About a decade ago, this Fortune 100 insurance carrier in the U.S. was at the forefront of its digital transformation, offering customer-facing properties online, including basic chat features to online visitors. However, the company realized that its multi-channel approach lacked efficiency and scalability. In 2016, the carrier refined its digital transformation journey in its online sales department to create seamless digital engagements across all its channels.
Fast forward to 2022 and this well-known P&C insurance carrier has successfully implemented Glia’s Digital Customer Service platform across more than seven different business units, spanning online sales, customer service, claims, billing, agent portals, greenfield deployments and even its internal IT helpdesk. Today, the insurance provider offers a consistent customer experience that has drawn praise from policyholders, independent agents and internal staff alike.
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Leveraging Digital Customer Service to boost conversion rates in online sales
Glia Products Used:
Challenge: The insurance carrier was seeking to sell more policies directly online, and its multichannel contact center with a legacy chat app proved insufficient in driving digital sales. While the company was seeing a steady increase in online traffic, it was having trouble converting those visitors into new policyholders.
The carrier’s digital strategy team began exploring ways to foster more direct customer relationships, handle more engagements digitally, and sell more policies online. Ultimately, the carrier was seeking a digital-first solution that could offer a seamless end-to-end experience for prospective customers who had previously been dropping out amid a disconnected, clunky process.
Solution: After thoroughly assessing 10 service provider solutions, the carrier selected Glia’s Digital Customer Service (DCS) platform based on the maturity of the product and the strong customer experience it delivered with a seamless digital engagement across all channels. The ability to support the carrier’s evolving customer engagement philosophy and offer channel choice—with the capacity to seamlessly transition from chat to OnScreen voice and video—was a deciding factor.
The carrier also valued collaboration features, including a CoBrowsing tool that provides service representatives with deep context around each engagement and enables them to directly help customers compare products and complete policy applications online—without breaking the digital connection.
By enabling sales reps to simply transition visitors from chat to OnScreen Voice, the carrier eliminated a high dropoff point where prospective policyholders previously would disengage after being asked to dial into a 1-800 number when chat couldn’t resolve their question. Adding the CoBrowsing capability also helped accelerate engagements and boost resolution rates. The results were compelling with a 35% increase in conversions over the former disconnected multichannel system. The carrier experienced a significant surge in engagements with Glia and an even higher conversion rate, with four times more applications completed compared to the previous chat solution.
Carrier experienced reduced handle times and fewer calls with AI bots
Glia Products Used:
Challenge: As customers have increasingly embraced a digital-first lifestyle, managing their utility bills, streaming services and bank accounts online, policyholders came to expect similar digital experiences from their insurance carrier. The company wanted to provide ultimate channel choice to help policyholders start on screen and complete their engagement online with an easy, continuous engagement. Further, it wanted to overcome the efficiency challenges that managing multiple disconnected channels created.
From the service perspective, call center reps struggled to assist online customers without being able to see what was on their screen. As the carrier made frequent changes to its online interface, reps often experienced disconnects where they were attempting to navigate policyholders to a page or button that had been moved. The carrier developed ‘mock site’ graphics to help reps guide online users over the phone, but they were time consuming to create and did not always align with the live site.
Solution: Glia’s Digital Customer Service platform has enabled the carrier to engage with policyholders in any channel and seamlessly move from one to another. Rather than forcing policyholders who are online to call in to the contact center when they need assistance, the carrier is now able to ensure that all transactions that start online, finish online. This has resulted in improved efficiency and enabled customers to experience end-to-end service without leaving their screen. The ability to escalate from chat to OnScreen voice and provide a consistent experience across all digital channels proved effective for customer service as well, resulting in a 20% drop in the Average Handle Time.
The carrier simultaneously improved the employee experience, boosting the employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) significantly, which helped with both staff retention and recruiting efforts. One of the key reasons for the uptick in rep confidence and happiness was the Live Observation feature. This enabled reps to see exactly what the customer was doing and alleviated the feeling of flying blind or experiencing unfamiliarity while assisting customers with the online experience.
Lastly, the carrier saw efficiency gains through the use of Glia’s AI Management platform. By rolling out a triage bot, it streamlined the policyholder experience by ensuring the customer was directed to the appropriate representative the first time. Additionally, the carrier launched a CoBrowse bot that is able to handle many customer interactions without requiring human assistance. When a policyholder is seeking their ID card, for instance, the CoBrowse bot is able to guide the policyholder to the appropriate page—not only streamlining the customer experience without involving a rep but also teaching the policyholder how to find that information the next time.
Results
Improved customer satisfaction and digital adoption for claims submissions
Challenge: The strategy team knew that the claims platform would be challenging, pushing customers to complete complex, multistep processes online. Ultimately, the carrier was hoping to improve the digital claims experience to improve adoption among policyholders. Simultaneously, the carrier was seeking to reduce the number of representatives required to complete the claims process.
Solution: Building on the successes from the DCS implementation around policyholder support, the carrier introduced many of the same tools to improve the digital claims experience. Utilizing the AI Management module, the carrier implemented a triage bot and CoBrowse bot to improve the claimant’s self-service experience and reduce the number of contacts per claim. Enabling claimants to engage through chat and easily transition to OnScreen Voice to simply explain an issue verbally helped drive digital adoption, which began to climb immediately after the DCS platform was launched.
CoBrowsing proved especially helpful in guiding customers through the claims process. Not only do more policyholders start and complete their claims requests online, but the DCS platform has earned the highest Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score of any channel associated with claims. On the business side, the carrier has gone from high turnover rates among its claims reps to using the technology—Chat and Live Observation—as a successful recruiting mechanism.
Results:
Reduced call transfers by leveraging chat to connect billing specialists and reps
Challenge: Like claims processing, complex billing questions often required multiple service representatives to assist a customer. Reps routinely had to transfer callers to a specialist, driving up costs and creating extra friction for customers. The carrier was seeking a way to limit the number of transfers while speeding up service.
Solution: The strategy team got creative in extending Digital Customer Service to help contact center service representatives within its finance department. The carrier made billing specialists available to the front-line contact center representatives via chat. Rather than passing a customer to a specialist, reps simply ask an expert a customer’s question via chat, getting near real-time answers. This novel approach to chat helped improve customer service and also boost employee satisfaction.
Results:
Streamlined IT service support by consolidating multiple platforms into a single DCS solution
Challenge: The carrier’s IT Helpdesk, which was responsible for supporting more than 50,000 employees, wanted to streamline its service and move to a completely digital model. The IT Helpdesk was maintaining two systems, one for all digital communications and a separate one for the contact center, creating complexity for managing support and a disconnect for reporting. The bulk of employees called in for support via phone, which led to a poor employee experience and made it more difficult for IT to properly assist. The company was seeking new efficiencies and was open to digital technologies that could streamline service, lower operating costs for the business and reduce support wait times for staff.
Solution: The IT Helpdesk digital transformation began with an integration of Glia’s DCS platform with Microsoft Teams to bring the corporate-wide messaging tool and digital channels together for a unified, seamless experience. Employees could now send a message via Teams, or simply click the Chat, Voice or Video customer engagement ‘bubble’ they saw OnScreen.
To reduce the number of employees who called in by phone for support, the company replaced the IT Helpdesk phone number on internal sites and intranet portals with digital options, prompting employees to chat or call OnScreen instead. While this reduced phone volume, a number of employees continued to call for support, which meant the company was still required to maintain a contact center.
To consolidate all engagements onto a single digital platform and also support those employees who still prefer traditional phone service, the IT Helpdesk team deployed Glia Phone, an integrated component of the DCS platform. Glia Phone converts traditional phone calls into a digital engagement to bridge the data disconnect while allowing for easy management of one single system.
Results:
Providing real-time support to agents to increase business and build agent loyalty
Challenge: While the company was pursuing growth opportunities in the direct-to-consumer channel, the carrier acquired another insurer with a strong agent and broker network. The carrier was seeking ways to build on its longstanding relationships with agents and help them drive more business. The challenge was that agents would often get lost in the digital portal and needed to call the carrier during the quoting process, for example. The carrier wanted to implement a digital-first solution that would allow agents to get quotes completed accurately, submitted, and bound faster and also enable them to more easily self-serve in the future.
Solution: The team developed a plan to streamline the agent experience with digital-first communications that not only brought agents online, but kept them there with help to complete processes and bind more policies. Glia enables agents to easily chat with carrier reps to answer questions they have in real time, which has led to increased business and more agent loyalty.
To further encourage business through the agent network, the carrier sought to prioritize top-selling agents and provide them with ‘whiteglove’ experiences that help them convert even more business while building preference and long-term loyalty.
The carrier also offered high-performers Gold Tier service to help accelerate underwriting and increase business. The Glia enhancement to the agent portal has been well received by agents and brokers, with a growing number joining the ranks of Gold Tier. This, in turn, fuels what has become a solid revenue stream for the company.
Results:
Challenge: The emergence of new insurance companies, focusing on engaging Millennials and Gen Z through their preferred digital channels, has started to challenge the industry and highlight a shift toward better OnScreen experiences. To appeal to younger customers, the carrier sought a digital approach that meets the expectations of this rapidly growing demographic.
Solution: Glia’s Digital Customer Service platform and its proven success across multiple other lines of business made it a natural fit to help the carrier launch a new digital-first insurance company aligned to the digital lifestyles of Millennials and younger demographics. The new company, operating as a separate brand, is entirely online, offering digital engagements for service. The ability to meet customers OnScreen and keep them online is the only option. The digital synergies between the new company and Glia made the deployment straightforward and efficient.
Results:
While many insurance carriers are exploring Digital Customer Service and considering when to deploy, this visionary large insurance provider is seeing tremendous advantages by shifting from traditional multichannel contact centers to a DCS platform across a large percentage of its business.
Much like a multi-policy bundle, the carrier is seeing tremendous cost savings by working with one service provider to enable digital engagements. In addition to standard pricing advantages, the streamlined approach means fewer resources to maintain and optimize the system. Managing multiple customer engagement platforms drives up technology, maintenance and staffing costs, while taxing the IT team.
The carrier’s resources are now focused on providing superior service while also having more time to devote to strategic initiatives. Working with a single service provider to support and optimize the DCS platform creates efficiencies when the carrier needs to make changes. No hang ups with tech integration and no single technology hindering a project. In fact, the carrier can take lessons learned and best practices from that single platform and leverage them across the entire organization.
Another major benefit of working with a single provider is consolidated reporting and analytics. An engagement that might start with an AI bot, transition to a chat with a live representative, upgrade to voice or video, and even transfer to a manager or specialist to resolve an issue is treated as a single engagement, tracking every stage of the customer journey and passing full context along the way. Detailed analytics highlight a wide range of key metrics such as abandonment rates, average handle times and staffing efficiencies.
Glia has provided a consistent customer experience across digital engagement channels and also across divisions. With nearly 3 out of 4 consumers saying they will likely change brands if the experience is not seamless, according to research from Salesforce, Glia’s DCS platform is helping engage visitors digitally, keep them online, and drive more business for the carrier.
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• Accelerate Policy Sales
• Enhance Policyholder Support
• Digitalize Claims Workflows
• Streamline Billing Operations
• Digitally Transform the IT Helpdesk
• Develop a Digital-First Agent Network
• Launch a New Division
• Conclusion
