French-first claims and service operations for a Quebec insurer

The insurer had previously outsourced part of its service operation to a provider delivering French from outside Quebec. Policyholders noticed immediately. Complaints referenced vocabulary, register and, in the insurer's own words, the sense of speaking to someone who did not understand where they lived. The arrangement was terminated and the work brought back in house, where it then hit the capacity ceiling that had prompted outsourcing in the first place. The insurer needed capacity without repeating the experience, and it needed a partner that understood Law 25 rather than treating Quebec as a subset of Canada.

We built a dedicated team in Quebec, staffed by Quebec French speakers, with quality calibration performed by Quebec French quality analysts against a framework written for Quebec French rather than translated into it. Terminology follows OQLF standards. Claims correspondence is drafted in Quebec French to a register appropriate for a formal insurance communication.

On the compliance side, we mapped the engagement against Law 25 obligations at design stage rather than retrofitting: consent handling, privacy impact assessment support, breach notification protocol, retention and the transparency requirements around automated processing. All policyholder data remains in Quebec.

Dedicated team, Quebec, aligned to the insurer's operating hours with extended coverage during catastrophe events.

Policyholder satisfaction on serviced interactions exceeded the insurer's in-house benchmark by month five, which the insurer had set as the bar for expanding scope. Complaints referencing language quality fell to zero across the first year. First contact resolution on in-scope claims enquiries reached 88 percent. During a significant weather event the team absorbed a volume spike of roughly four times baseline while maintaining service level. Scope has since expanded twice.

The insurer's earlier failure was not a quality failure in any measurable sense. It was a locality failure, and locality is not something a quality framework can add after the fact. It has to be hired.