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How Farmers Insurance, GM Financial, And Tryg Grew Customer Loyalty During The Pandemic

This article is more than 3 years old.

Companies that invested heavily in their digital customer outreach were able to evolve and tailor those communications to meet the new demands and challenges presented by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Businesses, such as insurance companies Farmers Insurance and Tryg, as well as GM Financial, the financing arm of the carmaker, turned to chatbots and AI technologies to help maintain their customer bases. Those innovations will only increase in importance in the coming months,  representatives of these companies said, as businesses reopen and customers adapt to the new ways of doing business in a post-pandemic world.

As the number of calls skyrocketed in March, GM Financial’s AI chatbot “Nanci” answered 60% of customer interactions, while Tryg’s chatbot “MIA” handled about 80%. Chatbots use AI-based algorithms to comprehend and respond to text or voice questions from customers.  Farmers Insurance, GM Financial and Tryg also employed text analytics software to listen and learn from their customer interactions.

Since these companies were early adopters before the crisis, they could respond daily to the evolving needs of customers amid the Covid-19 outbreak, such as fielding queries about delaying payments and other relief measures.

How businesses handle customer conversations, otherwise known as “customer experience,” will be a crucial  concern as companies head back to the office in the upcoming months.

GM Financial

"Our 700 employees started working from their homes within a week of the shutdown orders," said Bob Beatty, the executive vice president and chief experience officer at GM Financial.  "We trained everyone on LivePerson and deployed a virtual desktop phone to everyone in the first week of remote working."

According to Beatty, his team digitized every step of customer interaction. They chose LivePerson for their person-to-person chat platform, IBM Watson for their conversational chatbots and Clarabridge for text analytics.

Early into the pandemic, communications using live chat between agents and customers rose from 10% to 60% of total call volume.    Their AI chatbot Nanci handled 50% to 60% of all the inbound requests without a human.   Built using IBM Watson, "Nanci runs 24x7, and gets updated every night by our analytics team," said Beatty.

“Analyzing the thousands of customer conversations from chat and phone calls play a key role in knowing what our customers are thinking,” said Michael Beste, vice president of analytics for GM Financial.  “Clarabridge extracts the topics and emotional tone from the thousands of daily customer interactions.”   Beste’s analytics team then uses the output to update Nanci on how to respond.

“As the pandemic increased in the U.S., customers worried about the ability to pay from our conversations with them,” said Beatty.  “GM financial responded by offering different payment solutions to fit each customer's need, and empowered the client service representative with the ability to offer a solution immediately to a customer.”

Farmers Insurance

It’s the business of Farmers Insurance to be prepared for the unexpected.

“In March, Farmers Insurance transitioned 19,000 employees from the office to working from home remotely in the matter of a few days,” said Melissa Joye, chief customer experience officer for Farmers Insurance.

Prior to the pandemic, Farmers invested in the digital customer outreach software that their network of insurance professionals use to speak to customers.  The company uses a variety of software apps to provide a real-time pulse on what customers are saying and what needs attention.  A case in point, Farmers isolated COVID-related customer feedback in the Covid dashboard using Clarabridge, a text analytics company.

"We recognized early on in the pandemic that many customers would face financial challenges during this time, and we extended payment grace periods," said Joye. "As we evaluated mileage data we could see driving was decreasing and what that would mean for accident frequency."    The company responded by reducing car insurance premiums by 25% for April for customers with Farmers and 21st Century branded policies.   Farmers made other like minded business policy changes to help their customers during the crisis.

"Our ability to listen to customers across channels, analyze data in real-time and empathetic customer experience professionals are helping us maintain positive customer experience momentum during the pandemic," said Joye.

Clarabridge Turned On Covid Command Centers

During the rise of the pandemic, companies used products like Clarabridge and Verint to analyze chat, phone, and email conversation for companies using a form of artificial intelligence called natural language processing.

“The conversation topics started around the stay at home orders, then quickly moved to topics on the stimulus and financial worry after the first two weeks,” said Mark Bishof, CEO at Clarabridge.

Bishof noted that Clarabridge created a special dashboard for their customers during the crisis called “Covid Command Center.”   He noted that over 100 customers use these dashboards to track how what their customers were saying  and how they were feeling.

Emotional models highlighted how people were feeling in the pandemic such as anger or frustration. The sentiment model showed daily whether the conversations were negative, neutral, or positive.  Sentiment is a measure over time — an hour, day, weeks, or months — to let companies see how certain topics or customers are trending.

Tryg Insurance

"Our digital customer platform delivered better than expected during the COVID-19 pandemic," said Benjamin Alex, business efficiency lead at Tryg. "During the first two months of the pandemic period our customer calls increased by 50% with our AI chatbot MIA handling about 80% of the conversations.”  Alex added that manually handling a spike in volume of this magnitude would typically require us to activate an additional 10-15 resources.

Trgy  is the largest non-life insurance company in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden with 4 million customers processing 1 million claims annually.   According to Alex, customer interactions are handled mostly by phone in Denmark, and by phone and chat in Norway and Sweden.

"We have many tools to handle different tasks, such as Verint for Speech Analytics, Boost.ai for AI chatbots, and UIPath for RPA (Robotic Process Automation)," said Alex. "We have established a Center of Excellence for each of those tools where we identify and adapt the right tool according to the needs of both the business and our customers."

Prior to the crisis, Tryg handled 60% of all inbound claims are handled through the self-service features of the platform and 45% of all claims are submitted online.  Alex added that 30% of all claims are processed without human involvement.

The company behind MIA, Boost.ai, saw similar jumps in traffic across their network of 200 companies in the US and Europe.   “We saw spikes in conversations, as high as 300% increases, related to the pandemic not only in the insurance sector, but also in other areas such as banking, healthcare, and the public sector, “said Henry Vaage Iverson, chief commercial officer at Boost.ai.

Customer Conversations Become A Priority

"Last October, the Forrester Customer Experience, or CX, index predicted that 25% of CX professionals would lose their jobs for not showing value of customer experience to their companies," said Faith Adams, a senior analyst serving customer experience professionals at Forrester Research. “It is the white elephant that many organizations did not want to touch.”

Forrester’s CX Index measures how successfully a company delivers customer experiences that create and sustain loyalty.

With the rise of the pandemic, Adams started getting phone calls from panicked customer experience leaders.   “They wanted to know what they should do, continue business as usual or make changes on how they engaged their customers,” said Adams. “To survey or not to survey was often the question.”  

Adams explains that while customers’ surveys are ineffective, analyzing real-time conversations captures more insights.  She added that the voice of the customer technologies show trending conversation topics as well as the sentiment and emotional tone of the customer. 

"We observed that companies with technology capabilities that could capture the real voice of their customers could better understand their needs, and how to respond," said Adams.  She noted that some Forrester customers are utilizing customer feedback loops, like Clarabridge and Verint in hopes of emerging from the pandemic in a stronger position.

Customer feedback loops analyze all of the content of customer conversations on a daily basis pointing out main topics being said, then assigning an emotional tone, such as happy or sad, and sentiment, such as positive, negative or neutral.

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