Challenge
Today every business has an email address. And if you’re a financial services organisation with many business sections and over a million clients, that channel can get crowded.
Nedbank Insurance covers clients’ life and other insurance needs and receives thousands of emails about claims, policies, address changes, complaints, queries and potential new clients. Some emails are long; others are short. Many have attachments that must be categorised correctly to simplify processing for back-end teams. There are also unpredictable peaks when for example heavy storms cause inboxes to be bombarded.
With this in mind, Indranil Bandyopadhyay, Head of Business IT Enablement for Nedbank Insurance, suspected that an automated system could solve the problem, and increase operational efficiency and client satisfaction.
‘With the old system, a single person can, on average, process one email every 60 to 300 seconds (three minutes on average). That’s about 160 emails per dedicated resource a day. With email volumes growing, our backlogs were mounting, and we didn’t want this to influence our client service. We knew technology could help us create a more sustainable solution, but we needed the right partner,’ says Bandyopadhyay. ‘Nedbank Insurance had to try a couple of times to get this right and with Synthesis we succeeded.’
Synthesis has been around the block. ‘We have significant experience in using emerging technologies to help organisations transform, but we’ve found there’s something more important than technology: Applying design thinking. We try to define an end-to-end system that is practical and includes all supporting processes. The challenge was interesting and we had to work closely with stakeholders and create a plan with the Nedbank tech team,’ says Marais Neethling, Synthesis AI Evangelist.