Create a new sales channel through an AI assistant built with Rasa

The Challenge

Helvetia, a leading Swiss insurer, faced increasingly high customer acquisition costs. Employing more staff for sales was driving increasingly small margins, where the cost of smaller policies can exceed insurance premiums.

However, cost savings shouldn’t mean cutting corners to deliver a degraded customer experience. Helvetia were aware of this and sought to handle conversations and engage users proactively in an automated way, without sacrificing quality. The Swiss insurance industry sets the benchmark for data privacy, another absolute requirement.

The Solution

Helvetia decided to build a powerful AI assistant that offers insurance policies to customers, based on the cutting-edge tooling provided by Rasa. The team was able to design conversations that consider the user’s context and understand natural language.

The graphical user interface from the suite of premium tools in Rasa X allowed non-technical team members to improve the assistant and to train it with real user data.

Additionally, Helvetia’s lead developer on the project was able to tweak the machine learning models specifically for their use case, leading to an improvement in customised accuracy. The assistant was deployed safely on-prem and and communicated with customers over text messages.

The Results

The careful implementation and ‘go-live’ interactions with real customers produced incredible results, achieving a conversion rate of selling over 30% more insurance policies via text message. Using Rasa X, the team was able to leverage a wider range of Helvetia employees in non-technical roles to establish excellent customer experience and iterate faster on feedback. The company now plans to expand the AI assistant to more use cases.

Rasa X Enterprise Edition allowed us to significantly reduce the engineering costs of our conversational AI projects. Being in control of our data and where Rasa is deployed is very important for us.

Florian Nägele, Project Manager at Helvetia