Aviva Increases NPS by 85% and Improves Compliance Using Verint Speech Analytics

Verint, supported by partner Five9, is helping leading U.K. insurance company, Aviva, with a unique and innovative solution to take control of customers “orphaned” from their financial advisor. The goal is to ensure customers receive the outcomes they were led to expect when taking out their investment policies. This leading insurance, wealth, and retirement business is using Verint Speech Analytics to identify and act upon orphaned cases, surfacing critical insights to better understand and remedy the situation.

One particular challenge for Aviva were cases of “orphaned” customers. Anecdotal reports from call centers highlighted an increase in customers being orphaned from their independent financial adviser (IFA). This can be driven by either the customers themselves or their IFA.

When a customer is orphaned, there are a number of implications for customers including:

• Any IFA charges on their policy will stop (a common driver for customers to orphan themselves if they seek to remove the IFA from their policy).
• Other charges on their plan could increase if the IFA had negotiated a special deal for them.
• The customer will not receive future advice, which might be valuable for them, particularly when approaching the key decision points around retirement.
• Withdrawing any money from their plan in the future is on a non-advised basis, which is more onerous for the customer, as the implications of making the wrong decision are potentially more severe.

Aviva takes this process of becoming orphaned very seriously. The organization has a duty to ensure its customers receive the outcomes that they were led to expect when taking out their policies. “We take our regulatory duties and responsibilities to these customers very seriously and have put in place stringent processes to ensure customers are aware of all the implications when this happens,” says Tristan Harper, Principal Data Scientist, Aviva.

The goal of this project was to build a new category within the existing Verint Speech Analytics deployment to easily identify customers orphaned from their financial adviser. “We wanted to ensure this category accurately picked up the right customers, and so it was rigorously tested, with results indicating that it was accurate in 99% of cases,” says Harper.

This innovative use of Verint Speech Analytics has transformed orphaned customer management, surfacing critical insights to better understand and act upon the issue. This has resulted in:

1. Reduced call volumes and cost: After new call scripts and recommended actions were introduced, there was a 20% reduction in the volume of orphan-related calls in just four months — dropping from 225 per month to 180 per month, in just four months. This also resulted in a reduction in operational costs, as these orphan-related calls are longer than average
2. Improved compliance:
   Feedback from Aviva’s Internal Audit highlighted the value of Verint here. “The new speech category has been super helpful with our sampling and regular audits, which we need to complete to ensure we are meeting the requirements of our regulated processes,” says Harper.
3. Increased customer satisfaction: Scores measured through Transactional Net Promoter Score (TNPS) increased from +21 to an astonishing +39 in nine months (an 85% increase).Harper concludes, “Verint can analyze all of our customer engagement, 24×7. This proactive, accurate view of our customer interaction is transforming the orphaned customers process and driving a unique and rewarding service experience for Aviva customers.”