Groupe Audeo: customer service gains confidence with Zendesk

A specialist in insurance and risk management, Groupe Audeo was founded more than 120 years ago, in 1902. Today it operates through three specialized companies: Servyr (broker for SMBs and mid-market companies), Exper-IS (broker for individuals and small groups) and Hélium (co-broker for group benefits insurance). With more than 9,000 customers worldwide (900,000 people covered) and more than 2,000,000 incoming requests to handle every month, Groupe Audeo needed a high-performance customer service solution and a ticketing tool to relieve its overloaded email inboxes. So in 2021, Groupe Audeo turned to Synolia and Zendesk to implement the customer service solution at its Hélium subsidiary.

Strong growth and the digitalization of management services at Audeo

A century-old group, Audeo has deep expertise in insurance and risk management. Today it serves nearly 9,000 customers, who generate a large volume of requests to the customer service team at its Hélium subsidiary. Over the past five years, Hélium has grown very quickly, from a few dozen employees to 350 in 2024.

Business was booming, but because Hélium had always run on Outlook, its mailboxes were overwhelmed by requests from policyholders (reimbursements, etc.). Dispatching requests manually was time-consuming and made it impossible to produce reliable statistics on customer service quality. Hélium’s teams struggled to keep up, and customer satisfaction suffered.

The Hélium brief

A high-performance customer service tool to work more efficiently (faster request handling) and improve response quality.

In early 2021, Groupe Audeo took matters into its own hands to lead Hélium’s digital transformation and replace Outlook with a dedicated tool for handling customer requests. It turned to the Zendesk x Synolia duo: the software vendor and its Zendesk integrator.

Synolia x Zendesk

Renowned, flexible, reliable, secure… All strengths that steered Hélium toward the Zendesk solution and Synolia, Zendesk’s leading partner in France.

Indeed, Zendesk stands out as a powerful, scalable solution that keeps growing and investing to improve (especially in AI). In Zendesk, Hélium found the ideal solution to replace Outlook and revolutionize its customer service processes.

• Smoother processes.
• Centralized, contextualized requests.
• Simpler archiving.
• Automated request routing.
• Better search performance.
• Speed and ease of use.
• Statistics and reporting.
• A better customer experience (better team organization, history of requests and attachments, etc.)

Synolia’s services for the Zendesk project:

Consulting • strategic support • specification workshops • configuration • training • functional and technical optimizations.

A two-stage rollout

In February 2021, Synolia carried out an initial consulting and support engagement to help Hélium structure the Zendesk project. Our experts delivered a detailed analysis of the company’s context and of how the service to be deployed was organized, before helping the teams write a functional scoping document. A few months later (June 2021), we supported the functional teams as they implemented and configured the solution within the department.

The rollout took place in two phases:

• A first phase in 2022, launching an initial version for a sample of users in two departments (around thirty licenses) with simple processes.
• A second phase in 2024, scaling up the instance and opening it to new departments.

Change management

Since 2022, Hélium’s business-side project team has led the project and ongoing change management.

With several hundred employees to migrate to Zendesk, Marine and Robin chose to proceed in batches, relying on a dedicated team to train future users step by step. This approach was essential for successful change management, since Zendesk’s capabilities go far beyond anything agents could do in Outlook.

Starting with around thirty users in 2021, Hélium is gradually scaling up to 350 Zendesk users by the end of 2024.

The results

Thanks to the Zendesk implementation, Hélium has significantly improved its internal processes. Teams have better visibility and traceability of customer requests. In addition, the Zendesk Explore module gives management and team leads reliable statistics on Hélium’s customer service, so they can put targeted action plans in place.

Now, 85% of incoming requests are automatically assigned to customer service agents. And numerous automations help qualify incoming requests.

Hélium is improving the experience of both its employees and its customers. And this is just the beginning! The company plans to modernize further by opening new communication channels for customer requests (in addition to email and contact forms).