ushur.com
Open in
urlscan Pro
2606:4700:20::681a:81f
Public Scan
Submitted URL: https://hello.ushur.com/api/mailings/click/PMRGSZBCHI2DGMBUGI2CYITVOJWCEORCNB2HI4DTHIXS65LTNB2XELTDN5WS62LSNFZWQLLMNFTGK...
Effective URL: https://ushur.com/irish-life-ushur-email-routing-case-study/
Submission: On April 24 via manual from IN — Scanned from DE
Effective URL: https://ushur.com/irish-life-ushur-email-routing-case-study/
Submission: On April 24 via manual from IN — Scanned from DE
Form analysis 1 forms found in the DOM
POST https://forms.hsforms.com/submissions/v3/public/submit/formsnext/multipart/4259971/be3be870-5dcc-4933-882a-030d49455ef2
<form id="hsForm_be3be870-5dcc-4933-882a-030d49455ef2" method="POST" accept-charset="UTF-8" enctype="multipart/form-data" novalidate=""
action="https://forms.hsforms.com/submissions/v3/public/submit/formsnext/multipart/4259971/be3be870-5dcc-4933-882a-030d49455ef2"
class="hs-form-private hsForm_be3be870-5dcc-4933-882a-030d49455ef2 hs-form-be3be870-5dcc-4933-882a-030d49455ef2 hs-form-be3be870-5dcc-4933-882a-030d49455ef2_f5bcce31-e626-4c40-8482-4a79295d373c hs-form stacked"
target="target_iframe_be3be870-5dcc-4933-882a-030d49455ef2" data-instance-id="f5bcce31-e626-4c40-8482-4a79295d373c" data-form-id="be3be870-5dcc-4933-882a-030d49455ef2" data-portal-id="4259971"
data-test-id="hsForm_be3be870-5dcc-4933-882a-030d49455ef2">
<div class="hs_email hs-email hs-fieldtype-text field hs-form-field"><label id="label-email-be3be870-5dcc-4933-882a-030d49455ef2" class="" placeholder="Enter your " for="email-be3be870-5dcc-4933-882a-030d49455ef2"><span></span></label>
<legend class="hs-field-desc" style="display: none;"></legend>
<div class="input"><input id="email-be3be870-5dcc-4933-882a-030d49455ef2" name="email" required="" placeholder="Email*" type="email" class="hs-input" inputmode="email" autocomplete="email" value=""></div>
</div>
<div class="hs_submit hs-submit">
<div class="hs-field-desc" style="display: none;"></div>
<div class="actions"><input type="submit" class="hs-button primary large" value="Subscribe"></div>
</div><input name="hs_context" type="hidden"
value="{"embedAtTimestamp":"1713989213173","formDefinitionUpdatedAt":"1704817420306","lang":"en","renderRawHtml":"true","userAgent":"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/124.0.0.0 Safari/537.36","pageTitle":"Irish Life took a fresh look at customer engagement | Ushur","pageUrl":"https://ushur.com/irish-life-ushur-email-routing-case-study/","isHubSpotCmsGeneratedPage":false,"formTarget":"#hbspt-form-f5bcce31-e626-4c40-8482-4a79295d373c","rumScriptExecuteTime":2969.6000003814697,"rumTotalRequestTime":3397.7000007629395,"rumTotalRenderTime":3427.6000003814697,"rumServiceResponseTime":428.1000003814697,"rumFormRenderTime":29.899999618530273,"connectionType":"4g","firstContentfulPaint":0,"largestContentfulPaint":0,"locale":"en","timestamp":1713989213306,"originalEmbedContext":{"portalId":"4259971","formId":"be3be870-5dcc-4933-882a-030d49455ef2","region":"na1","target":"#hbspt-form-f5bcce31-e626-4c40-8482-4a79295d373c","isBuilder":false,"isTestPage":false,"isPreview":false,"isMobileResponsive":true},"correlationId":"f5bcce31-e626-4c40-8482-4a79295d373c","renderedFieldsIds":["email"],"captchaStatus":"NOT_APPLICABLE","emailResubscribeStatus":"NOT_APPLICABLE","isInsideCrossOriginFrame":false,"source":"forms-embed-1.5064","sourceName":"forms-embed","sourceVersion":"1.5064","sourceVersionMajor":"1","sourceVersionMinor":"5064","allPageIds":{},"_debug_embedLogLines":[{"clientTimestamp":1713989213274,"level":"INFO","message":"Retrieved pageContext values which may be overriden by the embed context: {\"pageTitle\":\"Irish Life took a fresh look at customer engagement | Ushur\",\"pageUrl\":\"https://ushur.com/irish-life-ushur-email-routing-case-study/\",\"userAgent\":\"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/124.0.0.0 Safari/537.36\",\"isHubSpotCmsGeneratedPage\":false}"},{"clientTimestamp":1713989213275,"level":"INFO","message":"Retrieved countryCode property from normalized embed definition response: \"DE\""}]}"><iframe
name="target_iframe_be3be870-5dcc-4933-882a-030d49455ef2" style="display: none;"></iframe>
</form>Text Content
Manage Cookie Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store
and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us
to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not
consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and
functions.
Functional Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose
of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber
or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a
communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of
storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical
purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous
statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of
your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party,
information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to
identify you.
Marketing Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send
advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for
similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage {vendor_count} vendors Read more about
these purposes
Accept Deny View preferences Save preferences View preferences
Cookie Policy Privacy Policy {title}
CXAPlatform
Back
PLATFORM
Platform Overview
Ushur Studio
AI Studio
PRODUCTS
Conversational Apps™
Invisible App™
Invisible Portal™
SmartMail™
Intelligent Document Automation
CAPABILITIES
Security & Compliance
Insights & Analytics
APIs & Integrations
Community
University
Solutions
Back
INDUSTRIES
Healthcare Automation
Insurance Automation
Banking & Financial Services Automation
USE CASES
Email Triage
RFP & Quote
IVR Deflection
Two-Way Texting
Automated Surveys
Sales Enablement
Claims Process
FNOL Process
SOLUTIONS
Medicaid Plan Population Health
Commercial Plan Population Health
Medicare Plan Population Health
Medicaid Redetermination
Severe Weather Alerts
CustomersResources
Back
RESOURCES
All Resources
Analyst Relations
Blog
Customer Stories
Events
Overviews
Videos
Webinars
Whitepapers
FEATURED CONTENT
Webinar
Future of Finance: Digital Customer Contact Gathering and Paperless SignupView
Webinar
Company
Back
COMPANY
About Us
Awards
Careers
Contact Us
Partner Program
Press & News
Support
Ushur Community
Ushur University
TOP HEADLINES
Ushur Business Leader Survey Shows Regulated Industries Rapidly Adopting AI
Ushur Achieves ISO 27001 Certification for Its AI-Powered Customer Experience
Automation Platform
Ushur and Five9 Announce Strategic Partnership to Make Building Self-Service
Customer Experiences Quick and Easy
1 2 3 … 9 Next »
Request a demo
Get a Free Trial
Request a Demo
IRISH LIFE TOOK A FRESH LOOK AT CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT
SOME COMPANIES SURVIVE BY REINVENTING THEMSELVES FROM THE GROUND UP. OTHERS
THRIVE BY STICKING TO THEIR CORE VALUES. IRISH LIFE IS A GOOD EXAMPLE OF THE
SECOND TYPE. FOUNDED IN 1939 WITH A FOCUS ON LIFE INSURANCE AND INVESTMENT,
IRISH LIFE TODAY SERVES 1.3 MILLION CUSTOMERS WITH SERVICES THAT HAVE GROWN TO
INCLUDE PENSION, SAVINGS AND RETIREMENT PLANS.
CUSTOMER STORY
Irish Life Assurance plc, commonly known as Irish Life, is an Irish life
assurance and pensions company. Irish Life has been part of the Great-West
Lifeco group of companies since 2013, when the Irish Government sold the
business. Prior to 2012, Irish Life was part of Permanent TSB.
Irish Life Website
The results we got were phenomenal, and we hadn't written a line of code. We’d
never seen anyone who could do that. From our standpoint, Ushur were the only
ones out there truly doing something different.
Ken LynchHead of Information Technology
Corporate Business
Irish Life
Eighty years later, its mission hasn’t changed: “To help people build better
futures.”
“It’s core to everything we do,” says Irish Life’s head of information services,
Ken Lynch. “Every time we look at systems or evaluate a solution, every time we
consider a business problem, or examine an opportunity, we ask ourselves how we
can help people build better futures.”
That commitment to customer service extends to the way Irish Life handles
customer email.
Irish Life’s corporate division receives hundreds of thousands of emails every
year, from both internal and external sources. Until recently, each was opened
and read by a member of Irish Life’s email-triage team, who would index
(classify) the email based on Key Business Indicators (KBIs) such as membership
numbers or insurance-scheme identifiers, and forward it to the appropriate
operations area. There the email would be opened and read again, and finally
sent to an individual case manager for resolution. On average, each query took
2.5 days to resolve.
It wasn’t a hugely efficient process,” Lynch says. “We thought, if we could get
a product to ingest those queries, understand what it is our customers want, and
send them to the right area, we could serve these requests much more
effectively.”
The trick was finding software that could do the job. It needed to be able to
make sense of complex emails about insurance and pensions. It had to figure out
what customers wanted, and route their email to the departments that could best
help them. And it had to work without much guidance. “We wanted to be able to
take raw data and drop it into the system, and have it understand what was going
on,” Lynch says.
It was a tall order. To be honest, Lynch thought it might be impossible. Irish
Life had looked into natural language processing years earlier and had been
distinctly unimpressed. Every AI platform they reviewed in the past required a
massive investment in IT and development.
“They promised a lot,” Lynch says. But when we dug into the details, we realized
we’d have to write an awful lot of code to get the results we needed. That
wasn’t the direction we wanted to go. We didn’t want to hire a lot of technical
people to write a new codebase and revise it every time the software provider
issued an upgrade. So we walked away from the whole idea.”
That was where they left it until Lynch met with Ushur on a trip to Silicon
Valley. Ushur billed itself as a complete solution for intelligent automation,
designed for industries with a high volume of customer contacts, like insurance,
logistics and financial services. It offered conversational AI that could
understand what customers needed and what to do next, along with a SmartMail™
feature for data extraction, which seemed perfectly suited to Irish Life’s KBIs.
An intuitive visual builder and robust integrations with backend customer
systems rounded out the proposition.
Lynch was intrigued but skeptical. “I questioned whether what they claimed they
could do was even possible,” he recalls. But he took Ushur up on their offer of
a six-week pilot.
Ushur’s customer success team quickly swung into action. It created a dedicated
instance in a Dublin data center to comply with GDPR requirements, then worked
with Irish Life’s IT to integrate Irish Life’s work management platform, Midas,
using Midas’s native APIs. The integration enabled Irish Life to push incoming
emails through Ushur’s workflow for KBI extraction and email classification.
Ushur then inserted the extracted and classified values into Midas using a
simple API call for each work item.
Lynch was impressed with Ushur’s agility and responsiveness—something he hadn’t
expected in a company based thousands of miles away.
“We thought, ‘We’re here in Europe. How are the time differences going to work?
How are we going to operate?’ But the team working with us has switched over to
an Irish schedule, and we never miss a beat.”
“The other thing that's been truly impressive is how fast Ushur develops the
product. As we gave feedback about things we'd like to see, the speed with which
they were able to make changes was truly remarkable.”
Irish Life trained Ushur’s AI using hundreds of thousands of emails previously
categorized by human reviewers (roughly 5,000 per category). To protect customer
privacy and ensure compliance with GDPR, Ushur used its proprietary Data
Anonymizer tool to remove all personally identifiable information (PII) from the
emails before training and categorization. Irish Life then used Ushur’s
SmartMail™ data extraction tool to create defined rules within a workflow to
extract and return KBIs, which Ushur then populated in Midas using Irish Life’s
APIs.
Right away, Ushur’s AI achieved 80% accuracy — comparable to human
reviewers. And it only got better from there. The more email Ushur’s AI
processed, the more accurate it became.
“The results we got were phenomenal, and we hadn't written a line of code,”
Lynch says. “We’d never seen anyone who could do that. From our standpoint,
Ushur were the only ones out there truly doing something different.”
With the success of the pilot, Irish Life deployed Ushur across its corporate
division. Irish Life now auto-triages 70% of its incoming emails with Ushur and
expects to reach 100% soon, at an accuracy rate of 95%.
Ushur improved Irish Life’s response time as well. Previously, it took Irish
Life agents between 3 hours and 2.5 days to process enquiries and requests. Now,
with Ushur, indexing takes less than a second and requires about 40% fewer
resources. And since Ushur works 24/7, a backlog never piles up over weekends or
holidays.
“The benefit you get from technology is that it reads and understands things in
the same way every time,” Lynch says. “Whereas different humans can read and
assess them in a slightly different way. Once you’ve trained the AI, it applies
the same rules in the same way every time. It’s hard for a human to concentrate
on menial tasks hour after hour. It’s not hard for the machine.”
Another benefit of automation is that Irish Life can reassign staff who
previously worked triage to more complex, value-adding jobs, Lynch says.
“Our team are all intelligent, college-educated people. Our objective over the
next few years is to automate their more mechanical tasks so they can focus on
strategic delivery.”
The next step will be providing straight through processing on certain customer
tasks by gathering data from customers using Ushur’s Invisible App™, a secure,
1-to-1 communication channel powered by conversational AI.
“Right now,” Lynch says, “if someone sends us a query, Ushur quickly indexes it
and routes it to the right person within our organization. But that person might
not open the query for eight hours. Only then might they realize they’re missing
data they need to resolve the customer’s problem. So they write the customer an
email, and maybe the customer doesn’t see it for a day. By the time they write
back, another day has passed. That’s not only inefficient for us as a company,
it’s a poor experience for the customer.”
“With Invisible App™, Ushur would understand what the customer needed and
instantly respond with a request for the missing data. We could send that
response in an email or a text, and the customer could then use Ushur’s
Invisible App™ to quickly and efficiently respond to us. We believe we can
remove a great deal of delay, both for ourselves and our customers, with
the Invisible App™. It could be an incredible improvement.”
Ushur’s business value goes far beyond streamlining workflows, Lynch says. It’s
inspired them to take a fresh look at the way they communicate with customers.
“Often in the insurance industry we direct people towards customer portals to
resolve their queries. But what we found working with Ushur is that you need to
think about how the customer wants to interact with you. Think of yourself,
think of your mother, or one of your relatives, and how they would try to
interact with big companies. What we’ve seen with Ushur is that it's all about
customer ease.”
“Everyone has a smartphone now, whether they’re young or retired, and they feel
comfortable using text-based channels of communication like SMS or WhatsApp.
Working with Ushur is helping us rethink whether we should be pointing everyone
to a portal or an app. Maybe it could be even simpler. Maybe you could simply
communicate in plain text using Invisible App™, given that’s that’s how a lot of
people want to interact with companies right now.”
“We've only started looking at that aspect of customer ease, and Ushur has been
fantastic about bringing us to the start of that journey.”
SUCCESS BY THE NUMBERS
70%
of incoming emails auto-triaged
95%
email categorization accuracy rate
40%
fewer resources required
DOWNLOAD THIS CUSTOMER STORY
Download
READY TO GET STARTED?
See it in action
READY TO LEVEL UP YOUR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES?
Explore the Ushur Platform, or contact sales now and start improving and
automating customer experiences with incredible self-service options. You can
contact us to design a custom solution for your business.
Request a demo
USHUR COMMUNITY
Join a community of Ushurites, learning and improving the best Customer
Experience Automation platform available.
Join Community
NEWSLETTER
Join our newsletter and stay up to date on the latest thought leadership and
industry content.
© 2024 Ushur • All Rights Reserved • Terms of Use • Legal
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AUTOMATION
CXA ManifestoCXA for Insurance
PLATFORM
Ushur StudioAI StudioConversational Apps™Invisible App™Invisible
Portal™SmartMail™Intelligent Document Automation™Security & ComplianceInsights &
AnalyticsAPIs & Integrations
SOLUTIONS
Insurance AutomationHealthcare AutomationBanking & Financial Services
AutomationEmail TriageCall DeflectionRFP & Quoting AutomationTwo-Way
TextingSales EnablementAutomated SurveysAutomated Claims ProcessingFNOL Process
Automation
RESOURCES
Analyst RelationsBlogCustomer StoriesEventsOverviewsVideosWebinarsWhitepapers
COMPANY
About UshurAwardsCareersNews & PressPartner ProgramSupportContact UsUshur
CommunityUshur University
Manage consent
×
We Value Your Privacy
Settings
NextRoll, Inc. ("NextRoll") and our 18 advertising partners use cookies and
similar technologies on this site and use personal data (e.g., your IP address).
If you consent, the cookies, device identifiers, or other information can be
stored or accessed on your device for the purposes described below. You can
click "Allow All" or "Decline All" or click Settings above to customise your
consent regarding the purposes and features for which your personal data will be
processed and/or the partners with whom you will share personal data.
NextRoll and our advertising partners process personal data to: ● Store and/or
access information on a device; ● Create a personalised content profile; ●
Select personalised content; ● Personalised advertising, advertising
measurement, audience research and services development; ● Services development.
For some of the purposes above, our advertising partners: ● Use precise
geolocation data. Some of our partners rely on their legitimate business
interests to process personal data. View our advertising partners if you wish to
provide or deny consent for specific partners, review the purposes each partner
believes they have a legitimate interest for, and object to such processing.
If you select Decline All, you will still be able to view content on this site
and you will still receive advertising, but the advertising will not be tailored
for you. You may change your setting whenever you see the Manage consent
preferences on this site.
Decline All
Allow All
Manage consent preferences