Mutua Madrileña: Delivering premium customer service with Dialogflow
About Mutua Madrileña
Founded in 1930, Mutua Madrileña is one of Spain’s largest insurance companies providing automobile, life, health, and accident policies as well as pension and investment funds.
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About everis
everis, an NTT DATA company, provides business and strategy solutions, application development and maintenance, and outsourcing services in all sectors across Europe, the United States, and Latin America.
Mutua Madrileña created a virtual assistant with Dialogflow to improve its customer services and resolve inquiries more quickly and at more convenient times.
Google Cloud results
- Handles more than 700 types of questions with thousands of conversational variations
- Accounts for 60% of interactions with customers via digital channels and resolves 86% of inquiries
- Integrates seamlessly with web and mobile, as well as Google Home and Google Assistant
Resolves 70K+ customer inquiries a month
Founded in 1930, Mutua Madrileña has grown to become one of Spain's largest insurance companies, offering more than 10 million customers automobile, life, and health policies as well as financial products. The company prides itself on top quality service and is constantly looking for ways to improve customer service.
For much of its lifespan, Mutua Madrileña has relied on call centers and phone conversations to ensure customers get the nuanced, focused treatment they need. However, limits on time and availability mean this is not always the best option for customers, especially for minor queries. Over the years, consumer expectations have changed and people increasingly expect services to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, which was something the call centers couldn't provide.
"We tested nine different systems looking for a partner to help us build our virtual assistant. Google Cloud has strong AI and security offerings, but it's also mature and experienced as a company. For us, it was clear that Google Cloud would make the best long term partner."
—Juan Larrauri Diaz, Head of Digital Strategy, Mutua MadrileñaThat changed in 2017. Innovation is highly prized at Mutua, where an annual competition sees employees pitch new ideas for harnessing the latest technology to improve the company. That year, the winners pitched a virtual assistant, powered by the latest AI technology, that could augment the company's call centers and help customers any time of day or night. To bring that idea to life, Mutua Madrileña turned to Google Cloud.
"We tested nine different systems looking for a partner to help us build our virtual assistant," says Juan Larrauri Diaz, Head of Digital Strategy at Mutua Madrileña. "Google Cloud has strong AI and security offerings, but it's also mature and experienced as a company. For us, it was clear that Google Cloud would make the best long term partner."
Customizable, easy-to-use chatbots with Dialogflow
The detail needed to handle insurance claims, as well as the sheer range of options available, means that a static help page is simply not responsive enough for most of Mutua Madrileña's customer interactions. Instead, the majority of its customer queries and claims are dealt with over the phone through its call centers. But the company didn't have the capacity to staff call centers at night or on weekends, limiting the help it could offer customers.
The winners of the Mutua Innova competition in 2017 pitched a virtual assistant, using natural language processing (NLP) that could take some of the strain from the company's call centers and provide online support around the clock for customers who might not have free time during office hours.
"Dialogflow has excellent natural language processing, but I think the real power lies in the capabilities Google Cloud has built around it. It's easy to set up, easy to start conversations, and it comes with several predefined connections for the web, mobile, and Google Assistant, all out of the box."
—Marcos Obed Gonzàlez, Director, everisTeaming up with Google Cloud Partner everis, Mutua Madrileña set to work on its new virtual assistant, which would initially function as a chatbot on Mutua's mobile and web services. Before implementing any of the technology, everis ran a series of workshops with Mutua Madrileña to get a clear picture of the project's goals and how it would achieve them. "For chatbot solutions to work and make customers comfortable, it's vital to get the linguistics right," says Marcos Obed Gonzàlez, Director at everis. "We worked very closely with Mutua Madrileña to make sure that we not only had the right language for their business, but we could also deliver an appropriate 'personality' for the chatbot."
After intensive preparation, Mutua Madrileña and everis began work on the virtual assistant in May, 2018, calling it EME. The most important component of EME was Dialogflow, the Google development suite for creating conversational interfaces. Running on Google Cloud infrastructure along with Google Cloud machine learning tools such as Cloud Natural Language, Dialogflow allowed Mutua Madrileña to access some of the most powerful offerings of Google Cloud, with very few management overheads. Mutua Madrileña started EME with the ability to respond to 150 different types of questions or "images" with several variations for each one. The company received help from everis to integrate EME into its website and mobile application.
"Dialogflow has excellent natural language processing, but I think the real power lies in the capabilities Google Cloud has built around it," says Marcos. "It's easy to set up, easy to start conversations, and it comes with several predefined connections for the web, mobile, and Google Assistant, all out of the box."
"When we sent out surveys asking for feedback on the new chatbot, customers seemed to love it. It was so popular that by the end of the year, it accounted for 60 percent of customer interactions on digital channels."
—Juan Larrauri Diaz, Head of Digital Strategy, Mutua MadrileñaWith Chatbase, everis and Mutua could run analytics on the chatbot and make sure it was interacting with customers in the right way. Meanwhile, Cloud Storage provided a highly secure and easy-to-manage space for storing backups.
More interactions, more successful resolutions, happier customers
With Dialogflow at its core, EME went into beta before launching across all of Mutua Madrileña's apps a month later. By then, the company and everis had added more functionality, expanding its capabilities from 115 images to more than 700 with thousands of different linguistic variations. Thanks to the time spent getting the linguistic specifics right, EME has successfully resolved around 86 percent of the inquiries put to it. "This was a very important KPI for us," says Juan. In addition, the effort spent crafting the right personality for EME meant that customer response was swift and positive.
"When we sent out surveys asking for feedback on the new chatbot, customers seemed to love it," he says. "It was so popular that by the end of the year, it accounted for 60 percent of customer interactions on digital channels."
As well as its website and mobile applications, Mutua Madrileña has integrated EME with Google Assistant. Digital channels are now an increasingly useful and important point of contact for customers, who no longer have to wait until office hours to resolve minor issues. This has helped to position digital channels as an increasingly important first point of contact for customers. With EME up and running successfully, Mutua Madrileña has turned its attention to other Google Cloud technologies such as Cloud Vision API for automatic image recognition and BigQuery and Looker Studio for analytics solutions.
"It's like I said at the start," says Juan. "We didn't enter into this project lightly. We wanted a long term partner who could deliver solutions to us on an ongoing basis. With Google Cloud, we found that."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Mutua Madrileña
Founded in 1930, Mutua Madrileña is one of Spain’s largest insurance companies providing automobile, life, health, and accident policies as well as pension and investment funds.
About everis
everis, an NTT DATA company, provides business and strategy solutions, application development and maintenance, and outsourcing services in all sectors across Europe, the United States, and Latin America.