GIO is using a digital assistant to help its Australia-based claims teams correctly route work to an offshore centre for processing without breaching local data sharing rules.
Shontel Dashwood, of Suncorp Group.
Named ‘Postie Pat’, the WalkMe-built assistant automates multiple steps required to generate claims correspondence, which is typically compiled by the local team and then executed by offshore operations.
Since its launch, the share of claims correspondence sent to GIO’s outsourced partners has risen from 2.8 percent to 16.4 percent, and it has cut four minutes per letter from the preparation of over 16,000 letters confirming liability for personal injury claims.
According to Shontel Dashwood, performance and delivery manager in Suncorp Group, claims agents in Australia were becoming increasingly “bogged down” by high-volume administrative tasks, such as drafting letters.
Speaking at Gartner IT Symposium on the Gold Coast, Dashwood said: “[The tasks] required lots of manual generation; flipping from screen to screen, from platform to platform.
“It was very time-consuming and, more importantly, it was taking time away from serving our customers.”
Efforts to offload some of the processes onto Suncorp’s outsourced operations centre delivered limited benefits to the claims team due to “cognitive load” of “remembering what they could and couldn’t send” overseas, Dashwood explained.
“And when they had tried previously, it often would come back to them requiring more information,” she said.
“It was an inconsistent way of sending that work off, and we were seeing back and forth between our operations and our claims teams.”
On average, Dashwood said the entire workflow to generate a letter could involve up to three separate touch points per process.
As such, she added, GIO aimed to reduce agents’ cognitive load and ensure “we got it there the first time it was completed.
‘Postie Pat’ is engaged when either GIO or a third party accepts liability. This triggers a bot that auto-selects the correct letter based on the claimant’s state or territory, asks for any missing info, and allows staff to add extras like EFT forms via toggles.
It then pulls data from across the system to generate a compliant letter that is consistent with GIO’s operating procedures and ready for immediate processing.
“Once the claims advisor reviews the information, approves it and presses update, WalkMe automatically generates the activity required to send that information offshore, routing it to the appropriate queue for the letter type,” Dashwood said.
Pat is currently trained on six different letter formats. However, Dashwood noted that GIO has at least 200 letter types across its five insurance schemes, meaning there is still “lots more value to add”.
Teaching best practice
‘Postie Pat’ is one of 89 digital solutions GIO has rolled out since adopting WalkMe last year.
Another is Smart Walk‑Thrus, a guided, on-screen workflow, to support employees’ onboarding.
Fronting the experience is ‘Walter’, a digital assistant who “pops up” with prompts and knowledge articles in real time.
Walter is also housed in GIO’s internal library store for employees’ use as needed.
According to Dashwood, the adoption of Smart Walk‑Thrus and Walter for onboarding aimed to improve what was previously an “inconsistent” experience.
“It’s about making sure that we’re teaching best practice,” she said. We also wanted to increase the competency to get these people in the door and on the tools as quickly as possible.”
In tandem with Walter, GIO has also developed a digital assistant to improve its employees’ compliance observation and quality assurance, giving her the moniker ‘Prudence’.
“We wanted to make sure that we’ll be adhering to our regulatory compliance, but we wanted to do that in a proactive way,” Dashwood said. “Typically, I think quality assurance has been dealt with in a bit of a reactive way.
“Prudence will step in real-time workflow only when a step is about to be missed, and it prevents the person from moving on without completing that required step. [It ensures] adherence is being achieved 100 percent of the time”.
Looking ahead, Dashwood said GIO now has 25 WalkMe use cases it plans to deploy over the next year.
This pipeline has been driven in part by a “cultural shift” within GIO, with Dashwood noting that frontline employees, rather than technology teams, are now actively suggesting use cases for digital agents.
“We’ve got a large pipeline and that just continues to grow every day,” she said.
“We want to continue to expand our use cases and introduce more. We want to embed WalkMe even further into our customer and employee journeys.”
“We’re not looking at this technology to replace any of our people,” she added.
“We’re looking at it to empower our people to do their best work and get better outcomes for our customers.”
Eleanor Dickinson attended Gartner IT Symposium on the Gold Coast as a guest of Gartner.
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