living better together

Inspiring coaches for our customers

UNIQA 3.0 makes our attitude towards our customers very clear: we want to sustainably increase our relevance and impact in people’s lives. As inspiring coaches, we are reliable companions for our customers to improve their lives and help them to take responsibility for themselves. We do this better than anyone else and therefore aspire to be the leader among the service providers in our industry.

In order to turn this ambitious vision into reality, we have placed our customer care on a completely new footing and structured it according to customer segments as of the beginning of 2021. This reorientation was accompanied by a host of other measures, including a rebranding of the entire group and the rewording of our claim into “living better together”.

Effective 1 January 2021, the operational insurance companies of the UNIQA Group have been organised in the Retail, Corporate and Affinity, and Banking customer segments, replacing the previous business line structure. This enables us to address the individual customer groups in a much more focused manner across the boundaries of product lines and, in addition to further increasing customer satisfaction, should also lead to a growth in premiums. The continuous strength of the UNIQA brand – the strongest insurance brand inAustria – an attractive and easy-to-understand product portfolio, transparent pricing, cross-border cooperation, customer-specific affinity programmes and a wide range of digital tools and services form the basis for this.

An essential building block for all of this is the ongoing digitalisation of our business, which we have been working on consistently since 2016 – supported by massive investments. The focus is on the redesign of our business model, including all necessary IT systems, as well as digital innovations.

Expansion of strong position in Austria, growth in CEE

From a regional perspective, we are striving to secure and expand our strong market position in Austria, especially in the area of health insurance, to strengthen profitability in property and casualty insurance and to stabilise the portfolio in life insurance. At the same time, we are working on a massive cost reduction and efficiency increase (see also “Slimming down effectively”).

In CEE, on the other hand, strengthened by the acquisition of the former AXA companies in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, we want to continue to make targeted use of the great potential of high GDP growth rates and low insurance density. We are relying on a radical transformation of our business model with this through digitalisation, increased comparability, more transparency, hybrid offers for different channels, as well as cross-border customer-focused services.

Depending on the customer segment, the fundamental reorientation of our market access results in different detailed strategies and corresponding measures. We initiated many of these in 2021 and have already implemented some of them.

Retail: outstanding customer journey

An outstanding customer journey and simple products are our top priorities and objectives in the retail segment. Customers want individualisation, transparency and flexibility, and we are responding to this by streamlining and modularising our product portfolio, but also with dynamic pricing based on individual customer yield ratings. At the same time, we are addressing the trend of urbanisation with specific customer journeys for typical urban target groups. At the same time, we have also optimised our nation­wide presence in Austria by expanding our general agencies.

In order to be able to offer our customers holistic solutions for different topics, we consciously regard relevant living environments as “ecosystems”. Following the health ecosystem, in which we have already successfully diversified the group-wide service spectrum with our subsidiary SanusX, founded in 2020 (see also “Continued high dynamics at SanusX”), we are currently in the process of establishing the topic of housing as its own ecosystem. A prototype is already being implemented in Hungary.

In all of this, progressive digitalisation is changing the traditional role of sales. Examples are the UNIQA Customer Platform (UCP), which ensures comprehensive support with a 360-degree perspective in line with our seamless omni-channel strategy, or digital offerings such as the myUNIQA app, which our customers can use at any time to call up information, report claims or submit medical and medication bills. The app, whose design was made even clearer in 2021, is already used regularly by 20 per cent of our customers. Our new benefits and customer loyalty programme myUNIQA plus also proved to be very successful, gaining 125,000 users in its first year of operation in 2021, many of them members of the younger generation. With this innovative new tool, we are setting new standards in reducing complexity and increasing efficiency.

We are also using artificial intelligence in claims processing, for example with the new “digital claim handler” introduced in 2021, which will massively speed up the processing of claims. A completely new, disruptive concept in this area is CHERRISK – a purely digital, app-based sales platform for simple travel, household and casualty insurance that can be cancelled at any time and allows cross-border offers without a physical presence.

Corporate and Affinity: innovative services and sales channels

Customized solutions and innovative sales channels characterise our approach to our corporate customers. While we are increasingly positioning ourselves as a local insurance company here in Austria, the focus in CEE is on risk engineering. In both regions, we focus on property insurance and on tailor-made affinity programmes – individual offers for the customers or employees of our customers. One example of this is employee benefits in health, accident and life insurance. Here, too, our subsidiary SanusX plays an important role with innovative concepts for corporate health solutions.

We also rely on automation and digitalisation in our standard business with corporate clients with the support of the Corporate Business Navigator, a Group-wide IT platform for underwriting, sales and risk management. However, the latter is also changing our business itself: for example, we are seeing a significant increase in demand for cyber insurance, especially in Austria, and have developed attractive solutions for this. The advancing digital networking also creates the possibility of usage-based tariffs, the automated application of which we are currently examining. Likewise, thanks to sensor technology and the Internet of Things, data-driven prevention is becoming an interesting option – especially for industrial customers.

Banking: market expansion and digitalisation

Against the backdrop of generally closer cooperation between banks and insurance companies, we are striving for market expansion in this customer segment and – as in the other business segments – increased digitalisation. Based on a cooperation with our partner banks, which was further intensified in 2021, we will rely on standardised digital sales platforms in Austria as well as in CEE, from which we will jointly offer financial services from a single source.

In this segment too, the model of holistic ecosystems will increasingly ensure a holistic approach and support, supported by – even disruptive – digital sales options. As in the Retail segment, this requires a simplification of our product portfolio and an adaptation to changing customer needs – especially in CEE, insurance products that are easy to conclude are a central element of our strategy. At the same time, we would like to use bank sales to increasingly address small and medium-sized enterprises as well as farmers as new customer groups.

Operations and IT: excellent processes, first-class data

As far as our internal operations are concerned, we are working constantly and intensively in Austria and CEE to improve our production and efficiency. This includes increasing the cross-policy rate in claims settlement as well as ongoing efficiency improvements and cost reductions, for example through consistent process simplification. Further organisational changes are also planned, such as the merging of service units.

At the same time, we are constantly investing in the modernisation of our IT infrastructure and our core system (UNIQA Insurance Platform, UIP), our customer platform (UNIQA Customer Platform, UCP) and other central systems. In this context, we are also giving important impetus to IT security and cybersecurity in order to live up to our role of trust as an insurance company.

All of this will also be clearly felt by our customers through service improvements. Bots and self-service solutions support this process, such as the further expansion of the myUNIQA app.

Rebranding and cultural programme

Since the new claim of UNIQA 3.0 should also manifest itself in our corporate image, we have also initiated a rebranding for the entire Group in 2021. Apart from an update of our corporate design, this also included a further development of our claim – it is now “living better together” – as well as the development and launch of a new image campaign. At the same time, we launched a culture programme to introduce our corporate culture to the concept of inspiring coaches. Extensive further measures for our employees round off the package (see “Group business development” for details).