From Knowledge to Performance: How Malakoff Humanis Transformed Its Customer Relationships

When Knowledge Management Becomes a Strategic Asset

In 2024, Malakoff Humanis is embarking on a transformation of unprecedented scope. Within its Insurance Operations Division, 600 of the 1,200 employees are changing roles or responsibilities to adopt a new organizational model: an integrated customer relationship, designed from start to finish.

The ambition is great. The challenge is commensurate with this transformation. To enable everyone to quickly take on new roles and responsibilities, it is essential to build on new foundations: reliable content, a clear information architecture, and easy access to knowledge. These elements are the necessary conditions for sustainably supporting the organization’s evolution and ensuring its success.

It was at this pivotal moment that the Insurance Operations Department, under the leadership of Stéphane Defouilloy, Head of Customer Relations, fully realized a strategic truth: knowledge management is not just another technical component. It is the very foundation of the transformation.

“To ensure the success of a knowledge management project, the first requirement is to have strong, committed sponsors: senior management and business unit leaders,” says Stéphane.

It wasn’t simply a matter of rolling out a new tool. We had to rethink several thousand work instructions, break down silos between areas of expertise, harmonize practices, and build—for each line of work—a structured, accessible, and immediately operational knowledge base.

Overcoming Complexity: Four Tools for the Same Need

Prior to 2024, Malakoff Humanis relied on a legacy knowledge management system that had been gradually developed over the years. While rich in content, this environment was heterogeneous, consisting of several distinct tools designed for similar purposes, each organized according to the specific needs of its respective business unit.

Each team managed its own instructions and content independently. This organizational structure made it possible to address the specific needs of each business unit, but it made it more difficult to share consistent information across the entire company.

As cross-functional issues became increasingly important—particularly in customer relations—the need for a unified and structured framework became clear.

The challenge, therefore, was not merely technological. The goal was to create a common framework capable of streamlining the flow of information, enhancing the consistency of practices, and providing long-term support for the transformation that was underway.

As Stéphane Defouilloy puts it: “Without reliable, structured, and accessible content, the transformation won’t hold.”

Three Objectives to Guide the Transformation

To support this transformation, Malakoff Humanis has structured its approach around three complementary priorities:

• upgrade the workstations of advisors and managers to enable faster access to information and enhance operational efficiency;
• professionalize content governance through common methods, structured processes, and a clear division of responsibilities;
• to sustainably improve the customer experience through more reliable, consistent, and timely responses.

These three objectives all pointed to the same conviction: the effectiveness of customer relations depends above all on the quality and accessibility of content.

Breaking Down Silos: When Collaboration Becomes a Strength

Reducing the number of work instructions from 6,000 to 3,500

The project began with an in-depth audit conducted by Stéphane Defouilloy and his teams. The goal was not to make minor improvements to the existing system, but to rethink the organization of the content and its governance.

In total, more than 1,000 workdays were spent analyzing, harmonizing, and integrating the various databases.

This approach has significantly streamlined the documentation system, reducing the number of work instructions from 6,000 to 3,500.

Beyond the quantitative metric, this trend reflects a new approach to knowledge management: breaking down silos between areas of expertise, sharing content where appropriate, clarifying areas of responsibility, and strengthening collaboration across business units to ensure greater consistency in the messages delivered to customers.

The result: a knowledge base that is more consistent, easier to maintain, and better aligned with the teams' operational needs.

Involve the teams, don't impose them

Dina Despagne, Customer Relations and Cross-Functional Business Support Specialist at Malakoff Humanis, played a central role in this transformation. She shares a conviction that has become a cornerstone of theproject: “We no longer ‘store’ information; we design content that is useful, actionable, and user-focused.”

The goal was no longer simply to produce or centralize documents, but to design content that was directly useful to employees, tailored to their needs and the specific situations they encounter on a daily basis.

Operational teams were involved at a very early stage in the work of structuring and integrating content in order to ensure its relevance and to encourage adoption of the new operating procedures.

As Stéphane Defouilloy explains: “We presented the project early on, involved the operational teams in integrating their own content, and appointed ambassadors in each business unit to support the change.”

This collaborative approach has fostered a culture of lasting commitment by making employees full partners in the transformation.

The Three Key Factors for the Project's Success

1. A strong push led by management

From the very start of the project, Malakoff Humanis made the decision to prioritize knowledge management as a strategic driver of transformation.

As Stéphane Defouilloy points out: “A project like this requires clear direction from the outset, strong conviction… and, above all, dedicated personnel.”

The project involved in-depth work on content, its structure, and its governance, while ensuring the continuity of day-to-day operations.

2. A phased rollout, designed to maintain momentum

Several factors also contributed to this acceleration: mature, time-tested tools; teams already familiar with knowledge management practices; and a clear understanding of the business needs to be addressed.

The teams proceeded business line by business line, prioritizing the most frequently used content in order to quickly generate operational value.

This approach has made it possible to maintain a steady pace while helping employees adopt the new practices.

Stéphane Defouilloy sums up this approach with a simple conviction: “A project that goes on too long wears down the teams and saps their momentum.”

3. A technological choice widely embraced by users

To select its future knowledge management platform, Malakoff Humanis conducted a structured request for proposals, accompanied by demonstrations involving a wide range of employees.

More than 150 users from operational and support departments were thus able to compare solutions available on the market with their existing tools.

According to Stéphane Defouilloy: “The choice was clear-cut: a landslide victory for Mayday.”

Beyond the platform's features, it was above all its alignment with the project's objectives that made the difference.

A transformation driven above all by the quality of the content

For Dina and Stéphane, the project’s success hinged on a strong conviction: this project is not primarily about the tool itself. It is about the quality of the content.

As Stéphane points out: “If the content isn’t flawless, the tool will be rejected.”

The project was accompanied by the implementation of a comprehensive editorial governance framework to ensure the quality and sustainability of the knowledge base.

A Structured and Sustainable Editorial Governance Framework

This governance approach has resulted in several complementary initiatives:

• the development of a common editorial charter;
• the establishment of a clear methodology to guide the production of documents;
• the adoption of a consistent article structure;
• a clarification of responsibilities between business experts and support functions.

This approach has made it possible to build a knowledge base that is more readable, more maintainable, and better governed.

The Results: Much More Than Just Numbers

Adoption Driven by Usage

A few months after the initial rollouts, Malakoff Humanis has observed a particularly positive response to the new knowledge base.

As Stéphane Defouilloy points out: “At this stage, user feedback has been very positive.”

Advisors, managers, and support staff involved in content enrichment praise both the quality of the information provided and the seamless user experience offered by the platform.

Dina Despagne summarizes the benefits observed in the field as follows: “For advisors, the impact is immediate: time savings, greater autonomy, and higher-quality responses on a daily basis.”

Initial operational gains have already been identified

The initial measurable indicators highlight several concrete benefits:

1. a reduction in the time spent searching for information;
2. improved efficiency in processing requests;
3. productivity gains observed in operational activities.

The project also aims to achieve more qualitative objectives: to improve the reliability of responses provided to customers, to standardize practices, and to minimize the risk of errors.

A project that is gradually expanding beyond its original scope

Today, the project enjoys high visibility within the company and has sparked interest from other entities within the group, which are in turn considering similar initiatives related to knowledge management.

This momentum is driven not only by the results observed in the field, but also by the system's ability to demonstrate its business value on a daily basis.

A gradual rollout that helps embed these practices for the long term and consolidate, step by step, the transformation that is underway.

And what about AI in all this? 

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For customer service teams that create content, the platform has gradually rolled out the knowledge base and the Mayday Academy:

• Automated spell-checking to reduce minor errors.
• Duplicate detection, to identify instances where the same content appears twice and remove duplicates.
• Text clarity analysis, in line with the Malakoff Humanis brand promise.
• Automatic generation of quizzes from existing content (using the Mayday Academy feature).
• Ask Mayday makes it easier for advisors and managers to access information and benefit from summaries drawn from multiple content sources. This solution combines the capabilities of artificial intelligence and knowledge management to answer questions from the group’s advisors in just a few seconds. Today, at Malakoff Humanis, each business unit has its own Ask (Ask Santé, Ask RC, Ask Prévoyance, etc.) to ensure the relevance of the AI-generated responses and to meet the specific needs of each area. However, the same content can be shared and used by multiple business units or Ask platforms.

In fact, as Dina explains: “AI performance depends directly on the quality and structure of the content.”

Because at Malakoff Humanis, AI remains, above all, a tool designed to support our teams and enhance the quality of service:

“At Malakoff Humanis, we are guided by a strong conviction: the alliance between people and technology. Given our mission—social protection—we are particularly vigilant. The goal is not to replace. The goal is to enhance, secure, and improve. And there’s one key point: AI is not a magic wand. We had thousands of work instructions that needed a thorough review. We chose to undertake the demanding task of revising, structuring, and ensuring the reliability of these instructions through human effort. If we had used a large-scale, AI-driven automated integration, the result would have been disastrous. The tool is powerful, but intelligence remains human,” says Stéphane.

What this success story teaches us: Performance starts with governance

Dina and Stéphane confirm it: excellence in customer relations isn't based solely on technology. It depends on how we structure, manage, and collectively put knowledge into practice within our teams.

Dina sums it up this way: “Keeping content alive is just as important as creating it: governance, updates, and continuous improvement are essential.”

And she adds, “Internally, this also changes roles: we’re shifting from a content-production approach to a knowledge-management approach.”

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Stéphane finally sums up the progress made: “A well-prepared project, developed in collaboration with the teams, that has garnered support”— and one that must now continue to prove its value over the long term.

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