Applying Process Mining to Predict Customer Behavior and Recommend Actions

Background

In the Dutch health care system health care insurance is obligated for all residents. The government sets the basis package and insurers compete based on price and service. Customer service is therefore very important for every health insurance company; especially in the fast changing digital world. As a result customer satisfaction is the most important KPI.
Complaints are related to customer satisfaction, because they have a highly negative effect on customer satisfaction. Therefore, it is crucial to prevent customers from having a negative experience. What can we understand from previous process behavior and look-a-like customers to predict the most likely next steps and prevent such a negative experience?

Business Goal
In order to improve the customer experience and understanding what influences customer experience it is important to understand the process relationship with customers. Based on this working relationship; what are likely next steps the customer will take and what can we do, as a company, to make the process as seamless and positive as possible.

Research goal
Underlined works together with several companies like VGZ, a.s.r. and De Volksbank (with labels, suchs as SNS, Regiobank & asn bank) to build a generic framework in which all customer contacts are brought together as a unique dataset, which is further enriched by Underlined with relevant analyses that can be linked to customer events.

Underlined co-created customer journey mining algorithms, together with TU/e (dr. ing. Marwan Hassani at the Process Analytics group). This research showed that it is possible to distinguish the different journeys per customer and to predict future interesting interactions with the customer in the insurance journey (find it here). Moreover, in collaboration with the TiU econometrist department, a driver model has recently developed to distinguish relevant drivers and to predict the NPS-score.

Research question

In collaborative research between TU/e, VGZ and Underlined, the research focus will be on developing a recommendation method on the interaction between VGZ and the customer., based on process mining techniques. The scope of the current master project will be:

Developing a recommendation model by
taking into account the customer journey to detect root causes and recommend follow up actions.

More precisely, after a proper preprocessing of the different types of data, the master project will start by addressing the following list of questions:

  1. How can customers be segmented? Which distance measure is suitable for clustering customers such that similar customers can be grouped based on their behavior throughout their journey? How good is this clustering method when including the domain knowledge and/or internal quality evaluation measures?
  2. What has happened ? What is the model of the current process? How does this differs among the different customers? Which sources of data are relevant to enrich this model?
  3. Why did it happen? How does data from the different cases of each segment decides different paths within the model? Is this in line with the expectations of the business owner?
  4. What is recommended? Based on the above segmentation, interactions and predicted final outcomes, can we recommend the next best action for VGZ?

In the above-mentioned analysis, all available data will be leveraged. This includes logged data of the journey (workflow process data, call center data, online click trails, social media data), online and offline feedback and non-transactional data (product and background information).

Underlined

Underlined has a proven approach and toolset for providing insights into how to improve customer experience during the customer journey. Using data from customer contact channels, online environment, customer feedback and research response, we can reveal the actual customer journey and customer experience. This enables companies to measure the customer journey of their customers’ behaviour and emotions continuously and to manage and improve the journey across all channels. Underlined calls this Customer Journey Management. More information about Underlined can be found at: www.underlined.nl

VGZ

“VGZ is one of the largest non-profit health insurers in the Netherlands. We believe it’s important that you receive good care. And that your healthcare affairs are arranged quickly and easily. VGZ is part of Coöperatie VGZ. Our cooperative provides health insurance under a number of brands, including VGZ. The cooperative insures more than 4 million customers. We do this without a profit motive. Our main goal is to guarantee good quality, affordable and sensible care for our customers. We work continually with healthcare providers on innovations to improve healthcare quality. We do this because we believe that healthcare quality can be improved and unnecessary costs can be eliminated. With ‘Zinnige Zorg’ (our sensible care strategy), we work with others to keep healthcare accessible and affordable.” More information about VGZ can be found at: www.vgz.nl

Contact

For more information, contact dr. ing. Marwan Hassani.

 

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