Today, Sara Bertone talks to Sophie about the use of chatbots at Zurich Insurance. In this podcast episode, you can find out how they went about the project, what the difference is between vertical and horizontal bots and what the biggest learning was.
Sara Bertone
Sara Bertone works in the Digital Business Team at Zurich Insurance and has been working with chatbots since 2017. The company already has four chatbots in use.
The first steps
Sara became aware of the topic of chatbots through her former boss at Zurich Insurance. However, she explains that she initially started with a live chat. The insights gained from this were then used for an initial version of the chatbot. The first chatbot went live back in June 2018 and was continuously developed over the following years with an explorative approach.
Oops, I don’t understand that
In the beginning, this was one of the chatbot’s most frequently written sentences. You might think that this has annoyed a large number of customers – but Zurich Insurance has had very different experiences. The customers were very open to the technology and were very understanding and patient with the chatbot. “Of course there were also annoyed customers, but at least we didn’t have to shut down our bot completely like some other companies,” Sara reports and laughs. The feedback from customers has helped us a lot to keep going. It is important not to put the chatbot on the side, but to keep optimizing it. The users also see this and are therefore more patient, says Sara.
The first months of further development
It goes without saying that a lot of thought was put into this before the first publication. What does the bot say? How are the individual paths designed? What is the bot called? These many detailed steps have been retained even after going live. Sara and her colleague spent a lot of time at the beginning tracking users’ conversations with the bot and optimizing it accordingly. Where is a flow missing, where do we need a new intent, where is an intent out of place? Reading, analyzing and deriving measures – several hours a week. In the beginning, this amounted to a whole working day per person per week, Sara reports. At some point, we realized that we had to change our approach.
Try and error
This was the new recipe for the further development of the chatbot. Instead of analyzing the conversations for hours on end, at some point we switched to formulating a working hypothesis, testing it and then adjusting it if necessary. It was important to refrain from making major change requests. But Sara is convinced that the time was worth it and wants to take away other companies’ fear of the time involved. The way in which customers communicate with a machine, such as a chatbot, is completely different to the way in which they communicate with people. For companies that want to find out more about their customers, the effort is definitely worth it, says Sara. You find out things about customers and their needs that you would never get any other way. Another advantage throughout the project was the very small team, says Sara. For years, she and her colleague were solely responsible for the chatbot. In this way, know-how is bundled, the way of walking is routine and lengthy coordination processes within the company are avoided.
Vertical or horizontal chatbot
Initially, the question was whether to develop a bot that was more broad-based or more in-depth. The decision was made to use a type of triage bot, i.e. a chatbot that helps users to find their way around the website, for example. Inspired by the first positive experiences, the search for a vertical, i.e. specific use case for the chatbot began. The outbreak of the global coronavirus pandemic provided an opportunity for this. Just two weeks after the idea was born, the bot, including testing, went live. The two other bots are also rather small and vertically oriented compared to the first chatbot. Essentially, it is about certain products that can be purchased with the help of the virtual assistant.
Learnings
1. chatbots are not a substitute for good customer service, but a supplement to existing service offerings.
2. vertical chatbots are very well suited to specific use cases. Horizontal chatbots are used more broadly, for example to guide the user around the website. With the former, you learn more about the users, as the questions are also much more specific due to the specificity of the use case.
3. think in advance about how you want to connect several chatbots, especially if you use vertical and horizontal chatbots on your website at the same time.
4. one Implementing and further developing a chatbot can take a lot of time. But it is worth itbecause you often learn things about your customers that you don’t find out in a normal customer service conversation with an employee.
It’s best to listen to the podcast episode with Sophie Hundertmark and Sara Bertone for yourself. Have fun!
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