How Univé’s customers reap the benefits of chatbots

In recent years, Univé has developed into a security brand that focuses on “preventing, limiting, and insuring” and is further committed to improving online customer service (webcare).

In the summer of 2019, Univé implemented a chatbot to help control the growing number of questions and be available to customers outside of opening hours. In this interview, Customer Experience advisors Ties van der A and Mathijs Jilderda share their experience with this and their findings.

Chatbots as a solution for ever-increasing WhatsApp traffic

The Customer Experience team of Univé has the important task of providing effective customer contact and helping customers with less complex customer questions via the digital route. This way, the organisation can offer insured persons a personal customer experience.

The number of customer questions on WhatsApp has increased enormously over the past year. Ties and Mathijs were looking for a way to control the growing volume and be accessible outside opening hours. A chatbot offers the possibility of responding quickly and to the right channel.

To properly map out what a chatbot could deliver for Univé, the analysts from Spotler Engage carried out a feasibility report. This feasibility analysis outlines how chatbot technology can contribute to manageable customer volumes on WhatsApp and faster service times. Ties explains:

“At Univé, we think it’s important to communicate quickly and in the right way with our customers. The chatbot, therefore, fits well within our customer contact goals and values, for example, by being available at all times. Our WhatsApp and social media channels are integrated into Spotler Engage’s online customer service environment. Integrating a chatbot was a logical next step in optimising our service.”

Chatbot feasibility analysis and implementation

Before implementing the chatbot, Univé wanted to investigate to better understand how many questions the chatbot could answer. The team chose to carry out a feasibility analysis. The chatbot feasibility report is a tailor-made analysis that provides insight into what a chatbot can deliver to an organisation. The analysis showed that the chatbot can answer an estimated 12.8% of the messages and that a bot can provide faster response times (also outside opening hours). Mathijs explains:

“The report gives us a nice and clear numerical overview and explains in a very concise way what the benefits of a chatbot are for us. Thanks to the analysis, we also gained insight into the number of messages that a chatbot can take care of and which questions are suitable for the chatbot.”

A timetable for implementing the chatbot was determined in advance with the team. Together with the experts from Spotler Engage, Mathijs and Ties coordinated the flows and completely wrote out the conversations. The bot was set up in a test environment, where customer advisers trained the chatbot with customer questions from the past. Collecting and bundling customer questions, they could find out which questions were asked most often and how the customer asked them.

“We tested whether the chatbot responded in the desired way and made our adjustments accordingly, based on this. Then we put the bot live in the test environment. We noticed that we still had to train the bot further in that first period, because it’s just not possible to immediately have a ready-made answer to all possible questions. After the – relatively short – test period, the chatbot was completely ready for implementation, and chatbot ‘Vera’ was born! It was great that the implementation went so smoothly.”

The entire process took two and a half months, from writing out the flow and testing by advisors to the real go-live.

Response time is down on WhatsApp and other channels

Regarding service level, the response time of Univé on WhatsApp and other channels is set at one hour. Due to increased volumes on all channels, it was a challenge to reach this service level. Since the chatbot was introduced, the average response time has been considerably reduced. After the first few months, Mathijs already sees that the prediction from the feasibility report regarding the number of messages a chatbot picks up is quite accurate — to the nearest decimal point. After four months, indeed, 12.8 per cent of all messages were handled by the chatbot!

Mathijs explains that in this first year, he mainly wants to learn from the chatbot and not look so much at the figures. In addition, the data is qualitative, so it is impossible to turn it into a business case. Not all benefits can be expressed in figures. “For example, we know quantitatively that 15 per cent of all chatbot messages are picked up outside opening hours. But what that means for our customers is, for the time being, difficult to express in value,” says Mathijs.

NPS scores remained the same

The Customer Experience team actively measured customer satisfaction in the months following the chatbot implementation and compared the results with their pre-implementation discussions. What did they notice? The NPS scores remained the same in conversations with and without a chatbot.

Ties explains that the customer knows the chatbot is still in training when a conversation starts. This creates the expectation for the customer that a conversation can be carried out a bit differently than expected. In addition, an employee is always linked to the chatbot so that an employee can take over the conversation at any time.

The general murmurings among the service team are very positive. Before the team started with the chatbot, the service employees regularly asked for a solution to answer standard questions. The team is now relieved of that work. The chatbot is used for performing a lot of the preliminary work, for example, asking for any specific information that may be used to help the customer right away, ultimately leaving more room for the service employees to deal with the content of the more complex questions.

A chatbot isn’t rocket science

If you look at what a chatbot is all doing within Univé, it’s not rocket science. It mainly requests data. Yet that alone has an impact on both the team and customer satisfaction. The big advantage for Univé is that the answering/handling many questions can be automated. Ties, therefore, gives the tip to start small and learn from that:

“Focus on the questions with a lot of volume, such as processing a proof of warranty. Then use these insights to optimise your online customer service and further develop it”.

A practical tip that Ties and Mathijs also want to give is that “Throughout the integration of a chatbot, it works well to consider it as an employee. You can do this by giving your chatbot a name. Univé calls her chatbot Vera. The transition from a chatbot to a live conversation with an employee must always be clear to the customer. This way, the customer will always know what he or she can expect.”