In your keynote case study, you discuss Allianz Services 'transformation engine' to drive customer excellence, innovation and best-in-class services. What was the vision behind this approach?

Thank you. First of all, let me explain to you, the insurance industry is about promise. So, you promised your customer to be with him in the moment of truth and to take care of the customer's need, and therefore, customer excellence, best-in-class services, and real-time response become really a success factor. By treating your customer in the moment of truth, can you imagine you have an accident and you're waiting for four hours for a pickup service? This is exactly the moment of truth where it matters that you take care of your customer. And that's for me very, very important, that we become the transformation engine that we can serve our customer in real time, we can create a superior client experience, and in the end of the day, take care of their needs and solve their issues. And that's about transforming, for me, the operations area, the contact center activities, and being next to each of our customers. On top of that, it's also very important you take care the same way you expect your people to take care of your customer. That's the reason for me it's very important: happy employee means happy customer.

What key challenges did you encounter with this approach, and how did you overcome these challenges?

First of all, the transformation means a change, and it means we need to do things differently, better, faster, cheaper, and with much better quality and with much better customer responsiveness and customer centricity to get there. At the moment, our challenges are clearly we have a huge pressure from inflation where costs are increasing dramatically. The second area is that we have talent scarcity to find the right talent pool. And the third area, how can we enable technology much better for our services? And to do so, it's very, very important that we have really smart ideas. How can we improve operations? How can we digitalize and how can we automate processes? One of the examples which we are having now rolling out in our organization is process mining to understand what are the cost drivers in this respective process, how can we improve it, and even how can we innovate it.

On the talent scarcity area, we are facing that in many business areas and in many regions. And here we want to become a very attractive employer to really offer our people a great place to work. And thirdly and lastly, there is the area where we need more capabilities to train the people in the area of automation, AI, machine learning, and you name it.

What tools or areas are you looking to invest in to support this approach, and how do you see this approach evolving over the coming years?

I think one of the fundamental areas is how can we better utilize technology for our people. I know many of us are afraid of automation, but my simple view is that let's get the bot out of the human being. What I mean by that, let's give the bots the transaction repetitive task and give our people high-value activities and tasks. And definitely, yes, we need to invest in the capabilities of our people to much better utilize AI, machine learning, automation tools, process mining tools. That's the one area. The second area is how can we be much better serve our customers, to improve in our service capabilities, how we can increase the customer centricity, and what we need to do to train our people to be more customer-obsessed. And the third area is clearly transformation capabilities. We need a lot of transformation agents, a lot of consultants, how can we move from an old world to the new world.

What memorable moments or highlights from SSOW Europe 2023 have stood out?

So, this, for me, the first time to join such a venue and I didn't have any expectation because I was too much focused on my presentation. However, I really enjoyed being here and thanks for having me here. First of all, it was really a pleasure listening to other industries, to other companies, and as well the peers to learn how they are running their GBS operations. Secondly, the networking with the colleagues, fantastic. And third thing, really having fun. That's very, very important.

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