Business insurance service BizCover says it has harnessed intelligent automation (IA) to better support customers while putting repetitive tasks on “cruise control”.

Ops Excellence Manager Brad Hoyle says in conjunction with its IA partner Salesforce it’s been able to support 200,000 customers with less than 20 full-time customer service employees across Australia and New Zealand.

Mr Hoyle says the firm has used system data to construct a 360-dgree view of the customer, their needs and the BizCover offerings, and to identify opportunities to deploy IA.

Examples of its use include managing email inquiries from customers, so queries such as resending documents or rescheduling payments can be automatically processed in real-time.

“We saw a low-value process that benefits customers and automated it, and best of all, the system will learn to do it better next time,” he said.

BizCover says the human element remains just as important as the technology itself in any digital transformation.

“It works best when everyone in the team takes responsibility for customer experience, from your front-line workers through to your back-end developers,” Mr Hoyle said.

“Above all else, automation is giving our people back time to work better - and that’s where our customers really see the benefit.”

Mr Hoyle says frontline staff should be involved in technology projects, and can be the best resources for understanding customer pain points and common requests, while being adaptive can help a company transition to using advanced technologies.

“You don’t need to start with a massive transformation project - just pick out some quick and easy wins to prove the case for further investment,” he said.