From 600,000 Emails to Zero Backlog. How CED's Claims Operation Became Autonomous with Otera

When a 2,500-person claims operation processes every inbound email same-day with zero backlog and near-zero errors, that is not a process improvement. It is a fundamentally different operating model. Francois Goffinet, CEO of CED, explains what changed when his organization shifted from manual email triage to autonomous claims processing with Otera (previously DeepOpinion).

The Challenge. Scaling a Claims Operation Without Scaling the Administrative Burden

CED manages claims across the full lifecycle for insurance clients, with roughly 2,500 people active across the value chain. Growth created a familiar tension at enterprise scale. More volume demanded more capacity, but CED's real differentiator was never processing speed. It was the quality of interaction between its teams and the policyholders they serve.

"What we are aiming for is the smile of the end customer," says Goffinet. "That's the ultimate metric we are after."

The administrative weight of triaging, sorting, and routing hundreds of thousands of inbound emails per year was absorbing the time and focus CED's people needed for those higher-value customer interactions. The question was not how to make that work faster. It was how to remove it from the equation entirely so the organization could redeploy capacity toward what actually differentiates CED in the market.

Why CED Chose Otera. Bridging Technology and Operational Reality

CED selected Otera for a specific reason that went beyond technical capability. "What was really a differentiated component is the ability to make the bridge between the technology and our business reality," Goffinet explains. Otera's team invested significant time upfront to understand and formalize CED's operational processes, in some cases structuring patterns and decision logic that CED's own teams had not codified.

That calibration phase was critical because the goal was not to automate one task within an otherwise manual workflow. It was to redesign how an entire operational process runs, with specialized agents handling volume autonomously while humans focused on judgment, exceptions, and customer relationships.

The Results. Same-Day Processing, Zero Backlog, Near-Zero Errors

CED receives 600,000 emails per year, many with attached documents that require classification and routing into the correct workflows. Today, email qualification runs autonomously. Every item is processed same-day. Backlog has been eliminated entirely. Error rates are near zero.

For an operation at this scale, the downstream impact is significant. Same-day, near-error-free processing directly improves the experience of every policyholder CED serves, which strengthens CED's value proposition to its insurance clients. When administrative burden disappears, the organization can invest its capacity where it compounds.

"Feedback internally and externally has been very good," Goffinet confirms. "I would like to expand the scope of what we do together and continue to roll out these solutions in our organization."

That expansion signals something worth noting. When an enterprise with 2,500 people and 600,000 annual inbound communications moves to extend autonomous operations further into its value chain, it is not optimizing at the margins. It is adopting a new operating model.

About Otera

Otera brings autonomy to the operations the world depends on. We transform mission-critical processes into governed AI systems that decide and act end-to-end, freeing enterprises to grow without limits. Trusted by Allianz, Siemens, Bayer, SAAB, and Hannover Re.