As leaders in the financial services
industry here at Old Mutual,
we believe our success as an organization
comes down to our customers
being our number one priority.
In fact, we are obsessed
about our customers.
We are on a constant journey to ensure our
customers experience us in a way that is
convenient, purpose led and at
the cutting edge of innovation.
The applied intelligence team here
at Old Mutual were tasked to develop
solutions that make customer engagement
frictionless by automating what we call
key customer moments of truth to ensure
seamless engagement on our customers channel of choice.
When we first started
exploring solutions for a better email
experience, we have to first and foremost
make sure that the solution we delivered
enable the business to respond timelessly
to customer requests via email.
The goal was to create an intelligent
email classification solution that could
predict customer
intentions and sentiments.
This solution allows customers to interact
with Old Mutual's products and services
in the most natural possible manner.
This is what we call
purpose led technology.
I read a very interesting quote
by Dean Cayman that every once in a while
a new technology, an old problem
and a big idea turn into an innovation.
I could say that a rough mix of these
three elements birthed Old Mutual's email
classification solution.
Partnering with Microsoft,
who are undoubtedly leaders
in AI, was a no brainer.
Together, we embarked in a phased delivery
approach and a program of continuous
improvement which enabled us
to successfully introduce the intelligent
email classification solution that manages
critical customer mailboxes and today
processes over 100,000 emails per month
which ordinarily would be touched
by a human and has reduced our
email handling time by 65%.
We were able to automate common email
requests and therefore minimize
manually handled emails.
We were able to remove duplicate
emails across the multiple mailboxes.
We were able to leverage emails
channel to nudge customers to other
more digital channels and most importantly
we are to provide a consistent customer
experience regardless of the
customer's preferred channel.
Old Mutual really had some great automation
successes using Microsoft AI,
so we expanded the AI footprint
on top of this key foundation.
Together with Old Mutual,
we developed the solution in stages where
the power of AI and natural language
processing to predict customer intent
and sentiment based on these email
requests with a very high
level of probability.
By leveraging cloud,
cognitive and infrastructure services
provided by Microsoft Azure,
we have been able to unlock the latent
potential of unstructured data
in customers emails,
allowing routing requests to relevant
processing areas and even achieving end-to-end
automation of critical customer transactions.
The ability to quickly process vast
amounts of email data to identify
customers intents and sentiment in
real-time has significantly reduced
the reliance on administrators
working through large email backlogs, has
allowed us to improve our workforce
management and has also provided us
valuable insight into customer emails.
To date, we have achieved a 45% straight
through process rate for conversational
requested Tax certificates with each
request process within a minute of email
submission and a 45% straight through
process rate for handwritten
customer disinvestment request.
And this is just the beginning.
Following this success,
we use computer vision with optical
character recognition to identify various
forms submitted by their customers
for more complex requests.
The success achieved has saved Old Mutual
thousands of hours in operational
costs and improved customer servicing.
Using the natural language processing and text
analytics services offered by Microsoft,
our intelligent email solution can now
autonomously authenticate a customer
and respond to conversationally
requested Tax certificates
in a matter of seconds.
Together with Old Mutual,
we plan to save Old Mutual and more
importantly their customers valuable time
when changing debit orders, reviewing or
changing policies and processing claims
with solutions built
on Microsoft Azure's AI.
We are extremely thankful for Old Mutual
for the opportunity to be able to build
this incredible asset and to see it
in action and to see how it's benefit both
the employees and the customer
with significant productivity improvements
and customer satisfaction improvements.
Thank you Old Mutual.
While we have the power of 176 year old
institution behind us,
we are now starting to operate like a 24
month old startup which has resulted
in our increased relevance as a financial
partner of choice for our customers.
Implementing this automated email solution
has saved the business thousands
of hours this year alone with more
sustainable cumulative savings expected
as a solution is further leveraged.