationship management and archiving systems would be complex. Based on previous positive experiences, Pohjantähti brought in IQI’s experts to help determine how the claims advisers’ work could be made easier, what the different systems could support and how they could work together to deliver the required changes to workflows and data structures.

During the implementation phase, an IQI expert assumed responsibility for project management.

“IQI’s expert involved our claims advisers in the planning from the very beginning. He interviewed them about their daily work and observed the problem areas in their workflows. This had a major influence on both the project vision and its ultimate success,” says Jukka Grönroos, Chief Information Officer at Pohjantähti.

What began as a plan to replace an archiving system ultimately became a project that significantly transformed the insurance claims process.

“This became the largest transformation in the history of our claims services, and it was completed extremely successfully,” Taivassalo says.

The results benefit both employees and customers

The project streamlined the workflows used to process claims and brought together the associated communications, documents and archiving. It made the claims advisers’ daily work easier and improved processing efficiency.

Automation was also increased, and the entire data structure was redesigned. This enables more versatile data collection and reporting. Pohjantähti plans to use the more comprehensive data to support areas such as customer experience development.

In addition to Pohjantähti and IQI, the project involved Fluido as the Salesforce implementation partner and Nextway as the provider of the archiving and work queue system. Communication, shared objectives and system integration can easily create challenges in multi-vendor projects. Under the leadership of IQI’s project manager, however, the teams worked effectively towards a shared goal.

“IQI’s expert had a clear vision of how to improve the user experience. Together, we consistently guided the implementation in that direction, even when it was not the easiest option from a technical perspective,” Grönroos says.

Sampo Koponen, Senior Solution Consultant at Fluido, also identifies listening carefully to end users as a decisive factor in the project’s success.

“We created strong plans, and the implementation required several rounds of iteration before we achieved the desired outcome.”

Everyone involved praised the smooth collaboration, describing IQI’s expert as “the glue that held the different parts of the project together”.

“I was impressed by how effectively the project progressed. Communication worked extremely well throughout,” says Olli-Pekka Sysinoro, Business Process Consultant at Nextway.

Other key suppliers involved in the Tähtikartta project included Enreach, Enfo and Vincit. IQI’s objective was to ensure that every participant worked towards the same goal. Despite the relatively large number of suppliers, the project achieved this successfully.

The new systems were successfully launched in spring 2022. Further development opportunities have already been identified, but the immediate impact on the claims advisers’ daily work represented a significant step forward.

“The successful outcome will undoubtedly also be visible to our customers through an even smoother service experience,” Taivassalo concludes.