Cloud-based digital customer engagement transformation

DXC Technology was engaged by a large regionally based life insurance organization to design and implement its core foundational infrastructure programs, modernize its technology environment and establish a consumption-based IT business model.

Challenge

Fundamental to the project was the need to create a distinct customer engagement platform that was better aligned to the organization’s principles of consumption-based operating expense, the elimination of fixed costs and technical debt, and the provision of a contemporary customer engagement experience enabled by modern technology, such as cloud-based operations, artificial intelligence (AI) and flexibly configured application content that could be deployed at pace and at scale.

In today’s life insurance market, carriers are also tackling the increasing burden of regulatory oversight and reporting and are challenged to find ways to minimize compliance cost through automation.

To meet their needs, the life insurance organization required a robust solution construct that could:

• Deliver a contemporary customer experience that enabled customer interaction with the organization
• Provide flexibility to accommodate variations in scale
• Provide integration to modern workforce management requirements
• Introduce new and measurable business benefits to optimize contact center operations
• Eliminate fixed-cost operations and the accumulation of technical debt
• Transition to a variable consumption cost basis
• Provide a foundation of investment in the inclusion of modern technologies such as AI and machine learning, automation for call quality adherence and usable dashboard and analytics functions to efficiently optimize contact center performance

Solution

To initiate the program, DXC conducted discovery workshops with the organization’s business management and system users to understand the long-term goals, technical and business requirements and implementation objectives for the company’s contact center operations across Australia and New Zealand. The life insurer identified its required benefits, which included improved customer experience, compliance measurement, and financial performance through a variable consumption model.

DXC proposed the Adaptive Customer Excellence (ACE) solution given its rapid time to value, scalability, cost-effective consumption pricing and enhanced functionality compared to the current and alternative platforms.

ACE offered considerable pre-packaged benefits, such as a seamless customer experience across voice and chat via the Amazon Connect telephony suite, automated call quality monitoring for compliance and regulatory obligations, automated call transcription and real-time personalization of customer conversations.

The solution, based on Amazon Connect, offered substantial new functionality in a modern cloud environment with consumption-based service and integration with the organization’s legacy systems for a unique and vastly improved customer and agent experience. It included:

• Amazon Transcribe
• Amazon Comprehend
• Amazon Translate
• Amazon Lex
• Amazon Lambda
• Full integration with Nimbus, a third-party cloud-based workforce management solution
• Customer relationship management (CRM) and other legacy system integration

With an increase in regulatory oversight across the financial services markets, customer interactions must always be measured for compliant contact. The solution introduced an automated quality assurance tool specific to life insurance, leveraging the AI-powered speech recognition and analytics offered by Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Comprehend. The automated solution increased call quality screening.

With Amazon Transcribe, every voice call can be transcribed to text, then automatically interrogated to identify where standards are breached. Deep data analysis and classification of failed calls is simple with data formatted for visualization, and the exact line of text where the call failed presented for further scrutiny. This protects the company, agents and customers, as well as maintaining high-quality standards and ongoing training for agents.

DXC provided further specialist expertise to fully integrate the Amazon Connect solution with existing legacy business systems and the Nimbus Workforce Management application. The Nimbus application allows the life insurance organization to access workforce schedulers to optimize time availability, ensuring maximum utilization of workforce agents to suit projected call volumes while maintaining the highest-quality customer experience.

The Nimbus mobile application enables compliant-proof, 24x7, on-premises and remote working access for agents and supervisors, so reactive and flexible changes can be made to the schedules to accommodate changing agent availability at any time.

Nimbus workforce optimization provides schedulers with easy-to-use models to ensure the structure and order necessary to control agent access and manage time and attendance in order to provide consistently high-quality customer service. Previously, workforce scheduling was an entirely manual exercise for the life insurer but has now been automated with the implementation of the Nimbus solution.

Real-time data integration with the existing CRM system allows automatic caller identification and contact pop-ups, so agents can personalize their introduction — improving agent productivity, service and customer experience.

DXC worked with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create a custom function that allows agents to pause and resume call recording (a regulatory requirement during credit card transactions or restricted conversations). Through the close collaboration between AWS and DXC, this component was seamlessly tested and delivered to make the payment collection process Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliant.

The interactive voice response (IVR) was rationalized with new contact flows and skills-based routing. DXC analysed the previous IVR provided by the company, with call flows detailed in a 300-page document.

By applying a Lean methodology to processes and optimizing to reflect customer needs, the reengineered IVR was dramatically simplified to unclutter customer interactions. The life insurance organization was then able to rationalize carriage lines, with better routing resulting in reduced wait times, enhanced queue escalations and a much-improved customer experience.

Dashboards now provide each group with real-time and historical visual reporting, with the ability to configure and customize reports on the fly, conduct deep analysis and automate delivery of standard reports.

Along with dashboards, DXC also implemented wallboard reporting with insightful key metrics that can be displayed on large widescreens on the call center floor.The entire solution is hosted on the AWS cloud platform, which provides the scale to adapt to consumption pattern changes as required, and to present in an entirely variable consumption cost framework.

DXC's solution was delivered over four releases across two countries in just 7 months, including the comprehensive requirement gathering and analysis phase.

Results

DXC and AWS have combined the scale of their global operations, technology expertise and deep insurance practice knowledge to deliver a level of innovation in customer experience and performance efficiency that is unique in the industry. The life insurance organization is enjoying the benefits this combined scale brings in delivering a uniquely optimized and modern customer engagement outcome.

As early adopters of the technology and the first to implement Amazon Connect in the insurance industry, the organization has achieved an improved customer experience that can be consumed on a variable cost basis with the foundation now laid for complete digital transformation. The organization’s contact center agents are now live across Australia and New Zealand.

DXC leveraged the power of Amazon Connect and integrated the life insurer’s existing core systems to seamlessly create a cloud-based customer contact solution which is transforming the organization’s customer and agent experience.

The modern platform also allows flexible remote working by agents, catering to emergencies and paving the way for a future where people work from anywhere with reduced physical office space needed. Customer experience is personalized, and the efficiency of customer interactions improved through better call routing, reduced wait times, enhanced queue escalations, smoother transfers between agents, and real-time data from core systems anticipating customer needs and helping resolve issues faster.

Collaborating for success

DXC leveraged its expertise in the insurance industry, its deep knowledge of the life insurance organization’s business and AWS IP to considerably improve call centre operations.

The existing longstanding relationship with the organization helped DXC understand its systems and business operations and that, combined with DXC’s insurance IP and specialization in large and complex digital transformation projects, helped drive success.

The life insurance organization’s chief technology officer (CTO) praised the close collaboration between the organizations, saying, “DXC delivered a particularly important first step in our transformation journey.

“DXC took us from a legacy solution and moved us to a cutting-edge cloud platform that provides better customer and agent experience with the economic benefits of a fully consumption-based commercial model. The business will achieve much-improved customer engagement together with higher levels of digital quality assurance to meet regulatory obligations.”