Leveraging AI to Enhance the Online Claims Experience

A significant trend in customer service across all industries is the way that consumers are increasingly showing a preference for online ‘self-help’ options rather than putting in a call to a contact centre. D&G had such options available for registering claims in the ‘My Account’ section of its website, but this involved a long journey for the customer, requiring them to log in every time they wanted to check a claim.

Inspired by the possibilities for advanced automation opened up by Artificial Intelligence (AI), our Innovation team suggested creating a shorter, more intuitive claims journey on the website, one which mirrored a more traditional assisted service pathway. The key to the concept was creating a chatbot - a ‘virtual assistant’ built using natural language processing technology which would guide the customer through the claims process like an agent, but with a journey designed to be faster, smoother and more seamless than both calling the contact centre or filling out the existing online claims forms.

We designed a chatbot to utilise D&Gs existing systems and recreate the same online journey that a customer receives through the ‘My Account’ section on the website, but without the need to log in and other known sticking points removed. On the back-end, the chatbot was built on D&G’s current commerce platform, while the front-end used Google’s natural language processor, Dialogflow.

Dialogflow converts text that, whatever the customer types in the chat window, D&G’s API can understand. In a simple chat window, customers are asked questions that match the fields on the front-end of the website, including: “what is your plan number and appliance model number?”; “when and how did your appliance break?”; and “what problems are you seeing?”. Every response can be entered in hundreds of different ways, so Dialogflow is programmed to understand the intent and therefore allow the claim to be booked and managed correctly.

The chatbot then provides the customer with an engineer’s availability so they can choose which day and time they want to book a repair. Simultaneously, it creates a booking on D&G’s back-end ORBIT system that can be amended or cancelled.