Parentia

Marc Ertveldt, Director of Marketing and Communications at Parentia, explains: “Our goal is not only to pay each family their benefits in a timely manner, but also to help each family understand all the benefits they are entitled to. This is especially important for single-parent households, who often don’t have the time to research all the possible options available to them.”

Keeping families informed

To help achieve these goals, Parentia regularly corresponds with families via email and through the postal service. Communications flow in more than one direction, and Parentia encourages families to send information to help it determine whether they are entitled to receive additional funds.

Marc Nens, Director of Parentia Wallonie and Parentia Brussels, continues: “Because we are responsible for delivering information on many different types of benefits and helping parents with all their family administration, we have around 300 different document templates for customer communications. And since Belgium is a multilingual country, most of these documents must be available in two or more languages, resulting in around 900 document templates in total.”

Manual processes drive cost and complexity

In the past, Parentia relied heavily on manual systems and processes to create, manage and modify its templates. In addition to making it complex and labor-intensive to update documents in response to new legislation, this approach increased the time required to send documents to customers.

“It used to take three days of work to send a batch of 50,000 documents to our email delivery service and printing partner,” adds Ertveldt. “The sheer number of documents and document templates also made managing our content a difficult challenge. We were confident that embracing a standardized and centralized approach across the entire business would help us to deliver a more responsive and cost-efficient service for the Belgian families. We therefore decided to look for an enterpriseclass customer communications management [CCM] solution.” “In response to the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic, the government of Belgium quickly introduced a range of new benefits legislation to help support families through the crisis. Thanks to OpenText Exstream, we were able to communicate these changes to all our customers quickly.” Marc Ertveldt Director Marketing and Communications Parentia

Embracing an automated approach

To rationalize its approach to CCM, Parentia selected OpenText Exstream: an omnichannel solution that allows organizations to create, manage and deliver engaging and highly personalized correspondence on digital and print touchpoints.

“Although an increasing number of our customers prefer to engage with us via email, it’s still vital that we offer everyone the option of paper-based communications,” explains Nens. “OpenText Exstream integrates seamlessly with our email service and our printing partner, which makes it fast and simple to send out large volumes of communications in a timely manner. Crucially, OpenText Exstream makes it very straightforward to manage our templates using standard document-naming conventions, even across multiple different languages. If we need to remove some of the sentences in one document template, metadata tags in OpenText Exstream allow our team to accurately identify and remove them from all the other language versions also—even if they don’t speak those languages.”

Ensuring high-quality communications

To further enhance its communications capabilities, Parentia decided to augment its solution with OpenText Exstream Empower Editor. By working with an expert team from OpenText Professional Services, Parentia successfully completed the deployment within just a few months—helping it to maximize the value of its investment in the OpenText platform.

“Using OpenText Exstream Empower Editor, we offer our teams a browser-based user interface to help them seamlessly create personalized documents for families with unique needs,” says Ertveldt. “The OpenText solution also has powerful workflow automation capabilities built-in, which we use to ensure that all documents are reviewed by a senior member of the team before we send them to customers. This process helps us maintain high levels of quality and regulatory compliance, without causing delays in sending out documents. Thanks to support and best practices from OpenText Professional Services, we achieved a rapid implementation for OpenText Exstream Empower Editor— enabling us to get started with the new workflows quickly.”

Generating documents faster than ever

Since embracing CCM solutions from OpenText, Parentia has transformed the speed and efficiency of its customer correspondence processes. Employees can access all the document templates they need in one place, and quickly and easily customize them to meet specific customer needs.

“In the past, it used to take us more than an entire weekend of work to generate and send out a batch of 50,000 documents,” recalls Nens. “Today, we can generate 50,000 documents¬ in just 10 minutes—99% faster than before. Parentia generates over one million documents each year, and the time we’re saving frees us to invest more time in customer-facing services for families across Belgium.”

Responding rapidly to the COVID crisis

The ability to rapidly make updates to documents proved especially valuable when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in the early months of 2020.

“In response to the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic, the government of Belgium quickly introduced a range of new benefits legislation to help support families through the crisis,” explains Ertveldt. “Thanks to OpenText Exstream, we were able to communicate these changes to all our customers quickly, helping to ensure that families received as much support as possible, as soon as possible.”

After more than a decade of success with the OpenText solutions, Parentia is now looking to the future. The organization plans to integrate the platform with its Salesforce customer relationship management system, enabling higher levels of automation and efficiency in its CCM process.

“OpenText solutions are helping Parentia to save around 60 fulltime equivalent days each year on manual document-related work, and we’re delighted with the new heights of efficiency we have reached,” concludes Nens. “Our collaboration with OpenText is playing a key role in our ability to deliver clear, effective communications with families across Belgium, and we look forward to building on that relationship in the future.”