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Nuance Communications - Award for Innovation in Customer Service

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2019, Click to Enter The 2020 Stevie® Awards for Sales & Customer Service

Company: Nuance Communications, Inc. Burlington, MA
Entry Submitted By: Global Results PR
Company Description: Nuance Communications is the pioneer and leader in conversational and cognitive AI innovations that bring intelligence to everyday work and life. The company delivers solutions that can understand, analyze and respond to human language to increase productivity and amplify human intelligence. Nuance works with organizations in industries like healthcare, telecom, automotive, financial and retail.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Achievement Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Award for Innovation in Customer Service - Financial Services Industries

Nomination Title: Esurance Intelligent Virtual Assistant, Et al. – Powered by Nuance

Tell the story about your organization's innovations in customer service since the beginning of July 2017 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

Esurance – a direct-to-consumer auto and home insurance provider with an A+ financial rating – wanted to ensure that its customers were able to have their questions answered at any time, right away through digital channels. But as Esurance’s digital customer base grew, the insurance provider didn’t want to have to increase its costs by adding more agents to its contact center. Instead, Esurance wanted to leverage intelligent technology that understands what the customer needs and then provides the best solution, whether that be a quick answer from a virtual assistant or more in-depth help from a chat agent with the right skill set, thereby saving on live agent costs and increasing customer satisfaction.

From the onset, Esurance had four key goals:

1) Create a professional, friendly and efficient customer experience that creates trust in the Esurance brand and maximizes sales of the highest quality to the business – all the while maintaining a relevant and transparent experience for the customer.
2) Implement a solution that seamlessly combines automated and human-assisted engagements in digital channels.
3) Gather meaningful and actionable insights to allow Esurance to optimize its customers’ journeys.
4) Accelerate the movement of Esurance customers to self-serve to help them quickly find answers.

As a result, Esurance turned to Nuance to help it drive its customer support and customer acquisition via multiple Nuance solutions including Virtual Assistant, Live Chat and Co-Browse – all of which are part of the Nuance?Digital Engagement Platform, which seamlessly combines automated and human-assisted engagements in digital channels. With the Nuance?Digital Engagement Platform, Esurance was able to utilize the following functions:

-Live Chat: Esurance started with Nuance-powered Live Chat in one business unit, then added other business units across both care and sales as success was proven.
-Virtual Assistant (VA): The Nuance-powered VA was added to address the increasing amount of incoming inquiries.
-Live Chat + VA: The VA and Live Chat have proven to be “better together” because the VA can interact with more customers, answer their questions and include a human chat agent, if needed. And the Live Chat agent can provide better quality assistance to customers who need more in-depth help.

Nuance also added a Co-Browse tool for personalized assistance (whereby Esurance agents can see what the customer is seeing by sharing a common screen, allowing the agent to explain certain things in a more efficient way), as well as to train Esurance customers to self-serve in the future. And, because the platform understands what the customer’s intent is, Nuance is able to route the incoming request to the agent with the best skillset to help in that matter. Nuance has also been able to continuously optimize the Esurance customer experience through meaningful and actionable insights gathered from all interactions (automated and human-assisted) to understand what Esurance customers need and adjust the customer engagement accordingly.

With these Innovations in Customer Service, Esurance has achieved great success with ultimate proof in the numbers:

-In Q3 2018 Live Chat generated incremental revenue of $4.4 Million
-In Q3 2018 84% of engagements deflected a call, resulting in $1.6M in cost savings
-After launch of the VA, Live Chat conversion rates improved by 23%
-Live Chat Customer satisfaction rate of more than 86%
-Virtual Assistant issue resolution rate of 85%