The company provides home services and 24/7 assistance, but also operates residential care centers, assisted living facilities and service centers for the elderly and has a pillar around youth care. ZBA is a for-profit organization that reinvests profits back into the business. Financial results are important, but most important goal is to provide clients with a joyful life.

No 360º view of the customer

Data is important for ZBA to achieve its strategic goals, says Dimitri De Rooze, Director of Data & Digital Transformation at Zorgbedrijf Antwerpen. “We invest heavily in digital transformation and in technology to make our customers’ lives healthier, safer and more enjoyable. After all, our customers are our most important assets. However, we lacked a 360º view of our clients’ data. This was largely due to the complexity of our broad healthcare offering. All of our departments deal with specific regulatory requirements for their own healthcare offerings and depend on their own customized IT systems to do so. Those systems form separate silos, which until recently did not communicate with each other. That meant that basically no one in the organization had a unified and up-to-date overview of our customers.”

“Simple processes, such as sending invoices to customers, were therefore very complex. To give you an idea, over 13 percent of our invoices came back due to incorrect data. We had to pull data from different systems to understand exactly who our customer was. And often it was not clear which information from which system was most accurate or current.

“Since 2021, we are required by law to put our customers’ bills on one healthcare bill. That was very difficult with all the separate systems and fragmented data.”

Dimitri De Rooze, Director Data & Digital Transformation at Zorgbedrijf Antwerpen

For example, when we sent a mailing to our customers, sometimes we would get a thousand mailings back because the contact information was not correct. And it sometimes happened that we wrote letters of condolence to the families of residents, when their loved ones had not died at all. Incredibly painful, of course, and absolutely not the customer experience we want to provide.”

“We also push hard on experience and in our vision we wished since the inception of the healthcare company to push for a 1 care bill, being 1 bill that would clearly reflect all services purchased. That was very difficult with all the separate systems and fragmented data. Therefore, our customers often still received multiple invoices per month for the various services they purchased from us. We also had a desire to develop a healthcare portal, in which customers could manage all their services and data themselves. That was simply not feasible because of the old situation, De Rooze said.

One version of the truth

ZBA realized that change was necessary to improve its customers’ customer experience. Says De Rooze, “We started a project to get our customer data in order and to extract maximum value from the available data in every possible way. After an intensive selection process, Informatica emerged as the most suitable software vendor. Through them, we came into contact with Credon – the only Informatica Platinum Delivery Partner in the Benelux – and there was an immediate click there. Credon helped us in a number of workshops to define where the problems were from our business point of view. After the workshops, they presented an approach to bring our data together in a structured way and extract the right, valuable information from it.”

Due to the legal requirement to get healthcare billing in order, we worked with Credon to develop a data platform using Informatica technology in just 12 weeks. A unique achievement, as such a project normally takes at least six months. With the data platform, we bring the information from all of our systems together in one central environment. This ensures that everyone within ZBA has access to the most current and correct information about our customers – one version of the truth, in other words. In addition, Credon has organized and simplified the documentation of our systems. It is now clear where what data resides, what that data is about and from which source the data comes. And with our business glossary, we can now explain and transform data into understandable language for our users.”

“We established a Master Data team that included about five data stewards (ZBA employees). Credon provided insight to the Master Data team to improve the uniformity, accuracy and consistency of all critical customer data. Another key focus for us was to build a “data culture” in the organization so that our employees enter and handle data with care. In addition, we felt it was important to implement a scalable solution so that we can easily add new data sources to the platform in the future.”

Everything about the customer is known. With everyone!

ZBA now has a 360º customer view, allowing them to provide the best experience for each individual customer. De Rooze explains, “As soon as a client contacts us, everything about that client is known. Client details, services purchased, hobbies, preferences, complaints, the care professional(s) responsible, contacts and other things. Employees do not have to ask our clients about their needs again, but can serve them efficiently and optimally. And we can even offer additional services based on this data.

By analyzing customer data, we can send personalized promotions without worrying about mistakes. The data platform also allows customers to access their own personal data, invoices and schedules through a web portal. This is not only convenient for customers, but also very cost-saving for us.”

“Our employees also see the impact of the data platform. Credon has trained our people to learn how to handle data, as well as how to read and interpret dashboards. Financially, we also see improvement. Invoices now reach the right people on time, which has resulted in invoices being paid earlier. We have now reduced the number of invoices returned to just 0.05 percent,” says De Rooze.

“Where previously 13 percent of our invoices were returned due to incorrect data, we have now reduced that to just 0.05 percent.”

Dimitri De Rooze, Director Data & Digital Transformation at Zorgbedrijf Antwerpen

Hand on heart

All in all, the data platform provides ZBA with comprehensive and accurate data to offer personalized customer experiences that contribute greatly to their quality of life. De Rooze: “With my hand on my heart, I can now say that we have the right information at our disposal to provide the best care and experience to our clients. And the data platform helps us work efficiently, thereby reducing operating costs.” “The success of this project was largely determined by our partnership with Credon. We were particularly charmed by their knowledge, competence, experience and transparency. In addition, they were very “hands on” and they spoke our language. They engaged with us, became part of our team, and based on our input, they showed us how to take our project quickly. They also ensured a good handover of all the solutions and processes – they showed us how it works, worked with us, and then handed it over to us. And then if we did need help, they were always on standby. That was exactly what we were looking for in a partnership!

All in all, the data platform provides ZBA with comprehensive and accurate data to offer personalized customer experiences that contribute greatly to their quality of life. De Rooze: “With my hand on my heart, I can now say that we have the right information at our disposal, to provide the best care and experience to our clients. And the data platform helps us work efficiently, thereby reducing operating costs.” “The success of this project was largely determined by our partnership with Credon. We were particularly charmed by their knowledge, competence, experience and transparency. In addition, they were very ‘hands on’ and they spoke our language. They interacted with us, were part of our team, and based on our input, they showed us how to tackle our project quickly. They also made sure all the solutions and processes were transferred well – they showed us how it works, worked with us, and then handed it over to us. And then if we still needed help, they were always on standby. That was exactly what we were looking for in a partnership!

Dimitri also looks ahead: “We’re making our organization more and more data-driven and are betting on a long-term partnership with Informatica and Credon. Since Informatica is “cloud only” we are going to work in the Cloud for new use cases. This is now the case for a first use case, using Cloud Application Integration and Data Integration.”

Customer data that arrives in our organization is checked against external data sources. Until recently, an external connection was used to check and enrich customer data. However, we ran into a lot of limitations. The existing service was not always stable and was slow. In addition, this external connection was set up separately for each system that needed validation of customer data, such as CRM, SAP, etc. This resulted in a lot of maintenance and development, headaches with the various connections and, above all, data that was not 100% matched in the various systems. Thanks to Informatica, we have one central hub, which now collects data from the external source in one central location. All internal systems are connected to the hub and can continuously check and enrich data in real-time. This new high-performance and stable cloud solution is three times faster than the previous solution and requires less development and maintenance. Moreover, all systems now use the same external data, bringing us one step closer to realizing our data-driven vision.

We know that Informatica’s future lies in the cloud. So new use cases, as discussed above, we are setting up in the cloud. For existing use cases, such as Master Data Management (MDM), which runs “on premise” today, we still have a migration ahead of us in which we could use Credon’s help. However, we look at it case by case and migrate to the cloud when it is opportune for our story. Fortunately, Credon can take care of all our needs: cloud, on-premise, hybrid … their Informatica experts guide us all the way.