HBF's new CRM shaves 35 minutes off member interactions

Health insurer HBF’s mammoth IT transformation is paying off for its frontline customer service, as it cuts handling times for queries or policy changes by over half an hour.

Sanjeev Gupta, HBF

Last year, the not-for-profit insurer Salesforce’s Financial Services Cloud as its new CRM as part of a raft of transformation measures that also included shifting off its core mainframe. 

Chief information and transformation officer Sanjeev Gupta said contact centre staff now use a “single pane of glass” member engagement portal to handle customer queries.

“Previously [our employees] had to use multiple screens to answer queries [and] it was quite cumbersome finding the information,” he told an audience at the Salesforce Agentforce conference in Sydney. 

“Now they can actually serve the relevant contextual information quite quickly and improve the first point of resolution for our members.”

Previously, for members looking to make a simple policy upgrade, such as adding a newborn to their plan, the process would take up to 40 minutes.

"It was a very complex process,” he said.

“Now, through guided flows and a bit of automation, it takes less than five minutes. That's a huge improvement and experience for the members, as well as for our staff.”

As a first point of call, HBF’s new CRM will include an autonomous agent named ‘Buddy’, which can handle initial customer queries related to policies before directing them to a human agent. 

Customer service staff using the member engagement portal are then served with a single page detailing the customer’s policy; query; previous conversation and the likelihood of leaving the insurer.

The portal also conjures predictive responses and policy cover information for agents to use through a generative AI version of Einstein.

“For [agents] to be able to access that information; have that kind of complete view of the customer have the relevant information on the fingertips, and not have to navigate multiple screens, they're able to respond and [improve] the first point of resolution,” Gupta said.

Meanwhile, Gupta added that the CRM implementation, along with the broader IT transformation, had improved HBF’s access to and retention of talent.