Q&A: life in the Care and Claims team of Alan Belgium

• Q: Let’s take it from the top: what does Alan do?
• Q: What’s it like to work at Alan?
• Q: What does Care at Alan look like?
• Q: And what about the Claims team?
• Q: Do you provide customer support by phone?
• Q: What are some characteristics you’re looking for in a candidate?
• Q: Is background experience essential?
• Q: How flexible are the working hours?
• Q: What does the application process look like?
• Q: All this sounds great, where do I sign?

At Alan, we’re firm believers in the importance of a kick-ass Customer Experience. Our Care and Claims team is at the heart of this idea, which empowers it to leave a mark throughout the organization. Working in our team means ✨ a lot ✨ more than just handling tickets.

In this article, Sophie Lobel and Tomas Van Zundert will take you through some frequently asked questions about our Belgian Customer Care and Claims operations.

Whoowee - where do we start? We’re a scale-up that was born in France, and later branched out to Belgium and Spain. We want to become the world’s most member-centric health partner. The main keywords here are personal, proactive, and holistic.

We do this by going way beyond the traditional insurance offer, and offering a range of services to support our members in their mental and physical wellbeing. Between chatting with a doctor, listening to a calming soundscape to help you sleep, and getting seriously fast reimbursements: it’s all about taking care of our members. 😌

Well, it’s probably unlike anything you’ve experienced before. We’ve got a set of leadership principles that we embrace in everything that we do. From our members-first approach (duh), to radical transparency and distributed ownership: everything is set in place for each and every one of us to have maximum impact.

In practice, this means there are some major differences between working in our Care and Claims team, compared to the industry standard. In a nutshell, our Employee Value Offer:

• allows you to work from anywhere as you see fit. Whether you prefer working from home, one of our offices (Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels), or some campground in the middle of nowhere: it’s all good, as long as you have a decent internet connection. Fun fact: at Alan, you can work up to four months per year from another country. 🏖

• contains an attractive compensation model, including equity for every employee. 🚀

• allows for flexible paid leave – read: you take what you need. 😌

But wait, there’s more! We also have a written culture, and a deeply rooted hate against meetings.

On one hand, we have our Care team: we go all the way to provide excellent experiences to our members and their employers. The way we do it, is fast and friendly. To give you an idea:

• During our opening hours, we pick up member conversations in a matter of seconds (41” on average last week, to be precise). 🏎

• Our members are super enthusiastic about our service, with about 98% happy ratings after a contact with our team. 🤩

Another vital function of the Care team is ensuring that we’re able to maintain this high level of service in the future. That’s right, working on projects that ensure scalability is an essential aspect of what we do. This goes from crunching care numbers, to hiring, to enriching our app with Care-related content…

Being in constant contact with our members allows us to pick up on countless signals. This knowledge is highly valued – and as such, we’re often finding ourselves in close collaboration with other teams, such as Sales, Product and Design. Plenty of product improvements at Alan are the direct result of feedback from our Care team.

Our Claims team, on the other hand, is doing everything to revolutionize the way reimbursements are handled. They’re the heroes who are redefining industry standards, making sure that about 90% of our members get reimbursed on the same day. 🤯

The core mission of the Claims-team is two-fold: treating reimbursement requests in a fast and correct manner, and working towards a high extent of automation. They’re in constant collaboration with our Engineers, to knock every possible second from the claims treatment time – and ever striving for a high level of scalability while keeping that human touch.

Nope – we do not. And for good reason! 😏

Keeping all of our communication written allows for a few advantages for both our members and us, Alaners!

• First and foremost, it allows us to respond a lot faster, saving our members the elevator music hold experience.

• An added bonus is that it saves our members from having to explain everything all over when a different colleague steps in to help, as we have a written record of everything everyone said and did.

Members-first 💚

We are looking for people willing to support and delight our members. As it's vital to our success, we take every interaction with our members as an opportunity to make an impression on them.

How do we apply this in our daily work:

• We educate our members and help them to be autonomous with our product, but also help them navigate through the health system. 🩺

• We have a friendly but adapted tone of voice and are very empathetic about our members' concerns.

• We proactively contact members to reassure them about the resolution of their requests.

Dig deeper mindset 🕵️‍♀️

Healthcare situations can be different from one member to another, so it's safe to say our job does not consist of pushing templates. We’re looking for people with a detective mindset and a knack for problem-solving.

We strive to dig deep:

• With our members, to find the root cause of their problems

• To find the best answer and solution to their request

• To go the extra mile, anticipating other questions that might pop up

The ability to take a step back 👀

We're a small team, and we have plenty of things to improve to succeed in our ambition to give everyone access to a healthy & productive life. As a consequence, we are looking for people willing to question the Status Quo and come up with solutions to make our services and product better.

How do we apply this in our daily work:

• We constantly give feedback.

• We run retrospectives to gather improvement ideas.

• We leverage data to take more enlightened decisions.

Written communication skills 🖊

Last but not least, in our written culture, it’s critical to be comfortable with expressing yourself in a written manner. We want your words to bring a smile to our members’ faces, and we test these writing skills at multiple stages of the application process.

No, we don’t have hard requirements in terms of background experience. With the right characteristics, soft skills and mindset, we are convinced one can learn on the job and thrive. Our team is rich of teammates coming from various backgrounds (Hospitality, Banking, Telecom, IT…) and we believe it plays a role in its success.

Of course, prior customer-facing roles, experience in healthcare or insurance is a great asset to get better acquainted with the role / industry, but it is not a hard requirement.

On average, most of the team follows the chat’s opening hours: from 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday. That means: on top of our flexible leave policy, there’s no weekend work involved. 🎉

Our main priority is providing killer service to our members, our second priority is making sure we do that with respect for a healthy work-life balance.

If you happen to have a doctor’s appointment, or you’d like to leave earlier in the day to pick up the kids – or the weather’s really nice, and you just want to go for a walk 🌳 – that’s totally fine! As long as you make sure your colleagues are up to speed, nobody’s stopping you.

Important to note is that we don’t expect you to be glued to your screen all day long: we work in shifts to man the chat, and regular breaks are encouraged. 🚶‍♀️

We’ve designed a thorough five-step hiring process to make sure that:

• Candidates we extend an offer to are fully trusted from day one

• Candidates choosing to work for Alan get a full picture of what it entails from a role and culture point of view

Throughout this process, you will have the opportunity to meet many of your potential co-workers, to deep-dive into the reality of your possible future role and our work methods.

You can read all about it on our website, so you’re fully aware of what you can expect.

You can find the posting for the User Care Expert role here, and the one for the Claims Expert position here. Or, have a look at our other job opportunities!