Mutual Insurance Firm Deflects 90% of Customer Issues with Customer Service Chatbots

The story of Teppo, Finland's most famous chatbot.

Turva uses JennyBot to build Teppo, a chatbot they can easily control to offer their customers 24/7 customer service.

363%

Increase in Chat Opening Hours

Teppo the chatbot allows Turva to serve customers via chat 24/7.

Hours Saved per Month

As a result of chatbot automation, human agent time is reallocated for other tasks.

2040

Conversations automated on average

Every month, Teppo handles 2040 out of 2400 customer conversations on average, so humans don't have to.

The Background: About Turva

Keskinäinen Vakuutusyhtiö Turva (Turva) is a mutual insurance company. Turva's products cover all accident insurance types, and they act as a broker for statutory employee pension and voluntary life and pension insurance policies. The majority of their customers are households, associations and small to medium-sized enterprises.

Turva has 37 offices throughout Finland and employs over 300 insurance professionals. Their main office is located in Tampere. Turva is the Finnish for "safe", and Turva’s values are responsibility, straightforwardness, and they state: “Smile, you’re safe with Turva.”

The Need: Provide 24/7 Customer Service with an Effective AI Chatbot

Turva found that more of their customers want to use self-service support options, such as chat. Customers and potential customers are also increasingly sending requests outside of office hours, when Turva's live support is closed.

Liisa-Maria Koivuniemi and Jenni Holmen, who develop customer experiences at Turva, needed to rethink how to best serve Turva's existing and prospective customers. They realised that automatically serving their audience 24/7 with a chatbot was the solution they were looking for.

Turva chose GetJenny after their sister company, LähiTapiola, had automated about 90% of their conversations with GetJenny chatbots.

Liisa-Maria and Jenni wanted a solution where they could control the chatbot so that simple insurance questions should be automated, and to transfer those issues that they definitely wanted handled by a human.

Solution: A Chatbot that Deflects Common Issues so Agents can Focus on Complex Tasks

Turva built the chatbot Teppo using GetJenny's easy-to-use conversational chatbot builder, JennyBot.

Teppo's technical implementation was straightforward. A single line of code on Turva's website brought him to life to serve visitors as the front line for customer service.

Turva's customer service team built Teppo as an extension of their renowned customer service, replicating their brand of personal support and care for the customer. They designed the chatbot to respond with a tone of voice and nuances in dialog which are native to Turva's main operating area, Tampere.

"The most important thing was to create the same personal touch and feel via chat that is noteworthy in our face-to face service. We also wanted to create a personality behind the chat and that is how 'Teppo' was born," Liisa-Maria explains.

Creating our famous chatbot Teppo using GetJenny gave us an excellent new way to serve our customers.

Liisa-Maria Koivuniemi

Development Manager for Customer Tools & Development

The Result: Chatbot Solves 86% of Issues on the First Month

Teppo the chatbot now takes care of most of the easy questions. His human colleagues at Turva can now focus on more complex issues, giving each customer with a critical need more attention and a lower response time.

JennyBot follows the GetJenny Human-directed AI approach and has allowed the human team at Turva to use their expertise to control the questions they want Teppo to answer, and those issues they'd rather have transferred to a customer service agent.

This has allowed them to control their brand story and presence, even when Teppo has made a mistake.

Liisa-Maria summarizes Turva's experience of using Teppo, "Creating our famous chatbot Teppo using GetJenny gave us an excellent new way to serve our customers. Teppo is a colorful new member of our team and helps us serve our customers 24/7. Teppo has proved to be a trailblazer into a future where humans and technology can help each other. He has decreased routine tasks from customer service and given three of his human colleagues a new position as Bot Whisperers."

In Numbers: Teppo in 12 Months


What Changed	Change per month	Explanation
Chat Opening Hours	Increased 363% (522 hours)	Live Chat was open only 08-17, Mon-Fri. Teppo now provides 24/7 support.
Time Efficiencies in Customer Service Team	Because of chatbot Teppo 73 hours of agent time can be reallocated.	Chatbot takes care of 1100 chats. One chat takes 4 minutes on average.
Customer Service Automation (bot deflected customer issues)	Before Chatbot: 0% Month One: 86% Month Six: 87% Month Twelve: 90%	Teppo has automated 85% conversations on average since it started in September 2018
Chat conversations with a human agent	Before Chatbot: 100% After Chatbot: ~15%	Turva receives ~2400 chat conversations per month

Lead Generation

Teppo also contributes to lead generation. He transfers interested customers to a human agent when there’s one available and directs leads to a “request a quote” form outside of chat opening hours.

Image: Teppo greets you when you go onto Turva's website.

Turva's chatbot, Teppo, engages visitors on their website.

Future Plans

Turva’s customer service team wants to keep teaching Teppo to be the best front line in chatting with customers as he can be. "We want to maintain a good level of answers, keep developing Teppo's personality and stay up-to-date with our answers to best serve our customers the way they expect," says Jenni.

Contributors

Liisa-Maria Koivuniemi

Liisa-Maria is a Development Manager for Customer Service Tools & Development at Keskinäinen Vakuutusyhtiö Turva. She manages streamlining Turva's customer service with lean strategies, robotics and mobile solutions. One of her primary responsibilities is to pinpoint tasks in teams which could be performed by a robot and sourcing solutions that eliminate these tasks for her colleagues, making their work easier and more fulfilling.