Solution from Transversal aims to help customers find answers quicker and to reduce call volumes by up to 20%.

Allianz Insurance plc, one of the largest general insurers in the UK, is providing its customers with a new way of getting help for their day-to-day questions.

By using Web self-service technology from Transversal, Allianz aims to reduce calls to its contact centres by up to 20 per cent. This is good for the customer and good for Allianz.

The Transversal solution was implemented in just 12 weeks and has recently gone live on Allianz's Your Cover Web site. Although it's still early days, customer response has been positive. Customers can rate how helpful the answers provided have been, and this feedback is used to continually improve the quality of answers.

Transversal's Web self-service enables customers to ask questions using conversational language. Semantic search technology understands the context of these questions and returns calculated responses from a knowledgebase of several hundred previously prepared answers to common questions.

As well as offering the solution in the help area of the Your Cover site,  Allianz has embedded links to self-service content in its Quote and Buy application. This provides users with relevant answers during all stages of the sales process, minimizing drop-outs and enhancing the overall customer experience.

"The vast majority of the customer queries we get are fairly routine but still need to be answered to the customer's satisfaction", comments Gary Lucas, Channel Development Manager, E-Business at Allianz Retail. "For instance, they may want to find out how they can access documents related to their cover or what they need to do to make a claim. Ordinarily, most of these customers would call the contact centre if they could not find the answer they needed online."

Lucas continues: "By providing them with the opportunity to 'self-serve', we’re aiming to take our customer service to another level. For us, a reduction in unnecessary call volume provides agents with time for more complex queries which they can deal with more efficiently; it's a genuine 'win-win' for customers and our business alike."

Davin Yap, CEO of Transversal, comments: "The feedback that Allianz has already gained from customers speaks for itself and demonstrates that empowering customers to 'self-serve' is both more convenient for the customer and efficient for the business. We're seeing demand from a wide range of organizations across different vertical sectors which increasingly recognize that traditional keyword search tools or static FAQs are not enough to help customers and can actually increase frustration and turn them away from the brand."

About Allianz
Allianz Insurance is one of the largest general insurers in the UK and part of the Allianz SE Group, the largest property and casualty insurer worldwide.
About Your Cover
Your Cover Insurance is a company of Allianz Insurance plc, one of the UK’s largest general insurers, established for more than 100 years. They provide comprehensive car insurance and home insurance to thousands of customers across the UK.
Your Cover works differently from other insurance companies because it lets customers build their own insurance policy to suit their needs – adding as much or as little cover as they like, so they never have less cover than they need or pay for more than they want.