SUCCESS STORY
Parentia
Industry• GovernmentSolutions• OpenText Exstream• OpenText Exstream Empower Editor

Services• OpenText Professional Services

Results
Centralized and standardized
management of all document
templates, reducing manual effort
Automated document review
workflow, enhancing quality ofcustomer communications
Accelerated batch process byover 99%, reclaiming
60 FTE days per year forcustomer-facing activities

Parentia connects families acrossBelgium with timely access tofinancial benefits

Delivering fast, clear and personalized information on means-tested
entitlements with automated customer communications management
capabilities from OpenText™ Exstream“OpenText solutions are
helping Parentia to savearound 60 full-time
equivalent days each year
on manual document-related
work, and we’re delighted
with the new heights ofefficiency we have reached.”
Marc Nens

Director
Parentia Wallonie and Parentia BrusselsParentia connects families across Belgium with timely access to financial benefits

Headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, Parentia is the largest childbenefit service provider in the regions of Flanders, Brussels andWallonia. Each month, Parentia pays out child benefits to almost700,000 children across the country, and aims to offer all families
the financial support they need to raise happy, healthy children.
Parentia also make every effort to reduce the administrative
burden for parents as much as possible.
Parentia plays a key social role in Belgium, as the organization isresponsible for calculating and paying out means-tested benefits forfamilies with children and young adults from ages 0 to 24. Parentia
strives to ensure that every child receives their maximum allowancefor the best possible start in life.
Marc Ertveldt, Director of Marketing and Communications at Parentia,
explains: “Our goal is not only to pay each family their benefits
in a timely manner, but also to help each family understand all
the benefits they are entitled to. This is especially importantfor single-parent households, who often don’t have the time toresearch all the possible options available to them.”

Keeping families informed
To help achieve these goals, Parentia regularly corresponds withfamilies via email and through the postal service. Communications
flow in more than one direction, and Parentia encourages families
to send information to help it determine whether they are entitled toreceive additional funds.

Marc Nens, Director of Parentia Wallonie and Parentia Brussels,
continues: “Because we are responsible for delivering
information on many different types of benefits and helping
parents with all their family administration, we have around 300
different document templates for customer communications.
And since Belgium is a multilingual country, most of these
documents must be available in two or more languages,
resulting in around 900 document templates in total.”

Manual processes drive cost and complexity
In the past, Parentia relied heavily on manual systems andprocesses to create, manage and modify its templates. In addition
to making it complex and labor-intensive to update documents
in response to new legislation, this approach increased the timerequired to send documents to customers.
“It used to take three days of work to send a batch of 50,000
documents to our email delivery service and printing partner,”adds Ertveldt. “The sheer number of documents and document
templates also made managing our content a difficult challenge.
We were confident that embracing a standardized andcentralized approach across the entire business would help us
to deliver a more responsive and cost-efficient service for theBelgian families. We therefore decided to look for an enterpriseclass customer communications management [CCM] solution.”“In response to theunprecedented
challenges of thepandemic, thegovernment ofBelgium quickly
introduced a rangeof new benefits
legislation to help
support families
through thecrisis. Thanks to
OpenText Exstream,
we were able tocommunicate thesechanges to all ourcustomers quickly.”
Marc ErtveldtDirector
Marketing and Communications
Parentia

Parentia connects families across Belgium with timely access to financial benefits

Embracing an automated approach
To rationalize its approach to CCM, Parentia selected OpenText
Exstream: an omnichannel solution that allows organizations tocreate, manage and deliver engaging and highly personalized
correspondence on digital and print touchpoints.
“Although an increasing number of our customers prefer to engage
with us via email, it’s still vital that we offer everyone the option of
paper-based communications,” explains Nens. “OpenText Exstream
integrates seamlessly with our email service and our printing
partner, which makes it fast and simple to send out large volumesof communications in a timely manner. Crucially, OpenText
Exstream makes it very straightforward to manage our templates
using standard document-naming conventions, even acrossmultiple different languages. If we need to remove some of thesentences in one document template, metadata tags in OpenText
Exstream allow our team to accurately identify and remove themfrom all the other language versions also—even if they don’t speakthose languages.”

Ensuring high-quality communications
To further enhance its communications capabilities, Parentia decided
to augment its solution with OpenText Exstream Empower Editor. By
working with an expert team from OpenText Professional Services,
Parentia successfully completed the deployment within just a few
months—helping it to maximize the value of its investment in theOpenText platform.

“Using OpenText Exstream Empower Editor, we offer our teams
a browser-based user interface to help them seamlessly create
personalized documents for families with unique needs,” says
Ertveldt. “The OpenText solution also has powerful workflow
automation capabilities built-in, which we use to ensure that all
documents are reviewed by a senior member of the team before
we send them to customers. This process helps us maintain highlevels of quality and regulatory compliance, without causing
delays in sending out documents. Thanks to support and bestpractices from OpenText Professional Services, we achieved a
rapid implementation for OpenText Exstream Empower Editor—
enabling us to get started with the new workflows quickly.”

Generating documents faster than everSince embracing CCM solutions from OpenText, Parentia hastransformed the speed and efficiency of its customer correspondence
processes. Employees can access all the document templates theyneed in one place, and quickly and easily customize them to meet
specific customer needs.
“In the past, it used to take us more than an entire weekend ofwork to generate and send out a batch of 50,000 documents,”
recalls Nens. “Today, we can generate 50,000 documents¬ in just
10 minutes—99% faster than before. Parentia generates over one
million documents each year, and the time we’re saving frees
us to invest more time in customer-facing services for families
across Belgium.”Parentia connects families across Belgium with timely access to financial benefits

Responding rapidly to the COVID crisis
The ability to rapidly make updates to documents proved especiallyvaluable when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in the early monthsof 2020.
“In response to the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic,
the government of Belgium quickly introduced a range of newbenefits legislation to help support families through the crisis,”
explains Ertveldt. “Thanks to OpenText Exstream, we were able tocommunicate these changes to all our customers quickly, helping
to ensure that families received as much support as possible, assoon as possible.”

After more than a decade of success with the OpenText solutions,
Parentia is now looking to the future. The organization plans tointegrate the platform with its Salesforce customer relationshipmanagement system, enabling higher levels of automation andefficiency in its CCM process.
“OpenText solutions are helping Parentia to save around 60 fulltime equivalent days each year on manual document-related
work, and we’re delighted with the new heights of efficiency wehave reached,” concludes Nens. “Our collaboration with OpenText
is playing a key role in our ability to deliver clear, effective
communications with families across Belgium, and we lookforward to building on that relationship in the future.”

About OpenText
OpenText, The Information Company,
enables organizations to gain insight
through market leading information
management solutions, on-premises orin the cloud. For more information aboutOpenText (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTEX)
visit opentext.com.
Customer stories
opentext.com/contact
Twitter | LinkedIn
Copyright © 2021 Open Text. All Rights Reserved. Trademarks owned by Open Text.
For more information, visit: https://www.opentext.com/about/copyright-information(16.06.21)18453.EN