How implementing livechat increased effictiveness and customer centricity for an insurance provider

Case Study

How implementing livechat increased effictiveness and customer centricity for an insurance provider

Services

Automation

Client

Europ Assistance Belgium

Year

2020

Background

Customer experience is key to any company’s success. And for a travel insurance provider, making sure customer questions and claims are followed up timely and effectively, is even more crucial. NPS or net promoter score is an essential business KPI for the insurance sector.

So, how do you activate a support team that has been using rather static communication methods? And how do you transform retroactive to proactive communication? The main goal? Align all agents and make sure all support channels provide the same messages. Our biggest challenge? Drastically decreasing time to resolution.

This wasn’t an easy challenge. Europ Assistance Belgium has over 25 highly-trained customer agents who are available 24/7. They are busy helping customers with urgent assistance requests, claims and general product-related questions and answer insurance broker’s questions too.

This is how we improved the customer experience and support team effectiveness.

Time to First Closure by phone was averaging around 10 minutes, but delays on support emails were lagging behind significantly and for the claims department this was reaching critical levels.

The Growth Agency and Europ Assistance decided to come with a solution to increase the customer experience significantly and on the other side support a highly effective customer service team.

We chose to implement a LiveChat system, run on the Intercom platform, while connecting it with a knowledge management tool called Getguru.

By implementing livechat, Europ Assistance wants to make it easier for customers to connect to the support team and get an answer to their questions.

With this instant and easy touchpoint, they have a new and valuable window into the path to purchase. It’s been a turning point for both customer success and customer retention. Next to that, the realtime feedback we’re getting from clients is extremely valuable. We’re using their insights to create content, improve our clarity and tone of voice and improve product pages.

Europ Assistance’s Customer Support Team has the opportunity to have an online conversation with over 4,000 people per month with workflows that allow them to solve problems quickly and easily.

By directing incoming chats with prospects to the right person in the team, we created a trackable new sales channel. In fact, the order value from a conversion coming through LiveChat is 35% higher than the average order value for website visitors who don’t use LiveChat.

Why?

On top of that, customer support can access a knowledge centre that is up to date and consistently verified by the organisation. This allows all employees of Europ Assistance to sing the same song while replying to customers, brokers and prospect’s requests.

This easily accessible knowledge center has decreased the amount of time agents need, to respond to each customer.

Today, Customer Support can spend more time on reactivation campaigns, the creation of incentives for long time customers and thinking of loyalty initiatives, bringing in a new revenue stream for the company and extending lifetime value.

We also implemented some AI-based functionalities for the support team.

When customers type in their question, a keyword detection function in the background starts a powerful search in the knowledge management tool that could help the customer. This way, the Support Team doesn’t even have to search for the question. It just automatically pops up on their screen.

The Chief Support Officer and her customer support team, Customer Satisfaction has increased to 94%, which is an increase of 24%. All that while the time to first closure has also decreased.

With the new tools, it’s also easier to onboard students and new employees in the customer support team.

They don’t have to completely absorb the scripts and wording but can count on the knowledge management system to do the heavy lifting.

While Customer Support’s monthly conversation volume has grown, The CSO has a more consistent and reliable overview on how the team is performing with plenty of ways to improve the operations without adding more workload.

"Intercom gives us insights into busy and slow hours which help determine our staffing decisions. It’s also helping us find moments to activate old customers or increase the loyalty with existing clients."

Dirk Van Eycken – Customer support expert at Europ Assistance Belgium

Result

By switching to Live Chat & Knowledge Management, Europ Assistance now has…

A knowledge centre with that is up to date and verified by the organisation
Real time insights in the customer journey and the gaps in the flow
An increase in customer loyalty and retention because of its improved customer experience
An optimised and data driven customer service team that’s driven to reach their business KPI’s

"The integration of live chat with a knowledge management solution has been a game-changer for our company."

Jan Van Heel – CMO Europ Assistance Belgium