Customer interview: P&V Group for Ambassify

P&V Group is a cooperative Belgian insurance group offering insurance solutions for individuals, the self-employed, companies, and institutions. The P&V Group distributes its products and services through independent insurance brokers and a network of exclusive agents under the P&V brand. 

P&V Group started working with Ambassify in 2022, and 6 months into our collaboration, we decided to meet with Noémie Léonard, Social Media and Community Manager at P&V Group, to talk about why they chose Ambassify, the details of their ambassador program, and what the goals and objectives of their implementation are.

Why did you feel the need to implement an ambassador program within P&V Group?

Well, first of all, I think it’s useful to mention that we had already worked with an employee advocacy platform in the past, but at some point, we realized that what that platform was offering did not suffice anymore. We were not satisfied with the support and functionalities of that partner, which is why we started to explore the market for an alternative solution.

On a more general level, though, we wanted to launch a formalized ambassador program with a platform and partner to support us along the way. 

On the one hand, we wanted to provide adequate support and guidance to our agents who act and perform under the P&V brand when it comes to social media and social marketing. They expressed the need to have more support in terms of social media content creation and output, and so we were looking for a solution that’d allow us to create content with visuals and copies on the go that they could easily share in a few clicks if they wanted to, or that they could take inspiration from if they wanted to have a go at a more personal approach. 

On the other hand, our HR department was looking for a solution to strengthen our Employer Brand and really spread the word about it, expand our reach, and draw new candidates and new talent to our vacancies and to our company in general. By activating employee ambassadors, we can put a face to our brand, which has a big impact. When your aim is to be genuine, and you're trying to make your workplace and your sector appealing to a wide pool of candidates, it makes a huge difference to have your messaging spread by real people. So yes, this was really something we wanted to focus on.

Why did you choose to start working with Ambassify? What drove the decision?

As I mentioned, a colleague was scouting the market for an alternative partner to provide us with the solution we were looking for. We did explore several options, but in the end, a couple of factors really drove the decision to choose Ambassify. 

On a product level, your platform definitely fit the brief of what we needed: we were excited about the library feature with the tags and sorting system. This makes it very easy for me to, you know, create and tag campaigns, but also finish those that aren’t relevant anymore so that the agents know that everything they find on the platform is up to date, approved, and ready to share and use, and they can easily find what they want with the tags. The mobile app was another big plus point, too, because agents can access it at any time on their phones, making it feel less cumbersome.

On a legal level, we had some issues with other solutions outside the EU. The legal documentation Ambassify provided solved those issues, so choosing a Belgian partner proved to be the best choice from this point of view.

What does your current implementation look like?

The employee-focused use case revolves around HR, as I mentioned. Our central focus here is employer branding, and the ambassadors have been supporting that trajectory. Mostly, they make short videos with the employee ambassadors, where they share some personal messages and personal experiences and then post them on social media via the platform. 

The work we do with the agents is different, though. The main goal is to facilitate and support their social marketing efforts, and that includes sharing content but also tips and tricks on how to build up and professionalize their profiles, their personal brand, how to make more and more content on their own, etc. It is a continuous process that has to be carried out over time, but it’s all part of the kind of training we wish to provide them with. 

What we mainly share with them is campaigns about our insurance products and our initiatives, and we share tips and tricks on how to improve their sales cycles, for example. At the same time, we also use Ambassify to communicate with the agents — to share news, to share announcements — and so it becomes an internal communications tool, too, basically. 

What is the value of such a program for P&V Group?

I would say there are two kinds of value here. For the agents, it’s all really about getting the support of the community management that they would not have otherwise to help them in their efforts on social media and in doing social marketing, which they believe is very important, yet, not all of them have the time to dedicate to it and build their brand. With both the desktop community and the mobile app, it all becomes much easier and more manageable for them. They can simply share approved content with the click of a button.

For HR, the value is talent attraction: in our sector, there is a big need for talent, but it is not always perceived as an appealing sector, you know, so our goal is to show that it is indeed attractive. To do that, we rely on those people sharing their authentic messages with their voices and personal thoughts and experiences, which makes a huge difference. You don’t have a brand tooting its own horn with ads or corporate posts, but employees opening up about why they love their job. They all speak in different ways and share their own stories, which matters to people.