Swiss Re boosts access to corporate services knowledge and experts with Starmind

Challenge: Improve access to knowledge

At Swiss Re – one of the world’s leading reinsurance companies – 14,500 people work from 80 global offices to create smarter risk transfer and risk management solutions for its clients, helping the world to become more resilient.

A couple of years back, Swiss Re used different channels where employees could access corporate services. The variety of channels made it difficult for them to find knowledge or get the right support. Employees were losing time trying to find the right expert or answer to their questions. This led to an increasing number of repetitive requests and questions for the support functions, resulting in longer service times. And all of this had an impact on productivity and employee satisfaction.

With the aim to increase the efficiency of customer service, Swiss Re consolidated the access of more than 200 corporate services on a self-service portal called ContactOne, with Starmind integration.

ContactOne offers employees a place to go for HR, IT, Logistics and other Operations services – a big productivity gain, both for employees, but also from a service delivery perspective. To increase efficiency, Swiss Re further integrated Starmind with ServiceNow, the platform on which ContactOne runs. By combining the ContactOne service information with the expertise of colleagues across the globe, Swiss Re can now provide its employees with access to context-based information whenever they need it.

Solution: A fast route to self-resolution

Today, Starmind is seamlessly integrated into the employee journey. Every day, up to 3,000 employees visit ContactOne to get support, request services, and access Starmind’s crowdsourced knowledge. Starmind is also integrated with ContactOne’s search and chatbot features, pulling in contextual information to enable a higher rate of self-resolution. And if users open a ticket on the portal, Starmind offers context-based knowledge as they type, helping to avoid unnecessary tickets for the ContactOne service desk. By enabling employees to access undocumented intelligence from the entire Swiss Re community, Starmind helps people self-resolve their inquiries quickly and effectively. The platform also gives Swiss Re a way to identify trends and resolve any frequent issues employees may be experiencing.

“Using Starmind, we crowdsource knowledge from over 10,000 community members across the globe.
This enables our employees to get fast answers to their day-to-day questions from experts throughout
Swiss Re, while being able to focus their energy on their jobs.”

Simon Margulies, Head of Self-Service Solutions, Swiss Re

Result: Fewer support tickets and crowdsourced knowledge

Since integrating Starmind in ContactOne, Swiss Re has achieved a 12% reduction of tickets. Employees get faster answers to their questions,  freeing them to spend more time focusing on what matters the most – the clients of Swiss Re.

Engagement has also grown following the integration, resulting in an average 58% increase in monthly active users. And as the community of users grows and engages, the value of Starmind increases over time. “The crowdsourcing effect clearly accelerated with the integration into ContactOne, as we saw incoming questions and answers increase by 175% and 131% respectively. Even our service desk agents started to use it as a source for new knowledge,” says Simon Margulies, Head of Self-Service Solutions at Swiss Re.

“But most value derives from the reuse of that collective knowledge stored on Starmind. And that knowledge has risen by 76%,” he adds. “The consequence is that more employees find quicker answers to their questions. For repetitive queries, which are more efficiently resolved by self-service on our digital channels instead of by a human assisted interaction at the service desk, we now also see fewer tickets created. To achieve this, we didn’t have to invest in knowledge management resources, as the community creates and maintains the knowledge on Starmind.”

Its success with Starmind has led Swiss Re to expand its use into other business areas to increase employees’ effectiveness and reduce time to resolution.