Simplyhealth cuts email response times by up to 90% to transform customer support.

Simplyhealth provides health and dental plans to almost three million customers with the purpose to make healthcare accessible to all in the UK. As the company works with businesses to reverse the UK’s sickness epidemic and increase access to healthcare, it has put AI at the centre of its strategy to be easy to do business with by digitally serving more people to boost productivity and provide outstanding customer experiences. 

Disjointed systems made it difficult to get a single view of customers to quickly resolve cases.

Putting people first is particularly challenging in the healthcare sector – customers span every age group and demographic, and some expect seamless digital services while others prefer traditional telephone support from an agent. Simplyhealth needs every customer interaction to be efficient and meaningful, finding the right care plan at the right price, and giving them fast, personal customer support. 

Behind the scenes, service teams struggled with disjointed systems that made it difficult to get a clear view of customers. Staff had to search through a vast range of health plans that were siloed across different departments to respond to customers.

Simplyhealth needed to find the right platform to address these challenges and enable it to embrace artificial intelligence, as well as establishing the right levels of governance and security around AI to reassure customers that their data is secure.

Service Cloud keeps Simplyhealth’s data secure and unlocks 360-degree visibility. 

An innovative team of in-house experts launched ‘Simplyhealth 360’ on the Einstein 1 platform to connect data from multiple sources – such as policy plans, customer records, and service cases – and bring the entire customer journey into focus, creating a single customer record no matter how many Simplyhealth services the customer uses and tracking their full history of interactions. This paved the way to modernise customer service and adopt AI.

Simplyhealth also set up an internal AI forum to define how the technology should be used. It set guidelines around the use of AI that require a human to be part of every interaction. Einstein Trust Layer’s zero retention architecture ensures the security of its data.

Generative AI responds to frequently asked questions up to 90% faster.

The team trained Service AI to create knowledge-generated email replies to three frequently asked questions and launched it in one area within a test and learn environment. Simplyhealth project leaders pulled 500 validated email responses from historical service data into a knowledge base. When a customer emails a question like, ‘How do I change my dentist’, Einstein analyses the knowledge base and writes a recommended response.

This reply goes to an agent to review, tweak, and send to the customer. A process that used to take 12 minutes now takes around one minute. And Einstein can also respond to sentiment, adding compassionate touches such as ‘I apologise for any frustration you’ve had so far’ before answering the question.

Simplyhealth was the first company in the world to use generative AI to respond to a customer FAQ email, and it now handles more than 600 emails a week across five different service departments. That’s a weekly time saving of over 90 hours. Simplyhealth uses Einstein to respond to customer complaints and expects to use it for more tasks – such as live chat – in the year ahead.

Omnichannel environment helps to reduce service calls by 30%.

Simplyhealth now has what it calls ‘the contact centre of dreams.’ Agents work from one console in Service Cloud that centralises the company’s extensive knowledge base containing T&Cs for every policy it offers. They serve customers by email, phone, live chat, and soon, WhatsApp.

Live chat is the favoured and most popular contact channel with customers looking for a fast response. Around 40% of cases that would previously have come in by phone now come in via live chat, an increase and channel shift of 30% in one year. Agents are more productive during live chat sessions because they can handle two or three live chats simultaneously, compared to one phone call. When customers phone in, service calls are pulled into the console by Service Cloud Voice. This produces real-time call transcripts, which are added to the customer record.

Einstein for Service provides trusted responses to emails that are grounded in Simplyhealth’s expert-approved FAQs. With AI built into the platform, agents are empowered to resolve issues faster, freeing up more time for conversations with customers. Across an omnichannel contact centre, this gives customers greater choice in how they access support while helping Simplyhealth to make customer service more personalised and efficient.