Attending to the identity of a society, understanding and incorporating cultural and linguistic elements are requirements when developing any Virtual Assistant project.

This is an issue that increases exponentially in complexity when dealing with companies that operate globally, have a presence in multiple countries and offer specific products and services for each market.

This was the starting point for MAPFRE, a global insurer with a presence in 51 countries. In addition to leading the Spanish insurance market, it is the leading multinational insurance group in Latin America and one of the largest in Europe. It has more than 28 million customers worldwide and employs more than 33,000 people.

Optimizing Customer Service through automation

MAPFRE's digital transformation process involved improving customer service through the automation of queries and procedures received through its multiple channels. This aspect was fundamental in terms of capturing leads. But this objective presented an added difficulty: the peculiarities that exist in each of the markets where MAPFRE is present.

So, the starting line was marked by:

• A common base of consultations and operations
• The particularities of each market in which the company operates.
• The requirement to maintain the corporate identity

All of this to achieve a double objective:

• Simplify the pricing process and reduce time to improve lead acquisition.
• To optimize customer service, achieving excellence. 

In order to offer a scalable solution that could grow as MAPFRE's needs evolved, Google's Artificial Intelligence and, more specifically, Dialogflow, its tool for building Virtual Assistants, was chosen.

Platform to generate corporate Virtual Assistants

We developed an advanced platform for generating conversational assistants to achieve the proposed goals. These virtual agents were based on Dialogflow and connected to MAPFRE's software.

This platform is a corporate tool available for all subsidiaries. Therefore, a specific chatbot can be created for each market or country. This platform is prepared to develop all the assistants required, both text and voice.

In addition, it has advanced analytics that monitor the operations of each conversational agent and their engagement with the customer. The data extracted is used to continuously improve the flow of conversation and the training of virtual assistants.

The chatbots generated on the platform have a common base of frequent queries shared by the different markets. But, at the same time, these assistants can be customized to meet the peculiarities of each one of them. In addition, this solution guarantees a single user experience under a single corporate brand, replicable in all subsidiaries and countries.

Global, versatile and scalable architecture

One of the most outstanding features of this platform is its architecture. It is designed to be scalable so that the launch of new use cases is carried out in an agile way. 

One of the objectives set at the beginning of the project was to improve lead acquisition. And to achieve this, a pricing use case was developed. From there, the platform allows the inclusion of new use cases, for example, those related to optimizing customer service and others that facilitate self-management.

On the other hand, the creation of new virtual assistants, adapted to the digital ecosystem of each country, is carried out according to corporate guidelines. This achieves a homogeneous perception of the MAPFRE brand in all conversational agents developed on the platform. Thanks to this, the customer can identify the brand immediately when contacting through this channel.

Once the platform was up and running, two projects were developed on it.

• Virtual assistant for insurance pricing for the Brazilian market.
• Action on Google, for devices that integrate Google Assistant, and Skill for Alexa.

These will be joined by new projects that the company is already preparing.