Case study: Together and Content Guru, Digital Technology Leaders Awards finalists
The companies expanded an existing eight-year partnership
Property finance insurer Together turned to Content Guru’s AI to build and maintain client relationships.
Computing's Digital Technology Leaders Awards offer a rare stage to shine, setting finalists' work apart and showcasing their dedication to the industry's future. This year's winners will be announced at a live awards ceremony on Thursday 3rd July in London.
Content Guru and Together have jointly reached the shortlist in the Machine Learning / AI Project of the Year category.
Together is an award-winning lender and property finance expert, specialising in commercial and higher-risk personal mortgages and secured-loan products. The company was founded in 1974 and has grown from lending under £1,000 a month to a loan book worth £7.7 billion.
In the finance industry delivering an exceptional customer experience (CX) is crucial, as trust, accuracy and efficiency are key to building strong client relationships. To qualify new loans, agents take in information through customer assessment calls and summarise for underwriters, who then approve loans based on agents' summaries.
Historically, this information capture has been a time-consuming manual process, which takes longer if the underwriters need to double-check information. As a leading non-bank relationship lender, Together offers a range of borrowing options, which means they often lend when others can't, as they understand that circumstances don't always fit neatly into tick-boxes. Together's underwriters work with more complex customer cases than mainstream lenders, which require longer, more thorough agent summaries.
Together wanted a process that would streamline agent summarisations and leverage technology in a non-intrusive way, whilst retaining the high level of detail required for specialist loan applications.
Working with Content Guru's Storm cloud contact centre solution product for over eight years, Together is an early adopter of AI, using Storm Real-time Transcription & Summarisation (RTAS) technology to transform its operations and assist its sales advisors by creating summaries of customer applications used by its underwriters to place financial products.
Since implementation, Storm RTAS has enabled Together to increase quality through automation, cut interaction time and get to know their customers better by helping their colleagues capture exact information and pass it through to their underwriters.
Taking just three weeks to refine from a minimum viable product to full rollout, the project has delivered significant improvements for Together's customers and users. Productivity has improved massively, with a 50% reduction in average handling time, enhanced quality and increased workforce efficiency across their sales and underwriting community.
Advisors have been able to handle more calls and deliver higher-quality service. With the AI summarisation tool transcribing the entire customer conversation, Together's sales advisors can focus on helping clients with the application process. Historically, the information capture was a manual task achieved by writing down notes to later input into the CRM.
In addition to saving time for the advisor, it helps Together's back office achieve a higher-quality, less time-intensive output. Underwriters now have fewer queries for the sales advisors, and the quality of the loan book is higher, increasing the volume of loans that can be placed. This is because the underwriters now have fewer queries for the sales advisors.
Storm RTAS has also helped with accessibility for Together's employees with hearing difficulties by enabling them to listen and not type, knowing that AI is capturing all of the detail, especially in a noisy office environment.
About the author
Alex Lewis, unified communications engineer at Together, is responsible for the specialist property lender’s sales and operations interactive voice response, dialler systems and call routing.
He is passionate about relationships with suppliers and was instrumental in onboarding Content Guru and rolling out Together’s award-winning Transcription and Summary AI model, using technology to streamline communications.
Alex has also been involved with the roll out of softphone services to Together’s IT and operational teams, streamlining and standardising sales and operations IVRs and routing.