Ceska pojistovna Turns to IBM to Personalize Its Offer for Customers

PRESS RELEASE: IBM announced that Ceska pojistovna, one of the largest insurers in the Czech Republic and a member of the Generali Group introduced Expert Multichannel Multilingual Analyst platform (EMMA) powered by IBM Watson Explorer to search customer data from multiple touchpoints. EMMA developed by IBM Premier Business Partner Datera is using advanced content analytics to extract new insights from unstructured data.

The call centre of Ceska pojistovna handled in 2016 more than 3.6 million calls and upwards of 600,000 other customer interactions, including e-mails and live support chats.

“As the insurance industry grows increasingly competitive market leadership depends more than ever on offering a responsive, personalized services that meets and exceeds customer expectations,” said Miroslav Sovjak Head of Call Centre at Ceska pojistovna. “We capture huge amounts of data from customers –around 1,000 hours of calls daily and, as we relied on manual methods to review these interactions, we were only able to evaluate around two percent of the calls we received. IBM and Datera have opened up a whole new world of insight to us, which our management can use to inform smarter decisions.”

As the insurer desired to deepen its understanding of customer interactions across its touchpoints, it sought to improve service quality and customer satisfaction, as well as potentially unlock new opportunities to offer tailor made insurance protection.

Reviewing the information recorded on these calls helps Ceska pojistovna to understand how its operators interact with customers and enables to identify opportunities to improve the services they provide. To better examine call centre data, Ceska pojistovna deployed EMMA which includes a speech-to-text engine that converts audio recorded during customer calls to text. The EMMA platform also offers data extraction tools that import content from sources including e-mail, support chat logs and social media pages.

“Whereas in the past Ceska pojistovna was able to analyze around two percent of all customer interactions, today they can tap into close to 100 percent of this information. And, what’s more, they can access and analyze the data almost immediately after the interaction has been completed. This kind of agility allows Ceska pojistovna to deliver a much more responsive service to customers, and act on new opportunities much faster, sharpening their competitiveness,” said Jan Rancak, sales manager at Datera.

“IBM Watson Explorer provides a unified platform for analyzing all of this data. Using the solution’s powerful content analytics and natural language processing capabilities, Ceska pojistovna is positioned to uncover new patterns and trends in its customer data, which previously went unnoticed. The company uses Watson Explorer to categorize the calls it receives – for instance, whether they are related to claims, collections, or new product offerings –and to identify common or significant topics. With a better understanding of what customers are calling about, and how effective support staff are at dealing with those requests, Ceska pojistovna will have the insights to shape a much smoother contact center experience,” said Roman Mentlik, Finance Industry Leader, IBM Czech Republic.

With newfound insight into call centre performance and its customers’ needs, Ceska pojistovna can take targeted action to deliver service that can exceed expectations. Armed with a greater understanding of what its customers call about, Ceska pojistovna can identify common inquiries and have in-depth solutions ready and waiting for its call centre staff to talk customers through. This helps Ceska pojistovna to resolve customer requests the first time they call, which helps reduce callbacks and increases customer satisfaction.