To ensure a consistent customer experience across Denmark, Norway and Sweden, Tryg launched three distinctly different virtual agents to get the job done
Insurance is an inherently complex industry that can often leave consumers stranded amidst a sea of policy wording and product information. This customer service challenge is precisely what Tryg, the second-largest non-life insurance company in the Nordics, wanted to tackle head-on when it decided to deploy a conversational AI solution across its three principal markets of Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
With over 4 million customers to satisfy, executives at the company identified that it wouldn’t be enough to simply use the technology to assist customers with their questions. Instead, a holistic approach would be needed in order to also maximize the efficiency of its support staff if they genuinely wanted to help from all sides.
“Working with artificial intelligence helps to assist our internal and external processes and to deliver fantastic customer experiences.”
— Morten Hübbe, CEO, Tryg
Each market posed its own unique set of challenges and Tryg approached boost.ai to develop and deliver a solution to help achieve the company's customer service goals in each country.
Norway: putting the focus on customer service
For the Norwegian market, Tryg decided to focus on customer-facing assistance. In October 2018, it launched Mia, a conversational AI-powered virtual agent that specializes in helping customers with insurance claims, and was later updated to also assist with finding answers related to Tryg’s wide portfolio of products and services.
Meet MIA:
- Use case: Customer service, claims
- Launch date: October 2018
- Topics covered: 5,000
- Automation rate: 80%
Developed on boost.ai’s no-code platform, the virtual agent can answer questions on more than 5,000 topics and is maintained by a team of AI Trainers assembled from Tryg’s in-house Norwegian customer service team. Tapping the expertise and experience of existing staff meant that Mia was developed with an innate understanding of the needs of Tryg’s customer base and is able to provide a clear channel to efficiently answer any questions that they may have about the company’s insurance products.
From a business perspective, Mia contributes to overall customer satisfaction which, in turn, results in increased operational efficiency. And the results speak for themselves: in 2020, Mia had over 200,000 conversations with customers, successfully automating 80% of cases without any human support.
In the future, Tryg plans to integrate Mia more deeply with its backend systems to provide customers a full self-service experience. It will be possible to make policy changes or check the status of a claim simply by chatting with the virtual agent. The more Mia can assist customers on her own, the more it frees up the customer service teams to tackle complex customer queries.
Denmark: enhancing the quality of inbound support
In Denmark, Tryg uses conversational AI to enhance its support staff from behind-the-scenes. With an internal virtual agent, the company is able to amplify the capacity and quality of its inbound customer service.
Meet ROSA:
- Use case: Internal support
- Launch date: August 2018
- Topics covered: 1,200+
- Automation rate: 95%
Launched in August 2018, the virtual agent, named Rosa, acts as an indispensable digital colleague, offering instant access to information on over 1,200 topics and assisting 750 Tryg employees daily at the company’s headquarters outside of Copenhagen.
The AI Trainers responsible for Rosa not only keep her knowledge up-to-date so that she can assist with relevant answers, but they also work hard to give her a unique personality that ensures their colleagues continue to engage with her. She has been incorporated into the company’s onboarding process so that new employees know they can always turn to her for help.
Rosa is also responsible for increased efficiency in Tryg’s customer support team. Instead of putting customers on hold to call the back office for policy and product information, customer service representatives can simply ask Rosa and she answers them instantly. The virtual agent is able to provide consistently accurate assistance - answering correctly in 95% of cases - with Tryg reporting that, since September 2019, they are now logging more monthly sessions with Rosa than calls to the back office.
“At Tryg, we focus on finding the right balance between human and machine. Our virtual agents have been important in communicating this to our customers.”
— Espen Opedal, Country Manager Norway & SVP Private Area, Tryg
Sweden: deploying a virtual agent in record time
In 2020, Tryg had planned to expand its conversational AI strategy to Sweden, taking the expertise its teams had gained from successful implementations in Norway and Denmark and applying it to a market twice the size.
Initially, the project was expected to roll out over a six-month timeline, however, due to the onset of COVID-19, Tryg made the decision to fast-track development so that it could have a solution in place for customers who may be impacted by the pandemic.
This resulted in Tryg launching a virtual agent, called Ebbe, to the website of its Swedish subsidiary, Moderna, in April 2020 - only 3 weeks after the first wave of the pandemic hit Europe. The flexibility and ease-of-use afforded by the boost.ai conversational AI platform meant that Tryg’s AI Trainers in Sweden could swiftly build and deploy a virtual agent with a clearly defined scope - in this case, they focused first on travel insurance - to deliver tangible help to customers in a time of need. Once live, the team then continued to expand Ebbe’s knowledge base, adding products until the virtual agent was able to assist across all areas by June 2020.
More than just a simple answer-bot, Ebbe also allows customers to securely login to their accounts and utilizes API integrations to automate a variety of tasks related to pricing, policy coverage and status, and more. Using natural language understanding, the virtual agent can also identify and recommend solutions to customers for products that they may be eligible for to expand their coverage.
Tryg has provided financial and personal security to its customers for nearly 300 years, and with the help of conversational AI - whether it’s renewing a car insurance policy or filing a claim - it is continuing to push the envelope on what it means to deliver an exceptional customer experience.