NICE Provides the Standard with Enlightened Experience

The Standard Insurance Company provides insurance, of course, but the Portland, Ore., company also offers retirement products and investment services for individuals and businesses.

As the company grew, it, like other insurers, looked to automation to help provide efficient customer service without continually adding customer service agents. The challenge was that the company added technologies on an ad hoc basis, leaving it with a number of point solutions that didn’t always communicate with each other, according to Sarah Ross, senior director of contact center operations.

“We had not made a significant update to our contact center technology in more than 10 years,” Ross explains. “We had been making some enhancements along the way but not reimagining what a [new] platform could do for us.”

So the insurer wanted to find one integrated solution that would serve the company’s contact center needs. The company was already using NICE as one of its point solutions, and though it looked at other companies, it chose NICE due to a combination of the technology and the team behind the technology, according to Ross.

“It was the way that they think about the future and leverage AI to drive positive outcomes. Anytime I hear their leadership speak, they are future-focused, and they’re thinking about AI in an optimistic and yet really strategic way,” Ross says.

Another factor that NICE had in its favor was that it brought the entire team that would be working on the Standard account to all meetings, phone calls, conferences, etc.

But perhaps the most critical element in choosing the NICE solution was that employees would be comfortable with it, according to Ross. “Our employees can be the toughest customers about the tools that we use. Making sure they were part of the process was important in getting us to where we are today.”

The Standard went with the NICE CXone platform at the beginning of 2023. NICE Workforce Management, Quality Management, Interaction Analytics, and Feedback Management were part of the initial rollout. But the feature that has produced the most outstanding results to date, according to Ross, has been Enlighten Autopilot, which went live in February of this year.

“It’s probably the first and most significant customer-facing AI that we’ve rolled out,” Ross says. “Autopilot is so transformative from the standpoint of where we had been.”

Enlighten Autopilot is a virtual contact center agent that aims to replicate the experience of speaking with the company’s best human agent. The solution identifies and automates the most frequent interaction types, following conversation flows that are automatically updated based on optimal resolutions and customer sentiment. Autopilot also accesses journey context and preferences from previous interactions to improve the customer experience.

“We had a lot of learning up front, but even with that, in our first three months, we had a 10 percent containment rate in our [interactive voice response system]; we had a 92 percent customer satisfaction rate and a customer effort score of 96 percent,” Ross says, calling the last metric the most significant because such high scores are rare and reflect the customer’s entire IVR experience.

The Standard hopes to push those metrics even higher in the future, Ross says. “Part of our focus moving forward is to have some structure and governance in place to be able to look at the data on a regular basis and find ways to drive that containment rate up even higher.”

To do so, the Standard wants to ensure that the right elements are in place for self-service while still making it easy to talk to a human agent when necessary, Ross says. 

The Payoff

Since it started using NICE's Enlighten Autopilot, the Standard has seen the following results:

• a 92 percent customer satisfaction rate;
• a 96 percent customer effort score; and
• a more than 10 percent containment rate for calls that are fully self-service, without involving an agent.