Challenge

Domestic & General (D&G) is the UK’s leading specialist warranty provider for kitchen appliances, boilers, and consumer electronics. It offers peace of mind for over 16 million customers in the event of unexpected failure or faults with protected equipment.

D&G commissioned VML Commerce to investigate how emerging technologies could be utilised to improve customer experiences and save money. In particular, D&G recognised its call centre was an area where improvements could be made to enhance the overall experience.

Inspiration

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.

Solution

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.

Growth

Each chatbot can resolve queries in a fraction of the time it would take a person, including completing an engineer booking in under a minute.

By reducing the need for customers to call the contact centre whilst improving resolution rates, the chatbots have resulted in an increase in customer satisfaction while costs have been significantly reduced.

The team at VML Commerce has helped us turn a nice idea into reality - we had been considering using AI, and VML Commerce brought this to fruition, giving us something to touch and feel very quickly. VML Commerce is helping D&G to be more forward-thinking and futuristic in our outlook, a place we need to be in today's competitive digital world.

Ben Rees

Head of Digital Delivery, Domestic & General

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