Alexa start ERGO insurance Platform for intelligent voice assistants

ERGO Insurance

With a platform for intelligent voice assistants, ERGO is driving the transformation from an Insurance company to a tech provider.

Thanks to the many devices with Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri, intelligent voice assistants are not only on the rise in numbers, but with the increasing technological maturity of artificial intelligence, acceptance among users is also increasing. The insurance group ERGO, for example, found that its customers were willing to handle various applications in the insurance context via voice assistant. This includes, for example, reporting a damage, asking for a processing status or arranging an appointment with a consultant.

While digital assistants are valued by many customers as an additional service - for example to bypass on-hold loops - the great advantage for the operator is that the technology can also be used in communication channels with high capacity utilization, on the phone or in the chat of the customer service. In addition, a digital assistant only needs to be trained once and can then deliver consistent quality across multiple communication channels and different societies. At the same time, a company can also "train" its own brand personality to its assistant.

Beam me up, Scotty

ERGO recognized this potential early on. Already at the beginning of 2017, the participant in this year’s DIGITAL LEADER AWARD - the German Award for Digital Leadership - began with the development of his own Chatbot for the automation of highly frequented customer services on the website. In the same year, the expansion was followed by a first application for Amazon Alexa.

Due to the positive experiences with the chatbot and in view of the trend towards language assistance, the people of Düsseldorf started a comprehensive, exploratory project called "Scotty" at the end of 2017. In a startup-like setup, the Scotty team was detached from the corporate processes in order to be able to act as agile and independent as possible. The result was that within the first six months ten voice assistants were developed for different insurance sectors. In addition, ERGO even launched ERGO Travel Insurance, the first purely language insurance in Germany.

Scaling Uberine Conversational AI Platform

Due to these successes, ERGO transferred the Scotty project into an independent organizational unit: together with the Startup future of Voice as a strategic partner, a cross-functional team of encklers, voice-UX designers and mach-affine-learning-experienced-experienced-experienced. This has the task of building a platform for the fast and scalable development of multi-channel voice assistants.

Among other things, the platform is intended to enable the insurance group to meet the growing internally growing need for digital assistants in various channels. In addition, ERGO also wants to create the option of making it available to other insurance companies as a software-as-a-service variant.

Iterative approach

ERGO's vision is the transformation from an insurance company that digitizes processes and Offers Chatbots to a real tech provider that can also offer its SaaS skills and technologies to other companies.

In the current transformation process, the team works its way forward step by step and learns hard to defzu. THE iterative approach should enable a high degree of flexibility and adaptability to the rapidly developing technology, so that Platdie is always on the pulse of what is technologically feasible.

Speaking of the platform: As ERGO explains, it is technically based on a cloud ecosystem of various technology providers and partners, all of whom are involved in the development of voice assistants. The cloud technologies of various providers are orchestrated for an optimal result. Different chat, telephony and smart speaker providers enable the respective communication channels to be connected to Google's language technologies (flow, TTS, STT).

Using these technologies, Google enables automated speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (Natural Language UndernLU) of customer dialogue with the help of artificial intelligence. THE understanding interpreted in this way is transmitted to the dialogue management system "Parloa" from future of Voice, on which the digital assistant is trained for conversations. This is how the brand personality of the bot is designed, dealing with customer questions is based on business logic's fide in the concretion of as well.

Continuous development of new use cases

Alexa start ERGO insurance

A team of voice experts and software developers is continuously developing new use cases for the content of the platform together with the respective departments at ERGO. Examples of this are the notification of hail damage via a smart assistant on the phone or the query on the performance level at a health insurance company.

And the know-how was also in demand at the beginning of the corona crisis." Because of our experience, we were asked by the city of Düsseldorf to support them with their Corona hotline, "reports Gregor Wiest, Head of Innovation & Digital Transformation at Ergo: "With our know-how, we have an anticipated phoneBot implemented to structure and relieve the hotline by topic. "The improvements were successfully implemented within a week."