Tryg turned to boost.ai to take advantage of the collaborative potential between humans and machines. Today, their virtual agent has amplified both the capacity and quality of their outbound customer support.
‘Complexity’ is a word commonly used by customers and corporate policyholders when referencing the insurance industry. What’s not talked about as often is that complexity has been just as much of an internal challenge for insurance companies for decades. Keeping up with numerous policies, terms, conditions, rules and regulations is a herculean task that consumes a significant amount of time, energy and resources.
“The insurance industry has been waiting a long time for technology that can help us manage complexity.” says Head of Process Excellence, Bjartmar Jensen at Tryg. “It gets in the way of good customer experiences and has resulted in a lot of silo-organizations, limiting the ability to efficiently cross-sell or develop and sell package products.”
Tryg's results at a glance...
- 97% of all internal chat queries successfully automated
- Number of calls to back office support teams drastically reduced
- Increased capacity of human support to resolve inquiries quickly
In July 2018, Tryg began working with boost.ai to develop Rosa, a virtual agent powered by conversational AI. Their objective was to build a tool that would make internal operations as streamlined and efficient as possible.
Almost unbelievable results
Fast-forward to 2019, and Rosa is now successfully amplifying both the capacity and quality of Tryg’s outbound customer support. By using the virtual agent to augment existing support staff (instead of having it interface directly with customers), the Danish company has ensured smoother collaboration and a more efficient way of working.
“When our outbound support teams speak to customers, they have all of the knowledge from the virtual agent instantly available and at their fingertips,” adds Jensen. “If the customer asks a question the operator doesn’t know the answer to, he or she can simply ask Rosa and get an immediate response. In fact, 97% of the time Rosa has the right answer, or can provide useful relevant links, explain contract conditions, and provide guidance to internal processes.”
By enabling faster, more efficient service, Tryg’s outbound customer support teams have been able to substantially resolve more cases while decreasing the number of calls from support to back-office teams.
Programming the brand experience into every conversation
Personalized service is becoming increasingly important for modern customers: 95% say that customer service is important for choosing and staying with a brand, while 61% claim they have stopped doing business with a brand due to poor customer experience. With this in mind, digitally-savvy insurance companies like Tryg are looking to stay ahead of the competition by ensuring consistent, high-quality experiences that feel personal to each one of their customers.
“Rosa is so knowledgable and reliable that even our most experienced staff ask her when in doubt,” says Eivin Joensen, an AI Supervisor at Tryg responsible for helping develop and implement Rosa. “With this knowledge pool, we ensure consistency in our outbound customer service, and can program our brand experience into every conversation between customers and our employees.”
In making the wealth of the company’s knowledge easily accessible to employees, Tryg has ensured that there is no risk of customers being greeted by support agents who are too inexperienced to handle their questions. Instead, with Rosa at their disposal, even new employees can give customers expert advice and resolve inquiries according to best practices.
An internal virtual agent is also a great way to disseminate useful information amongst employees. At Tryg, Rosa is the first thing that greets support staff when they turn on their computers each day. The company’s AI Trainers use the virtual agent to distribute a daily message with updates on new products, changes in policies and info on what Rosa has learned to answer since yesterday.
Heading towards a collaborative future
“The unbelievable part is that we are just getting started,” says Bjartmar Jensen regarding future plans for Rosa. “The first phase of having a virtual agent that can provide information has yielded great results. Going forward, we plan to enable Rosa to act on behalf of our human agents. That will really supercharge Tryg’s customer experience.”
By implementing functionalities for user authentication, Rosa will soon be able to perform a wide range of actions on behalf of outbound support teams. This means tasks such as renewing car insurance can be performed by instructing the virtual agent through chat, with the entire process completed in a matter of seconds.
“We are also planning on launching new virtual agents that can interact directly with our customers,” reveals Bjartmar Jensen. “With an external-facing virtual agent taking care of customers who prefer self-service, every touchpoint of the customer journey will become frictionless.”