esure Personalizes Customer Experience Using Machine Learning on AWS

Founded in 2000, esure Group provides car, home, and travel cover to around 2.3 million customers through price comparison websites. It operates in a competitive marketplace where most customers choose insurance based on price and ease of sign-up. In addition to providing this, insurers must also monitor transactions for insurance fraud and unwarranted claims. esure’s previous on-premises infrastructure limited its ability to get the insights it needed from data to offer competitive pricing and a personalized customer experience. It wanted greater ability to quickly respond to changes in the market with product development.

esure needed a flexible, scalable platform that could manage the up to 1 million insurance quotes it creates every day. The platform also needed to support advanced data analytics and ML to personalize offerings on pricing and claims, and increase the speed and accuracy of fraud detection. esure also wanted to provide new ways for customers to receive assistance with policies and claims, including ML chatbots and sending messages directly to agents, instead of waiting in queues to speak to call center staff.

esure built its cloud-native platform on AWS. The company can now easily and quickly integrate with third-party applications to expand its capabilities. To improve customer experience, for example, customers can interact with the business through apps offering self-service updates, chatbots, or human agents. It has added these services in months—something that would have taken up to 3 years to achieve on its on-premises infrastructure.

Since esure integrated chatbots into the customer journey, for example to verify a customer’s details, it has shortened the time it takes for customers to carry out simple changes to personal details or policies. Customers can also receive near-instant quotes, using near-real time analysis of customer data stored on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), a highly scalable cloud storage service. Its platform processes 15,000 data points—including information on vehicles, addresses, and credit ratings—in a fraction of a second. “Using AWS, we can apply data magic to the customer experience for quicker resolutions and better outcomes,” says Peter Martin-Simon, chief customer officer at esure Group.

esure has raised the quality of customer service using Amazon Connect. The system automates simple communications and provides agents with real-time access to information from previous customer interactions on chatbots, phone calls, or live chat. Employees are now more effective and faster when serving customer needs. “Our frontline staff love the new technology,” says Alan MacEwan, director of operations at esure Group. “They’re saying it’s like night and day compared to what we used previously.”

In just a couple months, the esure team has built a customer-focused agent desktop using Amazon Connect cases, customer profiles, and omnichannel communications. esure estimates that once the migration onto the new system is complete, 80 percent of customer queries will be handled online, further speeding up resolution rates.

Innovation is faster on its cloud-native system, too. The IT team can launch new offerings to customers in months rather than years. “We’ve significantly accelerated our ability to build and roll out products using AWS,” says Martin-Simon. Fraud prevention is more effective as well, using third-party ML models running on AWS. The business now makes accurate and fast decisions on whether a claim is legitimate or not. It now detects 60 percent of false positive and negative fraud incidents, up from 40 percent with its previous IT environment. esure has been able to innovate faster and help its customers by leveraging Amazon Connect’s out-of-the-box capabilities while retaining the flexibility to extend and build using its public APIs.

Along with improving customer experience and innovation, esure has reduced its overall IT costs. This gets passed on to keeping prices down for consumers—a key competitive advantage.

esure expects to complete the launch of its new platform and migrate its 2.3 million customers to AWS by the end of 2023.

The company now plans to explore the Generative AI capabilities of Amazon Connect as well as use other AWS services to further improve customer experience, insurance claim delivery, pricing, and fraud detection. “We’ve built the car, and now it’s time to take it out for a spin,” says Martin-Simon. “Innovating at scale will help us achieve future growth.”