FVF

The Federation of the Vlaamse Verzekerings- en Financiële Tussenpersonen V.Z.V (FVF, Wommelgem) is known as a professional association providing extensive service for the benefit of its members. With the reconfiguration of its entire IT structure and organisation, the federation is heading for an even higher dimension. The heart of it all is Qurius’ membership management software Q-MembeR, which functions as the backbone of the newly developed website.

FVF’s Managing Director Patrick De Ceuster does not hesitate to define Q-MembeR in its new IT environment as the ultimate business intelligence tool. “Q-MembeR provides far-reaching insight into individual behaviour and demand patterns of our members. This means that in future our entire service will be able to focus in an even more specifically tailored way.”  

FVF has 1,100 member insurance brokers, of whom about half also has the status of bank branches. These are mostly small-scale family firms. The basis of the organisation are eight regional associations. Together with its French sister organisation Feprabel, which appeals to the same target group across the language barrier, the Federation of Flemish Insurance and Financial Intermediaries was also the starting point of the sectoral marketing and PR organisation Brocom. A large number of insurance companies, working with real estate as a distribution channel, are also members of Brocom. At the time, FVF was founded to stem the tide against the amateurism in insurance brokerage. This explains why the federation has built in a high degree of professionalism in its services right from the start.  

Locomotive function
The member organisation has recently traded its previous multiplatform relational database application, which held both as a stand-alone as well as a client server, for Q-MembeR, the Qurius membership management solution. “We were looking for a new application because the old software no longer offered support, but particularly so because the added value proved to be very thin and entirely restricted to the address management. Besides, the process still required quite a lot of manual transactions. FVF is a solid federation that tries to work as efficiently as possible with a small but very hardworking team of eight persons,” says Patrick De Ceuster.  

Strikingly, the introduction of Q-MembeR was food for thought for the FVF team, the result being an entirely new and company-wide IT project in which Q-MembeR takes the locomotive function. “This led to the belief that the streamlining of the business processes should go much further than implementing a new (database) technology. The whole operation is hung on to Q-MembeR, all services in our portfolio are linked with the application,” Patrick De Ceuster continues. “FVF has disconnected its business processes from the insurance business. Optimization of services to the members was the starting point. Therefore you need high performance membership management software and not an insurance package in which ‘client‘ is replaced by ‘members’. That’s why we started looking for software that had been developed specifically for membership management, from a demand pattern that shows more similarities with an organisation like the Red Cross or football club RSC Anderlecht than the insurance industry,” he adds.  

High performance ‘tool’
FVF found a reliable partner in Qurius, which offered high added values by means of the tailor-specific solution Q-MembeR. Q-MembeR is based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which means that the solution can be seamlessly integrated with all Microsoft Office applications as well as with the e-mail platform Microsoft Outlook. “All this means also prospects of further integration with an underlying ERP system, a next step we may take in the spring of 2011,” says the Managing Director.

Patrick De Ceuster is of the opinion that the introduction of Q-MembeR should primarily be regarded as a further upgrading of services. “It’s only logical that we, as a professional federation, make the necessary ‘tools’ available to our eight employees, all top professionals, ‘tools’ to maximize the chances of further self-development and for the public benefit of all our members. By offering this team the maximum technological support, they can fully concentrate on their core business. Maximum automation of the executive functions ensures that they can concentrate on generating value added services, “ says De Ceuster.  

Q-MembeR automates, for instance, the entire workflow regarding the participation of its members in activities and events organised by FVF, ranging from sending out the invitations for the registration to the final invoicing and administrative settlement.   Technological partnership For optimal accessibility by the outside world to its website and Q-MembeR, the federation took its chance with COLT Technology Services as their Internet provider, which has a POP (Point-of Presence) in the immediate proximity of its offices.

The new FVF website does not only function as an information channel though, where members can download standard documents, such as a model agency contract, but also as a communication platform, where people can look for answers to specific insurance technical questions within their own community, based on shared expertise. “Q-MembeR will keep claiming the role of driving force behind the new website. We are, for instance, currently working on further optimization of the search possibilities to collaborate with a professional insurance broker. To offer our members equal chances of success, they will no longer be listed alphabetically within a geographical area as they used to be, but in a random and counterbalanced order. Once again, Q-MembeR functions as the basis of all this,” explains Patrick De Ceuster.

Strikingly, the federation’s Managing Director does not so much describe Q-MembeR as membership administration software, but more as a business intelligence tool, with high added value. “The link with Q-MembeR allows us to reconstruct the individual surfing habits of our members in our website. This gives us far-reaching insight on the behaviour and needs of each member and we will be able to keep developing our services even more tailored specifically in future. In short, Q-MembeR will be the central pillar of our new marketing strategy,” concludes Patrick De Ceuster.