Phonebots for DKV Seguros: ERGO starts international rollout of voice technologies

Since the end of April, the first Spanish-speaking phonebots have been in use at ERGO subsidiary DKV Seguros – the first time that ERGO phonebots have been deployed in customer communications outside the German market. This means that the global rollout of proven innovative technologies announced in Ambition 2025 has now been launched. But ERGO doesn’t have its sights set only on its own services – in future, the helpful phonebots will be offered to third parties too.
 

Voice assistants have become successfully established at ERGO in recent years. At the end of 2020, around thirty voice solutions were already in use throughout the ERGO Group, and thousands of customer conversations are now conducted with them every day. Pursuing the aspiration of its new Strategy Programme, ERGO is now starting the international rollout of proven voice technology, whose wealth of learnt knowledge is now also immediately available to other insurers and across various classes of business.

Since late April, DKV Seguros has been using two Spanish-speaking phonebots for the first time. Upon request, one of the bots helps existing customers make changes to the payment frequency of policies. A second bot automatically triggers the despatch of insurance cards, doing so entirely without human participation.
“ERGO is increasingly developing from a traditional insurer into a tech company. This is also demonstrated by the response in the market. Here, we’re seeing strong demand for our voice technologies – on the one hand from our colleagues in the international companies but, on the other, also from other companies”, reports Mark Klein, Chief Digital Officer and Chairman of the Board of Management of ERGO Digital Ventures AG.

Julian Nuño, Head of Transformation at DKV Seguros, is also happy about the launch in Spain: “We’re very pleased with our phonebots. They allow us to provide a seamless and maintenance-free customer experience in relation to requests for duplicate cards and changes to the payment term. This is DKV’s first foray into this type of automation and it will help us to better understand this technology, both in terms of interaction with our processes and our staff and in terms of customer acceptance. This means that we’ll be able to make the next phonebots even easier for our customers.”

For the phonebots, ERGO has developed a multichannel-enabled conversational AI platform on which the various chat, telephony and smart-speaker providers are orchestrated. Besides the technologies of well-known tech giants like Google, Amazon and Microsoft, ERGO is also backing the technologies and capabilities of agile start-ups. This association, coupled with ERGO’s own technical insurance and customer expertise, led to the rapid and scalable development of multichannel-enabled voice assistants. Today, the phonebots in use at ERGO can already correctly identify around 95% of what users say.

“Third parties can also use our pre-trained insurance phonebots productively from day one – and can do so without great implementation effort and expense and without significant fixed costs”, adds Gregor Wiest, Head of Innovation & Digital Transformation at ERGO Group AG. To facilitate the sale of innovative technology to third companies, ERGO is marketing the phonebots via the nexsurance tech platform.