The insurance sector is pouring huge resources into AI and technology to improve customer and broker service. But what about when insurers’ employees need IT support themselves, to help them do their jobs, make sure all their interactions and processes run smoothly, and ultimately optimise customer service?
Markerstudy’s Vicky Taylor, M-TECH Service Operations Manager, talks about the particular challenge for companies that are growing, often gaining large numbers of new employees all at once due to acquisitions, and how they can ensure their vital internal IT service desks aren’t overwhelmed.
When Markerstudy acquired Co-op Insurance’s underwriting business – the latest in a string of acquisitions bringing an additional 1,000 employees into the business – it marked a turning point for our internal IT service desk, which supports the IT needs of all our brands.
We realised that demand would soon outstrip its capacity, an issue faced by many growing businesses who are recognising the need to invest in new technology to support and service their own people, as well as their customers.
If you can use AI and machine learning to engage quickly with people and provide them with routine and simple IT support, it frees up experienced staff to focus on more complex issues. We’re all embracing that principle when it comes to service for our customers and partners, and it makes sense to do the same with employees and improve their access to self-service capabilities.
We put a high priority on moving with the times and making the most of what new technologies can offer us. Within the service desk, we wanted to shift away from traditional, call-based support and enable more self-service. It was an opportunity to both reduce costs and become less wasteful of both our teams’ and customers’ time.
Of course it’s important to make sure that the solution you adopt is right for your organisation, and for the volume and type of IT issues and queries generated by your people. For example, we had a pretty stable service and were only getting high volumes of issues in certain areas. Most of the machine learning-based chatbots we looked at relied on volume of tickets to train the AI model, so they didn’t work for us.
We needed something that allowed us to build the chatbot from scratch using our own knowledge, a capability we found in the ServiceNow IT Service Management service which we’re now working with. The Now Platform was already on our radar for addressing challenges in other areas of the business, because we were after a solution that combined lot of different options and modules in one central source that links everything together.
The ServiceNow Virtual Agent gave us the ability to leverage our teams’ knowledge and build a chatbot with a wide array of topics to fully automate first-line service, enabling the creation of our Lumi chatbot in just a few weeks.
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So we now have a fully automated chatbot capable of receiving, and often resolving, tickets, initially for nine topics.
Our original plan was to slowly phase out traditional channels in favour of the new chatbot, but when COVID-19 lockdowns began, like many others, we suddenly faced the challenge of supporting a wholescale transition to working from home.
At that point we made a pretty bold decision – in order to cope with the massive surge in service desk demand, we simultaneously disabled phone, emails, and live chat, making Lumi the first line of service for all tickets. We managed to get everyone set up within two to three weeks. If we’d been taking phone calls as well, it just wouldn’t have been possible.
Since then, we’ve continued to expand the scope of the chatbot, making targeted improvements based on usage data, so that it now covers 26 topics across the full range of requests. In some cases it can even automate issue resolution, for example allowing people to use the chatbot to trigger a script that will automatically handle a password reset, or shut down a virtual machine session.
For people using the system it’s a seamless experience, and a quick and simple way to deal with processes that used to take up a lot of technician time. They no longer need to wait for an agent, submitting a ticket is significantly faster, and the service is available 24/7.
For the service desk team, the transformation is just as great. Technicians who used to spend most of their time on first-line service can now focus on high-priority issues rather than answering phones.
Embracing this technology has been a real game-changer. It’s invaluable in enabling modern ways of working, supporting people’s work-life balance, and enabling them to do their jobs better and ultimately of course improving the service that we can deliver to our customers.
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