Tower Insurance Partners with Ushur to Digitize Customer Engagement

Ushur’s intelligent automation drives agility to respond to customer inquiries and flexibility for smooth transition to remote work during COVID-19 shelter-in-place


SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 21, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Ushur today announced that Tower Insurance, a major New Zealand-based general insurance provider, is using its intelligent automation platform to power digital customer engagement and business transformation initiatives.

Tower Insurance has served New Zealanders for the past 150 years. Like many companies in high-contact industries, it faced an ever-increasing volume of calls and emails. With wait times mounting and messages starting to backlog, Tower saw that manually processing outbound and inbound communications would no longer suffice to meet their high service expectations or modern customers’ needs.

Initially on the hunt for an RPA solution, Tower Insurance selected Ushur after realizing the benefits of a customer-focused platform. Unlike RPA solutions, which solely deliver back-office automation, Ushur can engage customers across channels while handling workflows digitally from beginning to end.

Ushur’s low-code platform enables Tower Insurance to rapidly adjust workflows in response to disruptive events, such as the evolving COVID-19 pandemic. As governments around the world implement shelter-in-place orders, many companies with large-scale call centers have struggled to move campuses online. 96% of Tower Insurance’s 700 employees are currently serving their customers remotely and Ushur will now become increasingly important to drive automation of these customer engagement activities.

“In a digital-first world, you have to meet customers where they are,” said Tower Insurance CEO Richard Harding. “Ushur supports our proposition as a digital-first insurance company. It delivers both omnichannel customer engagement and operational efficiency. These capabilities will prove invaluable with our ongoing transition to remote work and give us the agility to respond to other events so we can continue meeting our customers’ needs.”

“By powering Tower’s customer journeys with Ushur’s Digital Self-Service platform, we are enabling them to enhance the whole customer experience,” said Simha Sadasiva, CEO of Ushur. “Tower gets digital-first insurance right. By focusing on customer journey automation alongside their core systems modernization, they’re on track to deliver significant operational efficiency.”

Ushur will deploy a multipronged approach to automate customer engagement:

  • Automated email processing system SmartMail to proactively retrieve critical missing information from customers—slashing outbound calls and drastically shortening lag times in the customer journey
  • Ushur’s conversational AI tools to automate slow, paper-heavy stages in the claims process
  • Two-way engagement solution Invisible App to create quick, one-off digital campaigns that notify and help protect policyholders before impending emergency events, such as tsunamis or storms.

The multiyear deal involves all elements of Ushur’s intelligent automation platform. The first phase is focused on call and email automation, but the partners aim to power processes in other insurance operations such as First Notice of Loss (FNOL) in the following stages.

About Tower Insurance
Born and bred in New Zealand, Tower Insurance has been supporting New Zealand communities with their insurance needs for 150 years. While our heritage is important to us, we’ve set our sights on the future and on becoming the challenger in the New Zealand insurance sector.

We’re repositioning ourselves as a contemporary, challenger brand underpinned by a customer-focused, digital-first strategy to successfully compete in the 21st-century insurance marketplace. Why? Because we believe that people deserve better and we’re passionate about delivering on this belief.

Tower operates across New Zealand and the Pacific Islands and provides customers cover for their house, car, contents, business, travel and other personal needs.

About Ushur
Ushur is the complete solution for intelligent automation. Designed for high-contact industries like insurance, logistics and financial services, Ushur engages customers over email, apps, SMS and more, using conversational AI and intuitive workflows to understand what people are saying and what to do next. Its end-to-end platform accelerates time to value with features like a visual builder, powerful tools for data extraction and integrations with backend systems like Salesforce, ServiceNow and even homegrown, legacy systems. Easy to use and built for engagement, it’s the first automation platform that understands the customer’s needs—and yours.

Media Contact
Chris Ulbrich
ushur@firebrand.marketing
415 848 9175