Zavarovalnica Triglav modernizes customer service with Dynamics 365 and Azure OpenAI Service

Zavarovalnica Triglav is the leading insurance and financial group in Slovenia, with a significant presence in Southeast Europe. It provides a comprehensive range of services including home, automotive, and company insurance. ”We aim to deliver the best customer experience, offering services in a fast and simple way, as well as giving them the support they need,” shares Vladimir Nardin, Director of Communication Platform Department at Zavarovalnica Triglav.

For years, the company used disjointed communication channels and relied on lots of manual work to manage enquiries. To remain an industry leader, the company knew it needed to consolidate all inputs, from the call center to emails, onto one platform. “By doing this, we will be able to support customers more efficiently and streamline our internal processes,” says Nardin. “To achieve that, we needed to leverage technology.”

A unified 360-view of the customer

The first step was implementing Microsoft Dynamics 365 to centralize operations and customer interactions. “Before, our communication was scattered across different platforms and channels, so it was very difficult to design personalized communication or to segment customers for campaigns,” reflects Nardin. By centralizing communication, transactions, sales, support tickets, and service level agreements (SLAs) within Dynamics 365, Zavarovalnica Triglav ensured a seamless workflow across its departments.

“We decided to focus on harnessing the out-of-the-box capabilities of Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and Customer Insights to streamline how we interact with customers and manage internal processes,” explains Nardin. “Our staff will soon be able to find all customer communication, and personal, transactional, and marketing data in what we call a customer card,” Nardin shares. “We’ll be better equipped to support our customers and design more personalized experiences for them.”

To make the most of this data, Zavarovalnica Triglav integrated Dynamics 365 with its insurance enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The system is connected with Azure Data Warehouse and Azure Synapse to ensure streamlined data and analytics capabilities.

Solving queries more efficiently

With a better handle on data, Nardin and his team considered leveraging AI to deliver seamless customer support with less effort. “We thought venturing into AI was a worthy step since it offers natural language. It’s what we would like to have with automation,” says Nardin.

But first, the company had to overcome the challenges of data security. “In an industry like ours, data regulation is highly important. With the advice of Microsoft, we developed our own chatbot using Azure OpenAI Service, rather than using solutions available publicly,” explains Nardin. “This ensured our data was not accessible by third parties and met the local regulatory requirements for data protection.”

Training the bot on the company knowledge base, Zavarovalnica Triglav then began using the bot to draft responses to enquiries. “When we receive a question, the Azure OpenAI chatbot can automatically prepare answers based on general information. This answer is checked by a customer support agent, who can make adjustments before sending it,” explains Nardin. “Around 10% of queries are now answered like this, many of which are common queries.”

For the 60% of queries not addressable by automated responses, Zavarovalnica Triglav designed automated ticket routing to relevant departments. “This routing process used to be done manually by agents, who had to read each query individually, browse the knowledge database, and then forward the question to the right department, like claims or legal,” explains Nardin. The company developed a system with Azure OpenAI Service to review the content of the query and automatically direct it to the relevant department. Nardin adds,

AI-generated transcripts and summaries

Zavarovalnica Triglav also uses AI for documentation, like transcribing and summarizing customer communications. "We are required to record all communication with customers and prepare a transcript and summary,” explains Nardin. “With Azure OpenAI Service, this has been automated, resulting in a substantial decrease in manual work.” Zavarovalnica Triglav aims to add even more nuanced information to these documents in the future, through sentiment analysis and conversation quality checks.

“The AI initiatives have saved a significant amount of time spent on manual work, enabling us to redirect efforts to more complex tasks and reduce response times for common customer inquiries,” highlights Nardin.

An even smoother customer experience

Aside from the customer support chatbot that assists agents, Zavarovalnica Triglav also embedded a customer-facing chatbot on its website. The bot, built using Azure Bot Framework and connected to Azure OpenAI Service, handles common customer policy questions and assists customers through the claims process. “For registered users, the chatbot relies on account information to provide personalized responses, such as policy details and termination dates,” shares Nardin. “This brings customer experience to a higher level.”

Finally, a voice bot for the call center is also in development. With it, Zavarovalnica Triglav aims to offer automated, human-like interactions through speech. “Although it’s still in testing, it's quite impressive. It's a human-like avatar connected to our knowledge database, and customers will be able to talk to the bot in Slovenian,” remarks Nardin.

Looking ahead, Zavarovalnica Triglav will continue exploring new possibilities with AI to enhance its operations and customer service. "For now, we are focused on using and improving the chatbot. Recently, we developed a use case for sellers that simplifies information retrieval and streamlines ticketing processes. This can improve the efficiency for 600 sellers,” Nardin notes. “For us, it’s all about making work less tedious, and customer experience more delightful.”