What you need to know about onboarding insurance with a platform

Onboarding a new insurance can be stressful, especially when switching platforms, setting up interfaces, and aligning internal teams. In this customer story, you’ll learn how three companies streamlined their insurance onboarding process with grape. We’ll show the challenges they faced before joining, what’s changed since, and how grape’s platform, process and people made it all work.

1. Challenges

Absenteeism in Switzerland has reached record highs. In 2022, employees missed an average of 9.3 work days due to illness according to the Bundesamt für Statistik, a number that directly impacts company budgets, insurance premiums, and day-to-day productivity.

Behind the numbers lies a deeper problem. HR teams are expected to manage these challenges while navigating outdated, fragmented systems. Using Excel lists, shared inboxes or manual data entry. Most teams are still reacting to problems long after they’ve started because they’re stuck with tools that weren’t built for today’s complexity. This is not what they want to do, since many have joined an HR team to take care of employees, but instead they are now taking care of systems.

It’s not just the companies that are struggling. According to the IFZ Versicherungsstudie 2025, most insurers are also operating across too many disconnected systems, unable to provide the kind of clarity and support HR teams need. As the Handelszeitung noted, both insurers and employers must shift toward simpler, more digital models if they want to remain efficient, compliant, and employee-focused.

Before working with grape, Fisba, CWS Workwear and other companies faced these realities. One customer described case registration as a massive pain point: “We only had a web-based solution—and nothing saved.” Dependencies on third parties made timelines unpredictable and tasks like automating workflows felt overwhelming.

Most importantly, there was no central system that brought everything together or helped HR take proactive steps toward employee wellbeing.

2. What if onboarding looked different?

The three HR teams each had their own version of the same story: case registration was clunky, automating workflows felt impossible, and taking over ongoing cases was messy and unpredictable. Switching to a platform like grape that offers automation and clarity felt tempting, but this can come with a lot of effort and time going towards onboarding. Time and energy that because of their outdated systems, they didn’t have.

But at grape, onboarding is where transformation begins.

3. A system to care

Rather than leaving customers to navigate things alone, our Customer Success team takes the lead. They manage the whole process and take over the project management so that HR can keep focusing on their employees.

To give a rough timeline, most onboarding projects start latest in November given the contract is signed, with the goal of going fully live by January 1st for the KTG-process, while the integration project can take until mid-February. During this period, we provide structured kickoff sessions, clear documentation, and a shared timeline for every stakeholder involved, from HR and payroll to IT.

Platform access is granted as early as sensible and grape actively drives the takeover of ongoing claims. Tools like the case takeover template and customer questionnaire help clarify mutual needs and accelerate the go-live process. For larger customers, additional review sessions before, during, and after go-live ensure everyone is aligned and up to speed.

This structured approach takes pressure off internal teams and ensures that no one is left to manage the project alone.

Customers describe the experience as simple, intuitive, and confidence-building. Sebastian from CWS Workwear summed it up with one word: KISS—keep it simple, stupid. Each step triggered the next, creating a smooth, domino-like rollout that didn’t feel overwhelming.

4. grape connect

grape connect is the engine connecting the HR systems of our customers with the grape platform enabling automation. And while integrations can often be a source of friction, our goal is to make this process as straightforward and collaborative as possible.

From the very beginning, customers are asked to share information about their internal systems and the people responsible for them. That leads into a joint IT scoping meeting, where both sides lay out what’s possible, what’s needed, and what success looks like. This meeting is critical; it aligns expectations, potential costs from integration partners, if the customer chooses to work with an external provider, timelines, and responsibilities, and ensures no technical assumptions go unchecked.

From there, grape provides clear documentation for the integration and its data standard. These can be passed directly to internal IT teams or external integration partners for a feasibility check. Here, Fisba really emphasized the importance of coordinating as tightly as possible during this phase particularly across the triangle of grape, the integration partner, and the client’s own IT.

What makes grape connect so powerful, next to automating the insurance processes, is that it transforms the absence management process from manual to automatic. Without it, clients must enter case data manually including basic employee information like names, dates of birth, and employment status. That’s not just time-consuming, it's unscalable and error-prone.

With grape connect, we create a centralized employee data source that forms the foundation for automated claims processing and accurate allowance calculations. For example, in cases where a company uses Abacus as their core HR or payroll system, an interface can automatically transfer all necessary data into grape. And because data flows automatically, the risk of typos, duplicates, or missed entries drops significantly.

Before this integration, certain customers were sending manual letters and repeating data entry across tools, a process that took twice as long. With grape connect CWS Workwear emphasized how smart prompts helped their HR team move from reactive to proactive.

5. grape care

Once everything is up and running, grape care takes the experience beyond insurance processes not just by better managing absence processes but by actively reducing absences by 0.5%–1.0%. Customers using grape care typically see the strongest return on investment, as it helps them actively reduce absence rates through targeted follow-ups and visibility into trends.

While grape connect ensures the data is there, grape care is what turns that data into action. When an employee returns from sick leave, the system triggers an automatic follow-up: the responsible person receives a predefined form with next steps, what to ask, what to document and how to support the return. This form was established together with expert industry partners to ensure accuracy and the best possible care.

This kind of structured response reduces guesswork and ensures no one falls through the cracks even in companies with hundreds or thousands of employees. And in more complex cases, the task can be routed to HR instead of the line manager, keeping the flow flexible and accurate.

Through grape care, HR teams no longer need Excel trackers, calendar reminders, or offline documents. Real-time visibility and transparent documentation keep everything aligned and reduce admin burden.

The platform also visualizes absence trends over time by team, department or season. This empowers HR teams to spot recurring issues, explore their causes, and develop targeted initiatives to reduce absences with minimal time effort. It gives companies a way to go from reactive to proactive using insights to improve wellbeing, not just track it.

6. Key takeaways

This story isn’t just about new software or digital claims, it's about what happens when onboarding becomes part of the solution, not just the process.

By starting early, aligning stakeholders, and focusing on clarity, companies can simplify their insurance transition and set the stage for long-term impact. With solutions like grape connect and grape care, customers get automation and a system that grows with them, reduces complexity, and keeps HR focused on what matters most: people.

For teams managing rising absence rates and growing administrative burdens, this is a smarter, more sustainable way to manage insurance and employee wellbeing.

And it starts with onboarding that’s designed to empower you from day one.