Suncorp - Innovation in Technology Management, Planning & Implementation

Company: Suncorp, Brisbane, QLD Australia
Category: Award for Innovation in Technology Management, Planning & Implementation > Financial Services Industries

Nomination Title: Suncorp Multi Branded Intelligent Virtual Assistant

Essay:

Customer expectations across digital channels have increased exponentially, driven by sophisticated consumer experiences such as Amazon’s Alexa. Through analysis, we ascertained that our customers were struggling to find the information they were looking for using our existing web search capabilities and we wanted to significantly improve the way customers interacted with us digitally. This led us to search for a solution that was smarter, more intuitive and simple - a self-service solution that would give customers quick and easy access to information 24/7. We wanted to “…provide the ‘Google Assistant’ of Banking and Insurance across our brand..."

Our ambition was to create a step change to improve the way customers interacted with us across our digital ecosystem, including our web sites and live chat. With consumers already preconditioned by existing digital experiences we agreed a multi-branded conversational interface would be ideal, with differentiatied personas representing each of our mass brands – AAMI, GIO and Suncorp. This was particularly important as we decided the IVA would be front of stage on our web sites, available for all site traffic as well as our customers.

Imperative goals of the IVA project included the ability to:

Handle a complex set of enquiries
Seamlessly handover to live chat
Continually learn and adapt.

The vision was for the IVA to link into the central knowledge base we use at other touchpoints, including contact centres. This will ensure consistent responses to customers across channels, both digital and assisted. We worked with AI business Verint to architect and build out a single platform that could cater for all of these brands. A critical component was to ensure the IVA could be as accurate as possible in understanding and servicing our customers from day one. To do this we analysed customer data to determine what were the most common questions customers were asking in the existing search tool, asking contact centre agents,(converting speech from call monitoring into text), and asking Google when directed to our website. We grouped these into themes articulating customer intents. We also looked at customer verbatims collected in surveys to determine where customers were experiencing issues with their online experience.  

We invested in understanding both user demographics and the personas that we wanted the three IVAs to portray to represent each of our brands. Each of the IVAs have a different user experience, name and language. For example, the AAMI IVA personality is friendly but not unprofessional, whereas the Suncorp IVA personality is confident but not arrogant. Despite these differentiated experiences we made a critical decision to leverage common architecture in the back end for efficiency and scalability, so we could replicate content across the brands whilst keeping the user interface aligned to the brand personas.

Since launch the IVA has replied to almost 300,000 questions during 140,000 conversations, saving 27,000 phone calls. The IVA has been a growing and critical digital channel during recent crises in supporting our customers during the worst bushfires in Australian history and the COVID-19 pandemic. For COVID-19, we incorporated crisis specific responses within days to respond to trending questions, especially relating to financial hardship. The IVAs then managed four months of enquiries in under a week, increasing from around 1000 conversations per week early in the year and peaking at around 7000 per week in late March. Meanwhile the Csat measure stayed overwhelmingly positive with customer comments such as “it was very quick and precise” and a “very slick system”.

Our IVA solution is innovative because we have designed branded ‘concierges’ to both provide answers and also guide customers to more detail across our digital ecosystem (eg live chat or specific web location). The IVAs meet the need of helping customers to find a resolution fast in a channel that suits them.

Links:

https://www.suncorp.com.au/meet-our-intelligent-virtual-assistant.html?intCMP=iva

https://www.aami.com.au/meet-our-intelligent-virtual-assistant.html?intCMP=iva