Helping Renovation Underwriting bring a comms chatbot to life

Client: Renovation Underwriting

Campaigns, Commercial, Digital, Engagement, Strategy

The challenge

When Renovation Underwriting wanted to make their processes more efficient and allow more time for their underwriters to underwrite insurance, they told us that they wanted to introduce a chatbot. When you first think of chatbots, perfunctory and dull comes to mind but we wanted theirs to be different and standout as they do as a market-leader.

We set ourselves the challenge of making their chatbot part of the team and creating a persona.

Our approach

While we asked for a chatbot comms channel, our creative approach took that as the foundation but pivoted to make the chatbot a part of the team, releasing the underwriters to move away from basic enquiries but being on hand to guide brokers through the trickier elements of renovation cover.

We facilitated a brainstorm with the project manager to best understand the tool’s capabilities and from that brought our own creativity to change an IT product to becoming a human tool with a personality – bringing to life this chatbot.

We used our own AI to create the persona. The chatbot was given a name – DUA (standing for Digital Underwriting Assistant) – and given a visual identity (in brand colours of course!)  We messaged the introduction of DUA as a real life colleague to the rest of the team, one that would be integrated in everyday operations, and devised a multichannel campaign to make DUA known to the target audiences.

Impact

The creation of the persona and visual identity turned a run of the mill announcement into a fun and impactful launch. Our comms across channels were designed to playful and exciting, introducing the AI generated visual persona of DUA to announce the newest member of the Renovation Underwriting team, which drove brokers to the chatbot and certainly created for some discussion on social media – achieving some of the best results for the year.

The introduction of an AI chatbot to Renovation Underwriting also meant that we were able to continue the conversation of the use of AI in the insurance industry in further copy.

The email roll out to brokers included a slightly higher than normal clickthrough rate, the LinkedIn post performed higher than most and the website news story resulting in a huge uptick in website visitors. The story also landed in stakeholders’ communications materials.