New Digital Platform for AXA

RingCentral have announced that AXA is using RingCentral Engage Digital.

This is a platform that manages every digital interaction with customers, to revolutionize its digital customer service offering.

The new platform and approach has led to:

• A 50% month-on-month increase in digital interactions,
• 10x increase in case resolution,
• 50% reduction in time to reach a resolution

AXA, which has 107 million customers in 61 countries, realized that modern customers prefer using digital channels to engage with the company’s services.

In response, the company embraced new digital channels with the sole aim of delivering frictionless service and support that truly puts customer needs first.

AXA has now incorporated Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat, and WhatsApp messaging services into the customer journey, with plans to add chatbots in the future. Now, when a customer Googles or visits the company’s main contact page, they can get in touch four different ways beyond voice, whereas two years ago, customers could only contact AXA via telephone.

Making digital customer service great for customers and agents

But simply adding channels is not enough to deliver a great experience for customers or agents.  Customer service agents need to be able to engage with customers in them, and review previous interactions, wherever they took place, in one place, as part of their customer identities.

The RingCentral digital customer engagement platform automatically recognizes over 70 languages across all channels. It then leverages an AI-based smart routing engine so agents can efficiently manage customer interactions across all digital channels via a single interface. Plus, it automatically merges customer identities across channels so agents see a complete view of the customer and can easily understand the historical context.

“The previous customer service solution we were using didn’t provide any context of previous communication, so agents had no insight into interactions with the customer,” explains Sarina Blatter, head of back-office customer care for AXA Switzerland.

Christoph Schröder, head of front office customer care for AXA Switzerland, expands. “Our agents had to search each digital channel to see if a customer had written a message or a comment on a Facebook post, for example. It was painful and difficult to track the interactions.”

A single dashboard for all customer interactions

Today, AXA’s agents appreciate the ability to handle all digital channels through a single interface, giving them an easy-to-use solution that enables them to help customers better and more quickly.

When customers make contact on one of the digital channels, the message pops up in an agent’s RingCentral Engage Digital dashboard.

Agents can immediately answer questions but have time to provide answers if multiple messages come in at once.

This is far different from handling customer service on the phone, where agents can only respond to one customer at a time and are expected to provide answers to any question immediately.

In addition, the single dashboard eliminates the need for agents to switch applications or screens, and makes it easier for them to find and provide answers to previously asked questions.

When AXA started using RingCentral Engage Digital in 2018, its customer service team handled about 100 messages per month. Twelve months later,  AXA’s customer service handles about 4,000 messages a month – and that is increasing rapidly. RingCentral Engage Digital has significantly improved agent productivity with a ten-fold increase in case resolutions and 50% drop in the time taken to reach a resolution.

Harald Felgner, digital experience designer, UX innovation for AXA Switzerland, concludes with this thought: “Social media messaging services represent the next paradigm of interactions with customers. These types of interactions are a game changer. Without a solution like RingCentral Engage Digital, it wouldn’t have been possible for our company to enable one-to-one interactions with customers on so many touchpoints.”

Author: Robyn Coppell