The Initial Situation
SOKA-BAU realized that its target group, employers and workers in the construction industry, hardly knew about the advantages of the social fund procedure, if at all. Many customer inquiries required manual processing by the customer service department. This resulted in longer processing times during peak periods with heavy call traffic. Furthermore, a complex, historically evolved IT architecture impeded rapid adaptation to changing framework conditions and customer requests.
The Solution
SOKA-BAU plans to cut processing times by reducing technical and organizational expense drivers, as well as efficiently designing, developing, and rolling out new (online) services. At the same time, they aim to boost customer satisfaction and acceptance of the social fund procedure significantly through rapid, ongoing consideration of user feedback. Technical and customer services will be made available to customers online, independently of local offices, the infrastructure, and the user devices.
With its KAIROS projects, SOKA-BAU initiated a greenfield approach for developing and implementing social fund procedures as part of its digitalization strategy. Services and other core processes have been standardized and completely redesigned, taking customers’ needs into account.
In the KAIROS projects, teams consisting of internal employees from process and organizational management, customer service, and IT worked with external consultants to develop new products and services.
Technical components:
- Online services and portals as proprietary Java developments
- Process modeling with BPMN in Camunda
- Technical and organizational concepts in Confluence
- Backlog structure and user stories in Jira
- Building click dummies and design prototypes with AdobeXD
- Test automation with Robot Framework
The Project
The method chosen for the project was the “Digital Innovation Playbook” from Dark Horse Innovation, an advancement of design thinking and several other approaches.
The playbook was developed specifically for digital innovations and consists of three core modules: EXPLORE,CREATE, EVALUATE (see below). The modules have different perspectives and objectives, but are not strictly delineated from one another. Findings from one module can have impacts on a previous module, which means new solutions are developed iteratively.
The Benefits
SOKA-BAU piloted the employer portal with selected customers, who have been involved in the development of the new processes an services since the beginning of the EXPLORE module. The new processes and the new portal are now being rolled out successively to all construction industry employers (around 70,000 firms and service providers).
Manual processing steps have been reduced dramatically through expedient automation. Thanks to individual, proactive communication with the service team since the start of the pilot phase, customer satisfaction has increased significantly.
There are also firm plans for digital services for SOKA-BAU’s second group of customers, construction workers. They will be able to get a digital overview of available benefits at any time and submit requests easily on a smartphone. Now that an interactive click dummy confirmed high user interest in these potential services, SOKA-BAU will continue to push forward with this development. Its goal is to provide low-threshold, user-friendly services to significantly increase knowledge about the benefits of SOKA-BAU and the advantages of the social fund procedure among this group of customers.
