Fortis Insurance cuts customer enquiry time in half with Eptica Email Management

Leading UK insurance firm uses Eptica to enhance customer service, boost productivity and streamline insurance processes

27 July 2009 – Fortis Insurance Solutions (UKFIS), a leading provider of personal lines insurance solutions in the UK, has chosen Eptica’s advanced self-learning, natural language, Email Management technology to reduce costs and improve online service and efficiency of its customer and partner communication. In March 2009 UKFIS implemented a phased roll out of the platform, reducing its average customer query handling time by 50 percent, as a result of migrating telephony enquiries from online customers to Eptica’s email-based system.

With 250,000 policyholders and over 15 insurance partners, UKFIS is using Eptica Email Management to control multi-channel client contact and staff workload at its headquarters in Stoke-on-Trent. The insurance firm considered customer interaction solutions from several multi-channel solutions providers, before selecting Eptica for its features, ease-of-use, reporting capabilities and overall end-to-end efficiency. In addition to customer facing processes, the company is also using Eptica’s technology in-house, streamlining inter-departmental enquiries for its 310 employees.

Since deploying Eptica in March 2009, UKFIS has improved customer interaction across a range of business areas including payment collections, policy renewals and the issuing of duplicate documents. The email management solution has also helped the company deal more efficiently with its insurance partners reducing the amount of unnecessary communication via telephone and post.

"Around 90 percent of our business originates from the web in this highly competitive marketplace and it’s absolutely vital that we can efficiently process a large number of customer emails in the shortest possible timeframe to maintain our efficient customer service," said Ray Westwick, head of call centre at UKFIS. "Eptica has dramatically enhanced our customer services operations. Telephone enquiries that previously took up to seven minutes to resolve, now take just half the time via email. In addition, by migrating calls to email we can better distribute and prioritise our workload, enabling agents to deal with urgent enquiries straight away while saving non-urgent requests for off-peak periods."

Eptica’s self-learning Email Management software is quick and easy to deploy, helping organisations like UKFIS to immediately improve the speed and quality of their agents’ email responses. With an advanced linguistic and natural language semantic search engine, Eptica’s technology accurately analyses each inbound customer enquiry from the email text and provides agents with the best response from a self-learning knowledge base of pre-scripted replies. It also provides a future-proof solution for organisations wanting to reduce inbound enquiries by making the Eptica Email Management knowledgebase searchable online via Web Self-service.

With Eptica’s Email Management software, UKFIS can create and rollout bespoke web forms and email response content in just a few simple clicks, drastically reducing agent workload, customer resolution times and freeing up telephone lines in the process. "The aggregator boom has created a real challenge for insurance brokers – customer loyalty has decreased as more consumers turn to the internet in search of the cheapest prices on the market, so today’s business is all about being the most cost-effective as well as delivering a high standard of service," continued Westwick. "Eptica helps UKFIS in its strategy to operate the highest quality customer service model at the lowest operating cost, simply through improved management of client contact and staff workload. As a result, we can reward our customers with more competitive pricing in the marketplace."

"The insurance industry has seen a great deal of upheaval during the past five years which has tested organisations’ business models to the max," said Paul Barnes, managing director at Eptica. "Customer retention is the number one priority for insurance firms – particularly in the current economic climate – making efficient customer interaction solutions a critical business component."

For more information contact: Dee Roche 0044 07976 815140