The insurance company has chosen the expert.ai Platform to read, understand and send over 1 million emails a year by leveraging natural language processing
Established in Spain in 1834, Generali is one of the leading insurance providers in the Spanish market, with over 1,600 branches and a network of more than 10,000 agents and brokers across the country. Generali’s products range from life insurance and savings and pension plans to car, home, accident, and death insurance, etc.
“Innovation is part of our DNA and a driver of growth for our Group,” explained Pablo Díez García, Smart Automation Manager at Generali. “This allows us to keep looking for ways of being more efficient in terms of our business processes and support systems, enabling us to offer our clients and brokers the best possible service”.
The work of the Smart Automation Team is focused on the continuous search for new models to find and exploit new automation opportunities, now and in the future. Its work involves projects that use technologies such as RPA, OCR, AI/ML, Artificial Vision and Process Mining, in view of their application in the various departments across the company.
The main objective of the project was to improve operational efficiency. “We wanted to optimize our processes to reduce the workload of those employees who receive and have to sort emails received from different sources every day,” commented Pablo Díez.
From the start, it was obvious that the greatest issue was the large number of folders with very small differences between them. The challenge was having to look into the details of each one. Therefore, the company decided to adopt an artificial intelligence (AI) solution capable of sorting items automatically but also effectively and cost-efficiently. In other words, a natural language processing (NLP) solution.
After adequately testing various possible solutions, Generali finally decided to opt for the expert.ai hybrid AI Platform. As Pablo Díez explained: “It was the platform that obtained the best results, even if other solutions seemed to be faster, they were prone to significant errors, and this is something we wanted to avoid.”
Expert.ai natural language processing solution has a hybrid approach that combines machine learning and symbolic AI, enabling the system to understand and process human language.
In Generali’s case, expert.ai’s Platform reads and understands every email received and automatically sends it to the relevant folder, increasing the efficiency of Generali staff by limiting repetitive tasks and improving the service offered to customers.
Currently, Generali’s Smart Automation Team uses the expert.ai Platform in three different contexts:
- Accident Insurance: the system that sorts the emails and any attached documents allows the Electronic Document Management department to deal with multiple mailboxes. The sorting system redirects each email based on subject, message content or attachment.
- Broker Notes: the system reads the Notes from brokers, understands them and sorts them in 3 different categories.
- Subscription Centre: the system reads the emails in the Subscription Centre’s multiple mailboxes, understands their content and redirects them appropriately.
- Customer Channel: the system reads the emails sent to the Customer Services department’s mailboxes and, based on the messages, forwards them to the relevant Customer Services inbox.
BENEFITS
Following its implementation, Generali’s AI project has had an immediate and measurable impact. The system is able to process email messages as well as the content of the documents attached in real time, which ultimately allowed Generali to process and sort more than one million emails a year.
“The system is very accurate compared to other technologies we tested,” confirmed Pablo Díez. According to the estimates of Generali’s team, processing accuracy in the different departments where the NLP technology is used is around 80%, a remarkably high percentage for a project of this kind.
“Our Smart Automation department is implementing deep transformation on multiple levels–continued Pablo Díez– proof that at Generali we appreciate technology that can help us operate with more agility and more effectively. The fact that since we started using expert.ai Platform we haven’t stopped finding new application opportunities is a testament to its success”.
