Focus on comprehensive service

Providing immediate, direct help to customers 24/7 is the fundamental goal of assistance. Vienna Insurance Group is happy to set such a goal, since creating a customer-friendly image is a key success factor for the Group. In order to make further improvements in this area and increase customer loyalty, Vienna Insurance Group decided it would expand internally and no longer use outside companies to provide assistance services.

Internalisation like this allows for a significantly better use of potential synergies. The value added by this decision is clear to see: Control over claims handling – from first contact to payment of compensation – gives Vienna Insurance Group significant control over service quality and allows it to make further improvements.

By now, local market leader

The initiative began in 2013 with the purchase of the assistance company Global Assistance in the Czech Republic. This Group subsidiary has already become a local market leader.

In the following years, the organisational foundations were laid to enable internal assistance to be promoted in other Vienna Insurance Group markets. In Bulgaria, for example, a Group in-house call centre was successfully converted to an assistance company, and the company Global Assistance was acquired in Slovakia. A further milestone was achieved in Poland in 2016, where a motor assistance centre was successfully set up as a greenfield project and established itself as the most modern motor assistance centre in the Polish market. In the year 2017, work also began on establishing a separate assistance centre in Romania. The focus for internal assistance in the year 2017 will be on services in the travel and household areas.

Thanks to new technologies, even more customer service

The digitisation trend will also naturally affect assistance. As a result, mobile solutions that provide faster, better customer service have already been implemented, such as mobile GPS tracking for tow trucks. This supports the drivers to take the shortest route and ensures that locations are found quickly.

Identify customer needs + professional assistance = satisfied customer

The initial results from this initiative indicate that significant synergy effects are created by the transfer of knowledge between individual Group-wide assistance companies and close cooperation between assistance and claims handling. However, the fact that professional assistance has a major effect on customer loyalty and satisfaction is also extremely important. And ultimately, that is our goal: to provide the best possible service to customers who is convinced of the value of that service.