How BizCover Services 200,000 Small Business Customers With Smart Business Automation

Five years ago BizCover decided to get serious about transforming and unifying our technology, processes and our people. This meant prioritising smart business automation technology to make our business run as efficiently as possible. 

One of our main objectives back then was to create a 360-degree view of the customer. So that was the real genesis point, to uncover the right customer information and match it to business data in a more efficient way.

As a company that has been growing 30% each year, we know that we can’t scale everything at that rate. We needed to build an elegant and efficient system that could help us grow to the company we are today, and where we are going in the future.

Business automation lets the humans be humans

We decided very early on to bring out the best in customer service by making the process as effortless as possible. 

Our approach is to ‘Let the robots be robots and humans be humans.’ With the high empathy enquiries, we send to people to manage and respond. Then we automate the mundane, repetitive tasks, such as chasing up payments.

For us implementing AI is about augmenting the staff that you have rather than any staff replacement or removing those services. We want to make our agents’ lives easier by having information from various consoles in one place and at their fingertips. We are in the fortunate position where we’re a growing company, and we’re using automation to help us, particularly using intelligent process automation.

How to use process automation to leap ahead of your competition

The companies who go through digital transformation and get business automation right in the next three to five years are going to be way ahead of the companies who either don’t get into it, or just dip their toes and don’t really see it for the power it is. 

Here are a few tricks we learnt along our automation journey.

Ensure you prioritise and categorise enquiries

In the customer service space we try to treat things quite evenly, and assign it smartly to the right team based on what people are asking for. We now have an intelligent understanding of what our customers need and are routing those enquiries to the right place.

At the moment we have automatic systems in Salesforce where we can automatically push an enquiry higher up the queue to become a priority item if need be.

To make sure nothing gets missed, every case, every enquiry is automatically timed.

Build automation upfront

For example, in the sales area, we’re sourcing relevant data at every stage. If someone’s doing a quote, we’ve got automation that’s assigning to the correct campaign in our phone systems. Our agents are actively shown the next best work item, with customer queries and all the relevant information to action in real time. We have optimised when people are going to need more help and less help. So we can offer our best agents to assist at the right time. 

One of our big projects is around how we interpret the thousands of emails coming in. We are using a mixture of AI and algorithms to assess what the emails are about. If we can decipher what it is, we can automate that request straightaway. For example, customers who request their certificate of currency, we can automatically send that to them in an email.

Integrate systems for a smooth customer experience

To make our customers’ lives easier, we have built a lot of automation into the workflow. For example, failed payments can be a headache for everyone. So we have automated much of our email and SMS journeys to address this pain point. We have also developed a streamlined claims lodgement process, removing the stress from filling out manual forms. Our automation is really focused on making the customer experience more effective.

Use automation to track success

The insurance industry has a low Net Promoter Score (NPS), which is around -5, on average. BizCover’s NPS has been +70 for the past 12 months. And we credit that success to our talented team and a real time, automated feedback loop.  

We are creating cases in real time to review any negative elements and try to resolve that for customers straightaway. And all the feedback is going to the right business channel, whether that’s service, marketing, sales or even our executive team. Our customers could get a call from our CEO to hear their feedback directly and to have a conversation on how things can be improved.

Next on the horizon for BizCover

As a business, we have completed the foundational building blocks for our operational excellence goal. Now we can start to look at the next chapter. We’ve always been an insure-tech leader and we want to make sure we continue to stay ahead in this space. Infact, we have around 65 different operational excellence focused projects to work on.

We plan to grow our partner networks and referral partners across New Zealand and the US, and are on a global journey to expand, which includes our latest partner, South Africa.

Perhaps most exciting for our team is our new AI-powered chatbot Frankie, who is assisting with self-service enquiries on our website and automatically sends the right information.

Our digital transformation and technology journey started five years ago, and shows no signs of slowing. So we are excited to see what else we can do to improve the world of insurance for our customers. We truly are customer fanatics!

Learn about the latest trends in service by downloading Salesforce’s latest State of Service report.