How Bupa trialled the UK's first ever health insurance chatbot to transform digital healthcare

All Case Studies

Overview

Bupa wanted to deliver a strong online customer experience while increasing operational efficiency. Bupa selected Spixii for its Bupa Blue Table innovation programme, during which Spixii delivered a fully integrated proof-of-concept, quote-and-buy chatbot.

Use case

Distribution

Challenge

Bupa set out to explore the potential of chatbot technology to return a conversational
element to their digital customer journey.

Solution

Bupa and Spixii reviewed the existing digital customer journey for Bupa customers looking to buy or get a quote for health insurance. The teams worked together to break the journey into its constituent parts, piecing it together using plenty of post-it notes. They reviewed the customer information required to generate a quote, and then created a conversation that elicited this from the customer, in an interactive way. Then the conversation was created and validated through testing.

Given the regulated nature of insurance in the UK, the teams engaged in a series of reviews with Bupa's compliance, legal, marketing and product teams, iterating the conversation and digital journey. In parallel, Spixii's technical teams integrated the chatbot prototype with Bupa's backend and frontend systems.

"Our customers are our top priority, so there are multiple safeguards and measures we wanted to implement to ensure they are protected," says Richard Cohen, Actuarial Lead for Bupa's Customer Lab. "We refined the conversation to the requirements of our legal and compliance teams, and asked, 'How do you [the customer] want the conversation to be structured?' I really do see the future of this conversation as having a dialogue with the customer. So let's start a conversation."


Spixii team at work with man pointing screen


To build a strong architecture, aligned with the requirements of this solution, SPIXII has leveraged the benefits of the AWS Services including EC2 instances, Load balancer, RDS, CloudWatch and VPN Gateway to facilitate interconnections between the conversation solution and the payment interface.

Results

The resulting chatbot provided a user-friendly messaging interface, which gave customers a guide price, before working through a more detailed conversation to understand their preferences for different product features, in order to provide them with a more precise quote.

  • The chatbot was hosted on the Bupa UK website and available to around half of customers visiting the website during the pilot.
  • It provided access to additional information, to help the customer better understand the product features.
  • It gave further insights into Bupa's customers, giving them the opportunity to express detailed feedback in real-time.
  • The rapid development, integration and iteration of the chatbot saw a much faster product development cycle than usual.
John Moore headshot

"The work we have been doing with Spixii has given us some real insight into what innovative technologies can bring to insurance. Making the process of buying and using insurance products easier, and making customers' experiences far better"

John Moore, Director of Bupa's Customer Lab

robot with outstretched hand

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