Australian insurance provider, Auto & General, has selected Avaya to integrate communications into all its business processes to enable a seamless experience for its customers. Through this smart transformation Auto & General will be better positioned to provide the omni-channel, anytime and anywhere expectations of consumers today and into the future.
Auto & General provides and manages insurance products on behalf of brands including Budget Direct, Australia Post, Virgin Money, Aussie and 1st for Women.
According to professional consultancy Accenture, the Australian insurance industry continues to evolve on the back of changes to consumer behaviour and a competitive landscape. Well-established insurance providers are under significant pressure from new entrants to the market, subsequently empowering consumers with an increasing number of easy-to-access options.
Having expanded from a four-person team in 1999 to 1300 employees with an 800-strong contact centre today, Auto & General has constantly evolved its services to suit the contact preferences of consumers.
While telephony remains core to Auto & General’s business, there has been a significant increase in volume of email, web chat and social media-based engagements as customers demand an omni-channel experience on their own terms. Amid the contact centre transformation, Auto & General foresees smart chat bots and artificial intelligence (AI) complementing the services its team provides.
Collaboration and app development
As a result, Auto & General is using Avaya Breeze to build communications applications that integrate with its core contact centre platform based on Avaya IP Office. Launched earlier this year, Breeze is a collaboration environment and app development platform that allows Auto & General to design and develop bespoke communications applications within Avaya’s cloud-based developer sandbox. It also provides a series of pre-built Snap-in applications which can be customised so the insurance provider can take its services to market much faster.
The smart transformation will see Auto & General equip its team with advanced tools to resolve enquiries more quickly and effectively. Auto & General expects the tools will help increase first call resolution rates, allow staff to resolve more queries per day, generate a higher return on investment, and may improve brand loyalty from consumers. It will also help prepare Auto & General to adapt more quickly to emerging trends, including AI.
For example, Auto & General recently identified that many customers were regularly calling the contact centre to confirm insurance payments were received. To enable a seamless payment experience, Auto & General is using Breeze to develop a notification mechanism that automatically delivers this information to consumers. This will not only save customers from having to make the calls, but allow contact centre staff to focus on more complex interactions that require personalised human engagement.
Breeze will also be used in conjunction with Auto & General’s core contact centre environment to further improve the quality of life for contact centre agents. Avaya Proactive Outreach Manager, for example, automates outbound calls while simultaneously help eliminate the fatigue associated with listening to dial tones and voicemails throughout the day. The goal is to allow employees to focus on talking to real people in order to provide better outcomes for those customers, as well as maximising the number of enquiries that are resolved each day.
“Consumers are moving to an omni-channel environment where they change between channels regularly so we need to be flexible and deal with them how they choose,” says Paul Malt, Chief Information Officer, Auto & General. “We are using the platform to build features that integrate within our contact centre protocols and processes. People’s time is limited, so Breeze’s ability to make interactions more efficient is critical to the value we can deliver to customers.”