justclaims.eu
Inventing the future of automated passenger complaint management
Executive Summary
The Client
CHS Claims Handling Solutions GmbH is a LLC under German law located in Frankfurt/Main, Germany. CHS operates the platform justclaims.eu supporting air carriers with their digital claims handling – covering the entire claims handling chain from the entry of claims information through communication with the passenger and effecting payments.
The Challenge
The idea of creating a platform was born by a team of aviation attorneys in order to offer airline clients an easy and encompassing tool to handle their claims. With the number of air passenger claims skyrocketing, claim agencies gaining the upper hand and IATA forecasting the doubling of passenger demand within the next 20 years, the time-consuming handling of endless spreadsheets or clunky CRM systems will be no solution at all.
The Solution
Inventing a web-based business model from the scratch is on the one hand very exciting and on the other hand quite challenging. Based on a couple of workshops interviewing the aviation attorneys as well as studying the European Flight Compensation Regulation EU261, our team started to prototype quickly to get an idea of different approaches. Within a year of rapid prototyping, developing and testing, the platform was up and running and served the first customer to manage their huge amount of incoming complaints. Within another half year, a full workflow automation was deployed.
The Result
Since the platform was going public in April 2019 with its first customer, a german airline running a fleet of 36 planes into 38 destinations, it has led to a significant reduction in operating costs. Only several months after working with the SAAS system, the airline managed to automate up to 80% of all incoming claims via full workflow automation.
Inspiration & Focus
CHS decided to invest into developing a unique platform and disrupt their own work as legal firm. The aim was to eliminate the recurring manual work for claim handler and customer support employees. Moreover, an analysis of the existing market by conducting qualitative interviews with several airline employees quickly showed: There is a strong utility.
We focussed on several key reasons to make sure, we will not develop past the market.
Cost: The only way to convince an airline is by cost cutting and increase of efficiency. As a SAAS, we eliminate monolith software and the correspondent license fees as well as reduce hardware expenses towards zero.
Omnichannel: The airline industry expresses a desire for a lot of flexibility when implementing its own functionalities or CRM platforms or payment gateways. This is particularly relevant in terms of creating a unique customer experience, optimise the airline branding towards the passenger and help to make the claim management handling process more efficient.
Flexibility & Scalability: Over the past few years, there has been a massive growth in availing the SaaS Development Services, as it has become a feasible choice for businesses that look for convenience and flexibility of software solutions and cloud-based data analysis tools so that they can eliminate the need of installing and running applications on their computer system and data centers. And considering a number of factors like larger bandwidth, faster connections, global digitalisation tendencies, and improvement in data processing, we don’t think this growth will stop any time soon. Cloud technology was chosen as providing an innovative, future-proof solution with sufficient scalability in the face of rising complaints and numbers of backend users.
Internationalisation: justclaims.eu was initially developed based on the European Flight Compensation Regulation EU261. From the beginning, the idea was to be flexible and resilient and opening up for new markets.
The solution
In order to reflect these customer requirements in the best possible way, justclaims.eu provides airlines with a digital end-to-end solution for handling air passenger claims in a transparent and efficient way. With a high degree of automation, efficient internal and external communication, payment solutions, detailed analytics and reporting as well as an e-billing function, the claims handling process can be centralised and simplified significantly. The platform enables airlines to improve response times to passengers, enhance quality, balance out fluctuations and thus promote customer loyalty.
The project
The implementation project was carried out in several stages by all involved parties.
Phase 1: An initial Workshop. You might imagine how many questions needed to be asked and discussed. Understanding Flight Compensation Regulation to create a software solution on a greenfield site. Important to mention, our approach is: Remote first. We setup our infrastructure to work remotely to avoid too many meetings and work efficient and time and cost saving from all over the planet in different time zones and on different continents. Zoom, Slack, Confluence, Axure, Trello and PivotalTracker as our tools were setup quickly to concentrate on what we were striving for: creating the first and most powerful software solution. Several workflow diagrams were created, we defined personas and enjoyed interviewing key users from different airlines. The first prototypes were created and discussed. Besides that, we worked on a brand name, logo and a slogan. This exciting season is what every startup talks about. Full power.
Phase 2: As our mindset is Agile and we work customer centric, we also did a lot of research. And finally started developing prototypes. Testing. Conduct interviews. Revise. Develop a roadmap. Working out details. Revise prototypes. Testing. In the third month we could start the development. The Ruby on Rails Web Application Framework delivers quick results. It is a powerful front-end development framework that enables developers & designers to quickly build fully responsive websites. After a short time we could already try out test cases and check the conceptual preparations. A clear corporate design was developed in parallel and the first website went online, www.justclaims.eu went public and visible out there.
Multiple iterations of the PDCA cycle are repeated until the problem is solved.
Phase 3: Finding the first airline. Supporting CHS to convince a first customer to join us. In the meantime, our focus was to develop the platform until we reached a minimum viable product, then start with a first customer and fulfill the proof of concept. This has happened, the first airline trusted us and within 4 months, we went online. Since then we have been built, tested and learned in order to constantly improve.
Allover, we met five times in person. For sure, our team is very dedicated and via Zoom, we met weekly, daily and sometimes hourly.
Team
We setup the team of experts, working with Christian Meier-Freiwald and Alexander Detterböck from Munich to create the best user experience. Christian is leading the product development and UX. The team of makandra based in Augsburg runs development and hosting. Alex leads the prototyping and UX and the Visual Design.
The results
In April 2019, the official launch of the platform was celebrated as the first airline has begun to automate its claims redemption process. Customer use the airline mobile app as well as the website to file a flight compensation claim. Handling claims in a simple and fast manner improves the customer experience.
Disrupting the market
Sure, we were happy as the airline and several airline attorneys mentioned, the use of this platform was the first time an airline has outsourced its claim handling process to a legal tech vendor.
User Experience
Our challenge was to create a powerful application that is easy to use for airline passengers facing stressful situations such as flight delays or cancellation and make them feel understood and supported by the airline. Regarding airline employees working with our software on a daily basis, we were focussing on streamlining the claim handling workflow.
No Button or functionality, that is not useful or really needed has been implemented. Simplicity makes justclaims.eu powerful. As well as the implementation of automated checks and verifications helps to quickly handle the claims, if there is need of manual processing. And upon approval, payments to the customers are triggered directly. Done.
Transparent cost management
Tailormade reporting systems help airlines keep track of processing times, payments and other statistics. This allows them to monitor costs and benefits in detail.
Hosted on a high-availability infrastructure
Availability and security of all data was a major requirement for the client. The entire environment is running on the high-availability infrastructure in a data center in Germany. By consistently configuring all components for redundancy, we make sure all data is secure and the application is always available.