New Customer-Centric Service Processes

About SOKA-BAU

SOKA-BAU is the umbrella brand of two institutions: Urlaubs- und Lohnausgleichskasse der Bauwirtschaft (ULAK) and Zusatzversorgungskasse des Baugewerbes AG (ZVK). Both are institutions of the collective bargaining parties in the construction industry.

Both ULAK and ZVK are classic non-profit organizations. The tasks of the ULAK and the ZVK are - in each case on the basis of collective agreements - to secure vacation entitlements across all companies, to close pension gaps and to place vocational training on a financially secure footing. Since 1949 SOKA-BAU has been providing benefits tailored to the special situation of the construction industry. Around one million employees benefit from these services, 80,000 employers, 40,000 trainees and 360,000 retired construction professionals.

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.

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.

The solution

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.

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.

Technology/core 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 Adobe XD
• Test automation with Robot Framework