We all know time is money, but for Europ Assistance time is often life. The company handles two million calls per month with queries from eight million consumers on issues such as health, travel, emergency services, professional consultations and cover, labour, education, and recovery. Each of these calls requires the operator to not only have access to the caller’s details, but also to be able to answer all the caller’s questions. This is a tall order when you consider that they have to scan through more than eight million records that come from various imported databases and that are written in various languages. 

In order to pinpoint the most suitable option for each caller the operator must not only be able to access the member’s data, but must also be able to search for available products, solutions, and services that are relevant to his or her circumstances. All of this has to happen in the time it takes to complete a phone call.

To achieve this Europ Assistance asked QBCon, a business solution provider, to come up with an answer. QBCon installed EasyAsk, a unique Business Intelligence (BI) tool, which allows multi level access to almost any database, regardless of the type of database. The other great advantage of EasyAsk is that it allows any employee access without the need for the IT department to design reports. What is more, the operator can submit the query in plain English. “Think of it as a Google for your database, only smarter. It’s smarter because it puts things in context and generates more than a list of documents. Instead it answers the operator’s question,” says Gustav Piater, Director of Sales and Marketing for QBCon. He goes on to give an example: “Imagine that a call centre manger requests a report on the number of calls that requested an ambulance dispatch service. To get this information, the manager simply has to type in show me calls requesting ambulance dispatch services today. EasyAsk will immediately cross-reference all the key words with all the data and produce a list with calls that requested ambulance dispatch services.

Rouxle von Molendorff, a Director at Europ Assistance, says one of EasyAsk’s most attractive benefits is the low cost of implementation: “QBCon was able to do a complete implementation and include training on EasyAsk in five days.” This means that EasyAsk has a very low implementation to product cost ratio.

For Europ Assistance, EasyAsk is more than just a BI tool that helps senior management to make decisions; it helps frontline staff to provide the most effective service possible.