World Champion Austria Digitisation
Best practice: Digitising the SVS Hans Aubauer, Director General of the Social Health Insurance for the Self-Employed (SVS) on the necessary transformation from a paper plane to a digital high flyer.
What does this infrastructure encompass? Users only see the app on their phone or the chatbot “Fritz” on the website. There surely is more? You need an integrated channel concept. All elements need to interact perfectly. The three elements digital, telephony and
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When did the SVS start its digitisation process? The kick-off was in 2015. Since then, we are pursuing a consistent digitisation strategy within the SVS. The predecessors SVA and SVB were strong, long-standing social health insurance carriers. At that point it was necessary to set a new course to seize the chances and opportunities of digitisation in order to facilitate direct communication with our insured. We wanted to turn our administrators into customer consultants. The new technologies give us a new scope. We have the opportunity to reach a whole new service and communication level which has not been possible so far. We have always looked at digitisation in a holistic way. On the one hand, we have updated internal processes, organisation and internal IT systems, and on the other hand, we took the contact to our customers to a new level. We have launched a website that increased the usability of our services dramatically and we created incentives to establish it as our primary communication channel. An app, a
chatbot and other features followed. Our internal motto was: No more paper. That means: digitise files, update the core system. The Covid pandemic proved our efforts right. It was an unplanned litmus test that we passed with flying colours. We guaranteed the social security of 1.2 million Austrians. Despite the increased demand, we were always available to our customers. Communication moved from direct, personal communication on location to digital channels. We had the infrastructure already available.
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he Social Health Insurance for the Self-Employed (SVS) is the representative of the insurance sector and public services, and is like so many others right in the middle of the digital transformation. Consolidating existing systems, a fortunately growing number of clients and the creation of digital channels for customer services are some of the challenges that the SVS has to tackle. The SVS considers digitisation a holistic project as it wants to continuously reach out to customers with preventive measures and medical services in a digital way. Implementing this service channel for social security sounds trivial but is anything but easy in an industry that does not always have regular contact to its target group. Digitisation is not purely an IT issue to the SVS. Efficiency also matters, of course, but the aim is always to free up more staff for customer consultation. Director General Hans Aubauer offers more insights.
The SVS is available on the smartphone and through the chatbot “Fritz”.
