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The Critical Role of Cognitive Email Automation in Customer Support: Generali Case Study

 Email Automation in Customer Support

A professional spends 28% of the workday in reading and answering through emails per a study by McKinsey. Such manual handling not only slows down the email response but also creates email triage, which is one of the key reasons of customer churn.

Generali’s customer support reps encountered the same problem where delayed processes presented a growing challenge for them. The Swiss insurer’s email inbox was a farrago of customer emails multiplying in every minute. 

Traditionally, email triage has been a manual, repetitive, and time-consuming process. Classifying emails into predefined categories (Service Request, Complaint, Enquiry, etc.) and routing them to the concerned department have alone made job descriptions for full-time employees. 

In addition to being a distinguished sluggish process, more difficult was to derive valuable insights from unstructured datasets that customer interactions presented. Many important patterns, links, or relationships got overlooked all the time.

To solve those problems underlying manual email triage, Generali marshaled AI-powered email automation solutions to help its customer support agents.

It deployed a Cognitive Email Automation bot that 

  • Reduced the long response times associated with recurring customer email requests. 
  • Allowed its support staff to cultivate personalized customer experiences and responsiveness. 
  • Saved them hours to exercise their intuition, judgment, empathy, creativity, and social skills more proactively, instead of forwarding emails all day. 

What is Cognitive Email Automation?

Cognitive email automation is technology bringing intelligence to content-intensive and repetitive customer support processes. 

Cognitive Email Automation bots receive customer emails and precisely understand even the complex requests in their language using advanced Natural Language Processing. They instantly dig into their knowledge base to categorize the incoming emails and triage them to the right team with the appropriate responses. A support agent can choose to directly send the bot’s response to the customer or modify it first. The bots automatically learn from every interaction and get smarter with time. Customer experience gets more enhanced and delightful along the way.

Why Your Customer Support Strategy Can’t Ignore Cognitive Email Automation

The AI-powered Cognitive Email Automation bots are inherently scalable and augment the cognitive and interactive capabilities of the customer support teams.

They facilitate the agents’ decision-making abilities by making the right information accessible to them at the right time. They free up the agents to employ their unique human strengths for more complex, interactive, and problem-solving tasks by automating the repetitive task of email triage. The bots embody intelligence to complement the agents’ and help them interact in more novel ways.

Leveraging such Cognitive Email Automation helps businesses re-engineer their customer experience for greater speed, flexibility, scalability, personalization, and decision-making.

This very AI-enabled agility has helped Generali achieve a 90% faster email routing, improve cost-efficiency by 75%, and individualize customer experience in real-time.