STUTTGART, Germany, April 28, 2021 (Newswire) – Last Thursday at the German Digital Awards 2021 organised by Bundesverband Digitale Wirtschaft (BVDW), Gateway, the AI workflow engine, received 2 awards: a bronze for Digital Transformation and a bronze for Digital Commerce, User experience. The German Digital Award is given every year for creative and innovative achievements in 10 categories and 31 sub-categories. Gateway was recognised alongside the innovations from Hamburg Port Authority, H&M, Mercedes Benz and Zalando. The expert jury commended Gateway for its innovation and user experiences, a digital revolution to the current process for insurance claims and repairs.
“I’m truly grateful for the award Gateway received, especially among so many other top-class applicants. It’s a great reassurance that our software is future-proof,” says Markus Stumpp, Managing Director, Innovation Group Fleet & Mobility GmbH.
“We’re delighted to have Gateway recognised for the disruptive nature so soon after its launch. The claim and repair processes are lengthy and overly complicated, we focused on simplifying and bringing them to the 21st century. Gateway provides real-time data and transparency so that there’s no more back and forth emails and calls between the claimant, insurer and the repairer.” says Matthew Whittall, CEO Germany, Innovation Group.
Gateway enables mobile self-service to policyholders and drivers, and integrates with insurer, fleet owner, car manufacturer and repair shop processes to provide a real-time single source of truth. Artificial Intelligence at the core of Gateway drives the claim and repair workflows and notifies all parties involved of the changes and progression. It enables insurance companies to handle the entire claims process end-to-end via a simple online platform. Workshops can simplify calculation, ordering and billing processes that significantly reduce the administrative costs and times. It also presents the never seen levels of transparency, security and data insights in the insurance and repair industries.
Gateway launched in February 2021 in Germany and proved to reduce the average time between the damage report and repair booking from 2-3 days to less than 24 hours. The current pilot phase consists of 2 insurers and over 1100 workshops. “In May we want to activate more partners and gradually drive the digital transformation forward,” said Stumpp. By autumn, more than 40 participating insurers should be able to process their claims via Gateway.
Learn more about Gateway: www.innovation.group/gateway-technology
About Innovation Group
Innovation Group resolves car or home damage and claims on behalf of insurers, fleet companies and carmakers. Through AI workflow engine Gateway, white-label claim specialist teams and integrated repairer network, Innovation Group provides efficiency and cost savings to over 1,200 clients in the US, UK, Germany, Spain, Australia and South Africa. For over the 20 years, Innovation Group has helped its clients deliver on their promise to the policyholders and drivers by processing claims and damage repairs with exceptional customer service and disruptive tech, that can automate the process end-to-end.
To watch the award submission go to: gewinner.deutscherdigitalaward.de/gewinner/digital-commerce-user-experience-usability-conversational-commerce-bronze/gateway-digitale-schadensteuerung
It has been said that data has become the world’s most valuable resource – even more valuable than oil, because of its potential to revolutionise the way we do business. Just as oil and the internal combustion engine revolutionised transportation for every sector and industry, the application of big data to help drive cost savings and improve efficiency is practically limitless in any business environment, when applied creatively.
The state of technology today means that a business’s customers have access to thousands of options when seeking out a product or service, and access to other customer reviews of each business at the click of a mouse. Customer service – as one of the only remaining available avenues for a business to differentiate itself – is at the forefront of the data revolution. Businesses in every sphere of operation are frantically seeking out ways to use the insights gathered from big data, to maintain their competitive edge and retain customer loyalty – and for a large organisation, that means applying data in the contact centre.
Data gleaned from customers is everywhere. In a stock-standard working environment, it is being gathered and recorded in many ways throughout the day, from call recordings and email archives to website enquiries and social media reviews. The contact centre is responsible for generating much of this data, but the difficulty comes in sorting, organising, processing and extrapolating that data into something meaningful – an actionable insight that can tangibly improve the customer experience and the ability of contact centre agents to immediately meet the customers’ specific requirements.
A big part of keeping your customers happy is the ability to predict their needs. That’s why a modern data management system is vital. Automated analysis of voice calls can enhance performance of call centres by measuring and shortening call-waiting times. Speech analytics can offer insights into agents’ ability to reach resolutions to customers’ problems quickly and professionally. Depending on the business involved, a fully digitised contact centre means that many tasks can also be entirely automated, saving precious hours of labour on mundane tasks, like providing order and delivery status updates via phone, or appointment reminders over text or email. It also opens up the option of exploring the utilisation of RPA’s (robotic process automation) to further streamline mundane tasks that don’t have to be performed by live agents.
All of this has one end goal in mind – to personalise the customer experience to never-before-seen levels, while freeing up even more time and resources in the contact centre. Providing agents with instant, updated and highly relevant information on their customers is one of the best ways to accurately anticipate exactly what each caller wants, and to provide it in a way that creates an outstanding customer experience.
Contact centre data management has become so pervasive and multifunctional over the past few years, that many organisations have difficulty grasping all the ways it can streamline their customer service operations. For this reason, it is essential to deal with experienced and knowledgeable providers, who can guide them through the variety of applications available today and to make the right choices regarding the features that would be most valuable to their business and their customers.
At Innovation Group, we have built our success on helping our clients achieve just that. We aim to create and implement cutting-edge digital management systems that bring business processes into greater harmony with people’s lives, to improve the customer experience, save time, and open the possibility for insight and better planning for the future.
Karin Kruger, Operations Director: Innovation Group
While the term design most often conjures up images of objects – from clothing to consumer products to skyscrapers – true design in its most honest form refers to a dynamic process rather than a static end-result. Quite simply, design thinking is the process of observing, researching, experimenting, modelling and testing processes (as well as products), in order to improve them to their maximum potential.
In today’s digital era, with an abundance of information, as well as data collection, storage and processing technology growing in leaps and bounds, more and more enterprises are finding ways to process this data into actionable insights to fulfil their business objectives, and this is just the beginning.
Design thinking is being adopted by every industry imaginable, whether it’s medicine, law, engineering or advertising. Take the humble contact centre (once referred to as the call centre) for example. In today’s contact centres, huge amounts of customer data are generated on a daily basis that, more often than not, goes unused.
With improved data analytics taking centre stage in the business arena, just think of the kind of information that can be gathered, sifted through, and used to increase the customer experience beyond anything possible just a few years ago. What is your clients’ average level of satisfaction? Which customers contacted your company, and why? What is the most frequent complaint, and what is causing it? What is your average turnaround time, and how can it be reduced?
What’s more, the advantages of big data don’t just extend to callers and their complaints. A savvy contact centre will make use of design thinking to not only better “design” the customer experience, but also to improve products, identify operational flaws, drive sales, increase up-sales and cross-sales, and ultimately fatten up their business’s bottom line.
Many companies now employ advanced text and voice-based sentiment analysis, to analyse call centre agent records, identify customer concerns, highlight trends and patterns, and provide early warning capabilities. Many more also cross-reference their call centre data with their transactional data records, providing every contact centre agent with valuable knowledge about the customer. With this information, not only can they provide better customer service, but they can also turn the customer service channels into product research channels, as well as active sales channels. Contact centre records are an untapped resource that can provide valuable insights into how products and services can be improved and differentiated from their competitors.
When a mass of information meets the technology needed to unlock it, the sky is the limit in terms of the strategic advantage it gives businesses. The only challenge that remains is for companies to figure out how to use the information they generate to its maximum potential. For design thinking to provide any real return on investment, the analytics need to drive action, not only insight, and should be the basis of the future CRM strategies that companies employ.
With customers being more efficiently and accurately catered for in every step of their customer journey, and businesses gaining valuable insights into every aspect of their customers’ experience, big data analysis in contact centres is a win-win situation that is set to become the gold standard in CRM, no matter what industry you are in.
Big Data has been a topical issue for a number of years and as the need for integration increases so too does the need for adequate data storage and analytics. Data is a key driver within the Insurance industry as it forms the base on which key underwriting, claim and pricing decisions are made – whether it is new product development, product enhancements, product continuity or premium adjustments. As such, data integrity and accuracy is imperative.
In an industry marred by legacy issues, disparate storage and ineffective system integration the need for data cleansing and analytics is becoming vital to ensure future competitiveness.
But where does this process start?
Current legislation is being driven towards an empowered consumer. This consumer has a variety of choices and options, for which insurance companies must cater. As a result, data cleansing is essential, but it is vital to ensure that cleansed data conforms to a set standard.
The data cleansing process typically involves identifying, correcting and removing corrupt or inaccurate data from a database. In this process, the data to be cleansed needs to be identified. Following this, the necessary data firstly needs to be obtained and archived, and then replaced with current or up-to-date data. The updated data then needs to be standardised. Revisiting validation rules, which is the criteria used in the processing of data, is a necessity.
There have been significant advances in this regard. System solution providers are using validation rules for data capturing of information associated with products and policyholders, using structured processes. High value exists in this unstructured and semi-structured information, as it is an untapped resource for insurance companies.
Contributing to the existing challenge is the fact that, historically, there was no set of pre-existing industry rules. In order to rectify this, industry standards will need to be defined, agreed, formalized and complied with in the future.
In future, data cleansing may not be a major task if validation rules for applications are robust and comprehensive. From the beginning, data cleansing must result in data that can be imported or exported in a standard format. This idea for conformity will be further supported by the incoming Protection of Personal Information Act (POPI) legislation.
The significance of data cleansing cannot be ignored. The overall process may involve a degree of manual intervention to obtain the latest and most up-to-date information from consumers. But the value from this process translates into immediate benefits, such as improved and professional Customer Relationship Management (CRM), accurate premium structures and efficient claims processes.
The effective incorporation of data cleansing and validation rules can be achieved through the establishment of an industry committee. However, the organisations involved in this committee must be open to collaboration with competitors and business-to-business (B2B) partners. In the end, the aim will be the agreement by the industry to data standards at a database level, which will enable data to be secure, with no compromise in data integrity and ultimately a more effective use of data.
