Quarterly accounts from Acerta through IxorDocs.

Until recently (2017), Acerta sent most of the quarterly accounts for their customers by post. An operation that entailed a production cost of €135,000 per quarter, in addition to the internal operational challenges of getting 920,000 documents to the customer on time, each time.

It was time for a sustainable solution that would relieve the pressure on the organization and the budget while simplifying the administration for Acerta's customers. Acerta decided to use IxorDocs; an AI product from the Mechelen software house Ixor that simplifies and automates document flows. We asked Els Schellens, Director Operations Starters and Self-employed, to share her experiences with IxorDocs.

Els Schellens, Director Operations Starters and Self-employed.

"Acerta has very specific requirements, we wanted something customized and IxorDocs was super fast to deliver a solid solution."

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Els, you're in charge of Operations Starters and Self-Employed. If I understand correctly, are you the team trying to make life easier for the self-employed? "Absolutely! My department works mainly for the self-employed, not for their staff. That accounts for 290,000 customers. The teams keep the administrative hassle for the self-employed as low as possible. This ranges from translating legislation to our applications for collecting and refunding the social security contributions. And everything in between."
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Is this administrative simplification the core task of the department? "Well, of course, it's 80% of our assignment. Of course, we are also responsible for managing the underlying processes, implementing new legislation in our tools or working with integrators like you. But above all, it comes down to exactly what our customers want. If they say 'I want to pay by email' or 'I want to use WhatsApp to communicate with you' then it's my department that will see if we can meet that demand. If it makes the customer's life easier, we put our energy into it."
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What was the challenge when you got to know IxorDocs? "We send an invoice to all our self-employed customers, five times a year. They're all separate documents. Until a year and a half ago, that was with letter and envelope. Beware; that was and still is the standard in our sector. But we felt we had to change that. Sustainability and cost savings, these two things can really go hand in hand. We started looking at the Doccle platform to digitize the different documents as soon as possible."

Exactly what type of documents was this about? "It was about all the documents where we have to take the initiative on behalf of the customer, i.e. all the legal documents that we have to send. And, of course, we wanted something tailor-made. That's why Bram Lerouge of Doccle referred us to IxorDocs. It went incredibly fast after that."
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Are you actually actively looking for innovation yourselves? Do you look for third party solutions yourself? (laughs) "I'd like to! But I don't always have enough time for it. No, we've set up an innovation track within Acerta this year. A flexible team that keeps a close eye on the market. Dries (De Moor, ed.), Nicolas (Pevenage, ed.) and I do the follow-up for the department Starters & Self-employed. Within that team, my primary responsability is process optimisation. Dries is mainly looking for new services and Nicolas focuses on new tools. Of course we try to follow the new trends through the regular channels, but we also do a lot of customer queries. To see what the self-employed want, which direction we should go. Two weeks ago we invited our customers to our offices (Acerta Wilrijk) to question them about the pension service. We had one question: "What do you expect from us before the end of your career?" Incredibly valuable insights come out of conversations like this."

So looking for new things all the time? "Improvements above all. New isn't always better... But if a new solution can help to simplify administration for our customer, we will listen. "

That relationship with the client is ingrained in you, isn't it? "Although I may be responsible for the strategic aspect and rolling it out, I think it's super important to know what's going on. At our customers and in the teams. That's why I regularly visit custumers myself, to be able to work things out. That was no different with the IxorDocs project."

In complex projects you need to understand both the business and the IT and the customers. That's a big deal. Do you have many parallel projects? (laughs) "There are a few parallel projects. But that's fun too, isn't it? Not all projects at Acerta are the same size. What is always noticeable is that if you work with a good external partner it sometimes goes faster than if you do a purely internal project. It always comes down to who you're working with."
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Is it difficult to find good external partners? "For really big projects, we usually start from an RFP, but this project emerged from a conversation with Doccle. We wanted to put our accounts on Doccle for a long time, but we couldn't get that integrated technically. When Bram introduced you (IxorDocs) as integrators, the project gained momentum."
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So it can also be very organic? "Sometimes it's just by talking to other parties that you feel the click. If the integrator passes the background check and we're sure that the innovation benefits our customers, we go for it".

Our assignment was: 'make it as easy as possible for our customer', 'avoid paper' and 'save costs' without impacting the quality of the service. What was the reaction from the field? "We do notice that in every project there are early adopters who are immediately with us. It was no different here. But for a lot of people it was a big step to suddenly have to consult and retrieve their documents on a platform like Doccle. They need to know their password, apply for a token... After the first shipments via IxorDocs, we went to see if we could make it even easier and offer a payment option in the mail. After a conversation with Lauro (Vanderborght, the IxorDocs project manager, ed.), IxorDocs developed a tailor-made solution for us".

You mean the pay button in the mail so recipients don't have to use the Doccle platform? "We were the first to use this solution. We like to do our own thing, so the mail design, the look and feel - you name it, it all had to be custom made. This has also significantly lowered the threshold for our customers".

So it was worth the effort of developing the tailor-made solution? "Sure! We can see that in the number of people who sign up and pay. Those numbers are rising steadily. What is striking is that the people who have been with us for years still have trouble leaving their email address and just say: 'I'll disable the paper versions'. You have to help people. For starters, it is our policy to go for paperless from the start. 80% of those people respond immediately. But you have to keep the conversation going. And if the customer really doesn't want to, so be it. Our customer decides."

But why wouldn't they? "You still have the responsibility to keep the service at the same level. If something goes wrong, people tend to say: send me the paper version. That's really something like: 'on paper it was better anyway'. We're doing everything we can to organize that."

Speaking of organization, how did the technical cooperation go? "I've found the cooperation to be very smooth. It's very flexible working with you. Acerta has very specific requirements in all possible areas and you have to be able to deal with them. We had Doccle, we had a mail platform, but that wasn't really enough for us. We wanted something customized and IxorDocs was super fast to deliver a solid solution".

Did you have any specific questions about safety and GDPR beforehand? "We did the GDPR check before we started ther collaboration. Data security was one of the most important elements for a project like this."

IxorDocs is a cloud solution, how did Acerta feel about that? "Well, we're not used to it at Acerte. IxorDocs turned out to be a proven product, but we did the safety check thoroughly".

We are now a few months down the road on and IxorDocs is running smoothly, how does the organization react? "I haven't heard any complaints at all so far. It was striking that at the start of the project I had to explain on almost all levels how we had managed to roll out such a project in such a short time... Payroll, Consulting, HR; people were a bit suspicious in the beginning because it went so fast. There had been a preliminary process before we started with you and that hadn't yielded anything so when the solution was there after only a few weeks, a few thought: "Oh, is that all right? But then when you see everything is working, you're reassured. But I did have to explain it a few times!" (laughs)

We also worked well together, at least that's what our team tells me! "That's a compliment to Lauro and Gert. The first integration with Doccle via IxorDocs was a matter of weeks and the payment button in the mails was there just as quickly. We had decided in March to use the payment button when sending the statements in May. "Everything was settled after a month."

Didn't have a hitch anywhere? "Yeah, we ran into a few issues, but those hurdles were taken quickly. In my opinion, it was always very good when we communicated with the customers. (Thinks) When you work with such short deadlines, it sometimes happens that you have to postpone things."

You're talking about the reporting, huh? "Right. It wasn't 100% ready at launch. There's a long chain; from us to Doccle, to the print service and back... we've had to manually correct 2500 documents. If the reporting had been ready, we could have dealt with it quicker, but on a batch of 650 000 documents it's nothing. It's a growing pains that needed to be solved."

What would you recommend to other paper-eaters? "Listen to your customers. I really don't think a lot of companies do that enough. There are so many solutions on the market that can help you respond to your customers' needs. Two years ago, I never thought I'd find an integrator who could set up a project like ours so quickly. Actually, it's simple: take small steps and then expand so that customers have time to get used to the adjustments. Oh yeah - and marketing! You have to actively promote new solutions. "The early adopters are sparsely sown."

Do you have any tips for us? "If you're going to do something similar with our competitors, don't work as fast as you did for us! (laughs) You think along, you're flexible, really fun to work with. If anything goes wrong, we call Lauro and we move on. That really doesn't work with every supplier. It is always a lot of work to convince people internally and you have to take that into account: visual cases of your approach and above all showing what will emerge. Then, all is gonna be all right."