PegaWorld 2025: We are the Champions: How Groupama is Overhauling Customer Relationships to Surpass Customer Satisfaction

P egaWorld 2025: We are the Champions - How Groupama is Overhauling Customer Relationships Introduction

Good morning everyone. My name is Mohammad. I am in charge of the relationship with our beautiful customer who is here at Groupama. If you are in this room, I think you made the right choice. And you will see exactly the beautiful result of the amazing result that Groupama achieved. And I hope also that you are energized by the amazing keynote that you see previously.

So I'm proud and honored to have on stage Groupama who will share with you their beautiful results that they have achieved using Pega. And I'm going to introduce Halim YAHIA and Tanguy Chateau. So the stage is yours.

Speaker Introductions Thank you, Mohammed. My name is Tanguy Chateau. I'm leading the projects of client relationships delivery transformation at Groupama Group.

And my name is Halim YAHIA. I am in charge of Pega COE at Groupama. I have more than 20 years experience in software delivery, and I joined Groupama in 2022 to be part of this big and challenging CRM program.

So thank you for joining. I will introduce, first of all, with a quick introduction to Groupama. Then we will drive you through our ambitions and key business challenges. We'll explain how Pega fits in Groupama strategy, and we will also walk through our technical solutions that we have put in place to support those challenges. At the end, we will share some lessons learned and the pitfalls to be avoided. So after that you can have questions.

Company Introduction Let's start. Okay, so the first thing we should present to you is who is Groupama. And to be easy, we will just use a small video in order to show what is Groupama and that you understand it.

[Video presentation] Here we are. Thank you.

Business Ambitions and Challenges Okay, so let's start with the ambition of Groupama. And as you just saw, the group is very focused on relationships - client relationship, human relationship. It's very important for us. But we have to go deeper on the challenges that the group is facing.

As we strive to maintain our leadership position and expand our reach, we want to be the mutual insurance group that is the champion in customer relationship. To achieve this, we are committed to delivering top tier reactivity, proactivity, omnichannel services, and personalization for our clients.

We are constantly transforming our tools and practices and leveraging the power of Pega to reach these ambitious goals: accelerating the digitalization and automation of customer interactions and ensuring quicker, faster response times, increasing our productivity. And for this, we demonstrate to our clients that we understand and anticipate their needs, providing solutions before they even ask for them, offering a seamless and consistent experience across all points of contact through omnichannel strategy.

It's very important to be able to be present on all the channels for our clients, and pushing the limits to the personalization of our offers and advice in order to be the insurer personalized for the clients of tomorrow. We believe that improving our customer lineage through data collection and valorization is the best way to reach the highest level of personalization and satisfy clients' needs.

Customer Journey Transformation Groupama's approach is to enhance customer journey by reinventing its customer experience. Groupama aims to cover the whole client relationship, moving towards an even more omnichannel and personalized model. This implies covering all possible customer journeys to ensure quality and timely responses, improving customer knowledge through better data management, and providing a seamless experience across all channels. Each step of this customer journey, which begins when the need arises, such as information, purchase or warranty activations and ends when it's satisfied, is an opportunity for us to provide customers with the best of class services, regardless of the channel they used.

The use of Pega allows Groupama to ensure and improve the collection of customer data, information sharing of data with all the actors implied in the customer journey. Each step of the journey is an opportunity to share the data of the clients, and to use this data and the execution of the right activities at the right actor, at the right time. And the right channel is also one way that Pega is helping us to make the client relationship better.

Partnership with Pega We began our journey with Pega in 2021, and it was one of the potential partners we had at this time. And we had to select one of the actors of the market. I can give the names of Microsoft or Salesforce. There are other possibilities, and we chose Pega through an RFP of 18 months, ending process of several testing solutions.

In 2022, Groupama and Pega began their collaboration to implement the solution. This partnership aims to leverage Pega's advanced capabilities to streamline and automate customer interactions, ensuring a seamless and personalized experience across all channels.

When we began the journey, it took us less than six months to put in production a first level of lead management first deployed on a limited number of client agents, but rapidly - nearly six months later - extended to the whole network of Groupama. That's more than 6,000 salespeople and 6,000 people in client relationships. So 12,000 people in total.

It allows us to improve the productivity of the sales network, ensuring a detection of the potential customer needs and proactive treatment of those needs until transformation. We continued with a strong improvement of the customer knowledge in place, putting in place a traceability of the interaction on phone, email, SMS, physical channels and digital channels and understanding of the content of each interaction, capturing automatically according to the advisor actions during the interaction, what was said to the client and how we behaved in the context of this interaction.

In parallel, we started putting in place our first post-sales customer journeys, beginning with a simple one - the request for documents - in order to test the process and in order to set up and validate the basics of customer journey management with Pega.

We are now accelerating and setting up new customer journeys. The whole health management business line is already covered and continuously improving already deployed customer journeys. To name more than 12,000 users are active users of Pega customers as the end of 2025, with the exception of new customer journeys such as the claim management, which should reach over 15,000 users in our network.

Technical Implementation So to choose between the different solutions we mentioned, we started with POC and through the POC we also tested two solutions with Pega on premise and on Cloud - Pega Cloud. And finally we chose Pega Cloud.

Integration of Pega really started in 2023, since we have more than 12,000 people that are using features from Pega application, from sales automation, from customer service and platform apps. We also experimented a CDH MVP to engage with our customers during life moments like anniversary, and that just got a new path for us to move to the next best action and offer.

Our goal, then, is to generalize Pega usage for all our agents and customers over all channels.

Why Pega? So what do we expect from this strong partnership? Groupama chose Pega for several compelling reasons. In fact, Pega offers a comprehensive solution that covers a wide range of functionalities with customizable components. And customization is really something very, very, very important for Groupama, allowing us to tailor customer interactions and automate processes effectively. We wanted a really fully packaged solution in order to be able to deal with our client relationship management.

Secondly, it's a highly flexible model. It enables us to adapt to various business models that we have at Groupama, various industries, various geographies. And it's really a way that allows us to seamlessly integrate with all the types of solutions of the company. And there is a third aspect that is an important criteria for choosing Pega. It's around easy integration in our ecosystem, in our complex ecosystem. That ecosystem was built in line with Groupama's history, which is very rich. So it's a challenge to integrate in that ecosystem with the new system, and Pega has this facility to be integrated through several connectors and other features.

Let's illustrate with some of them. Event driven architecture leads to use integrated Pega Kafka data flows to consume and produce events - hundreds of thousands every day. Also we used, because we have this need, specialized connectors like Graph Connector for Microsoft to manage appointments and to manage meetings. File listeners also are helping us to import files daily. And it's the same for big files that can be integrated into our data warehouse, not to mention the REST APIs for the rest of integration.

Business Benefits So let's continue. So business benefits. We did this for good reasons. In fact, since setting up Pega capabilities, we observed true business transformation for clients and actors of the client relationships.

Our clients live today a better experience. They are recognized when they contact Groupama. We offer them a more personalized experience and we contact them proactively. We are really going to the client before they even ask for us to go for them.

The client satisfaction is really improving. We are already seeing the results of what we put in place with needs covered faster, with an improved quality due to process automation and standardization.

The sales consultants and managers have a better understanding of the client situation. They have a 360 view of the client, allowing them an improved customization of interaction and freeing time to perform value added tasks such as customer needs discovery and business development.

And finally, the supporting resources benefit from a better data quality and capabilities to improve customer personalization, such as marketing teams, where you can use, in fact, the data of the clients to go and personalize the relationship.

And as a group, Groupama is finally collecting the gains of development results and efficiency.

Concrete Results The concrete results are centered on three main axes: business development, client satisfaction, and efficiency. And as a figure, we see a 10% increase in commercial properties, triple the stability of client contacts across all channels, and significantly improved the quality of responses and client satisfaction.

We have reduced the time to answer our clients and minimized clients' reiteration and eliminated non-value added activities.

In 2025, we will focus on capturing all omnichannel customer interactions. We really want to make a customer request and demand really more fluent, and the client's file will be created and processed with a better 360 view of the client progress for all the advisors implied in the process.

The activity to process the file or support the customer is prioritized and distributed in the to-do list of actors, according to several criteria of prioritization and progress. According to steps and showing simplification of treatment and automatization, this approach ensures a personalized treatment for better customer satisfaction and operational efficiency of the advisor.

Technical Architecture But let's see how we do this technically. So our goal with Pega is clear. We have to gain autonomy for delivering high quality products faster and more efficiently. So to support that, we established a center of excellence that's built on a strong mix of internal resources with trusted Pega and partner experts.

We are focused on the long game. We want to develop and enable our internal teams to grow their Pega expertise and drive innovation from within.

The results speak for themselves. In just six months, we rolled out our first project with a strategic feature, Lead Management, which helps business growth. After one year, Pega was deployed across all our affiliates, regional, mid-market and life. By year two, we had launched eight projects and built a recognized expertise in the French market around Pega products.

This journey is also strengthening our internal culture, team cohesion continues to grow and we are building a strong foundation for what is coming next.

So we've made a strategic move by putting Pega in the core of our CRM system. It's not just a tool. It's the engine behind how we serve our customers and support our teams. And we are leveraging a full suite of Pega applications: sales automation, Customer service, Pega Platform, Common Data Model, and CDH to guide both customers and our agents.

And just as important, we have taken a major step forward by moving to Pega Cloud. And this is a significant shift and new in our ecosystem. It gives us the agility to scale and the ability to focus on what really matters: delivering value and not managing infrastructure.

We also are using a strong Layer Cake architecture. We've adopted a modular approach to case design, allowing us to build smarter and faster, whether it's activity management or shared web components. And we designed each piece to plug in seamlessly without duplication.

And to take it further, we implemented a Layer Cake architecture that maximizes reuse across all our affiliates. It lets us tailor experience locally while maintaining a consistent and scalable foundation.

And above all, we work with an asset vision in mind. That means every feature we deliver is designed to be a reusable component ready to be deployed across apps and contexts across affiliates. This strategy gives us speed, consistency, and long term value with every delivery.

Technical Challenges You told us about how well it is, but what are the pain points in just a few words? That's a good question. Thank you for asking.

So we have technical challenges. The first of the challenges we faced is about Constellation architecture and DX API. And we mix DX API direct calls with DX components, and we have built this with respect to requirements from UX and CX. We use a front end and we are integrating this API and SDK into our micro front end. And this is really a challenge.

And especially it's about performance where we faced a challenge about sessions being removed every time. And then this is the Constellation architecture which is stateless as you know. So every time a user is using API, the engine is recalculating everything. And it was a challenge we put in place with the help from Pega experts. A new solution using double token and stateful sessions.

The second challenge - technical challenge - is related to our architecture. Event driven architecture. As I said, we are consuming and producing hundreds of thousands of events every day. So we need a good solution to handle that high volume. And to meet this requirement, we need to fine tune the solution and especially Kafka.

Also, we are aligning with Avro schema standards for consistency and put in place a replay mechanism to be resilient on failure. And of course, we are scaling for volume from large campaigns of leads that we are using for our users in sales automation and also database growing fast now because we have a lot of users across affiliates.

And now I think we have put in place that robust architecture foundation ready for what's next.

Lessons Learned I think that we are nearly at the end. In fact, we really met some pitfalls and things to avoid during this journey. It goes from underestimating in fact, the understanding of what we could do with Pega to how complex it was to get the real business processes modernized and put inside Pega in order to get really the value out of it.

I won't go through all that. I think time is off, but don't hesitate to ask us questions if we have. I think we have time for conclusion.

Q&A Session Thank you. Any questions? Question 1: On that last slide you had a commentary about final users. What user types did you have join you in that journey developing and designing the business processes? What levels of associates?

Answer: In fact, in all the projects we went to see really business operations people coming really from the day to day operations. And they were integrated in the project from the beginning. We had to modernize the process. So it goes from the sale agent that is dedicated to the project during a few months to the manager or the responsible of department who gets involved from time to time as well.

Question 2: Also question related to this slide, you know the last one said people assume data is available and simple to manipulate. Why is that a pitfall? Can you expand?

Answer: Because I think we will complete what I say, but we have a legacy system. And in the legacy system, the data of our clients are split over many applications. So the problem is to get this data used from a centralized point of view with Pega, and to really use the data that we have in the system at one point valued.

Question 3: Congratulations. I think within three years, you guys have accomplished a lot. We have sales automation and customer service module in our organization, and we are still trying to understand the fit of that into our company and you talked about you guys started the Center of Excellence six months into the journey. Can you talk about some of the challenges you faced in standing up the Center of excellence in your organization?

Answer: This is a very good question. Thank you for asking. So at the start of the program, we put in place the Center of Excellence. And the first challenge was to get the right people, the right expertise. And you know, the experts for Pega are rare. So we have put in place a strategy to be autonomous on that by having the partners Pega experts helping in this center of excellence, but also our internal resources. Some we have enabled them by going to Pega academy, by having all this kind of enablement and others are experts already.

And we put in place rules and KPIs to measure that. We have a matrix to have where we are about our autonomy to deliver Pega. And that was very important - resources, experts.

The other challenge we have had is our complex ecosystem. And we have to really design it well from the start to think about how to go with the good design, not really faster, but the right design at the start and to be integrated in all architecture principles we have in Groupama. One of these principles was event driven architecture. And this is very important.

The other one we have a centralized system of records for contacts, which is not in Pega. So we have to integrate that with the live data we can get from Pega. These are our two challenges we have just to name these two.

Follow-up: So you mentioned that your contacts are not in Pega. Pega is not the system of record?

Answer: Yeah.

Next Steps As you see, in fact we have already put in place a lot of things in Pega and we have already a few customer journeys that are implemented today, but the next step for us is really to cover the whole client relationship with customer journeys. So we will go to the rest of the pathways we deployed at the end of 2025 and 2026, and to integrate in these all, we already put in place the Generative AI and CDH capabilities of Pega, which is really the next step for us. We already did some type of experimentation, but we have to go to the next future.

And just from a technical point of view, so we started using sales automation, then Customer Service, and now our next steps will be first to generalize customer service cases because we have other journeys to implement. Second is very important is to replace our legacy CRM system entirely. Now we are just working on some journeys there, but our next step is to decommission it.

And finally, as I mentioned, we want to use these capabilities coming from AI. And we know that there is CDH in Pega which is kind of AI. But also we need to use the GenAI. So we have this future. In the future we want to use these new capabilities.

So that's it. That's the story about next step.

Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you very much.