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

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:

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:

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!

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:

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:

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:

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:

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!