BPCE Assurances enhances the employee experience with Zelros AI Platform

Introduction: BPCE et Zelros

The BPCE Group is the second-largest banking group in France, with over 100,000 employees serving 35 million clients worldwide. It operates in retail banking and insurance in France through its two major networks, Banque Populaire and Caisse d’Epargne.

Zelros is an award-winning AI platform empowering insurance agents and bank advisors. Featuring specialized LLM agents tailored for banking and insurance, Zelros anticipates client needs, delivers personalized recommendations, automates workflows, and provides real-time contextualized answers.

BPCE Assurances and Zelros have been collaborating together for 7 years to build “Anna”, a solution aimed to assist employees in the Customer Expertise and Relationship Center (CERC) and the Back Offices of Caisse d’Epargne and Banque Populaire in their daily tasks, particularly in responding to numerous inquiries related to personal insurance. This partnership allows BPCE Assurances to accelerate the large-scale adoption of artificial intelligence through rapid innovation cycles.

Anna was first developed using state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology. Through the partnership between BPCE Assurances and Zelros, “Anna” has been continuously innovated, integrating the latest version of OpenAI on the secure Azure platform.

They have combined their expertise in AI and insurance to enhance the solution with new features, thereby increasing its value by:

• Providing more accuracy and personalization in the responses given
• Enabling the generation of ready-to-use responses, including emails to be sent to the final client
• Allowing the combination of structured data (transactional data) and unstructured data (knowledge bases, terms and conditions, etc.) in constructing the response
• Offering ease of administration 

In November 2023, “Anna NextGen” was launched.

The initial goal

BPCE Assurances has always valued technology to make its employees’ work easier. With a strong focus on continuous improvement, the company is dedicated to empowering its customer relationship managers with tools that enable the quickest, most straightforward, and most personalized customer experience.

To achieve this, customer relationship managers must navigate complex and diverse questions while maintaining speed to meet both customer satisfaction and regulatory compliance. The answers often reside across various knowledge bases and contract management tools, making it challenging to resolve policyholder queries quickly—particularly when onboarding new employees and supporting their skill development.

Before implementing the solution, BPCE Assurances faced several challenges:

1. Information access and management: The vast amount of documents and information made it difficult for advisors to locate accurate answers to client questions. This led to longer turnaround times, potentially impacting the overall customer experience.
2. Expert workload: BPCE Assurance’ experts were frequently called upon for repetitive questions, increasing their workload and reducing their productivity.

These challenges prompted BPCE Assurances to seek an innovative solution, resulting in a partnership with Zelros and the integration of AI to enhance information access and, consequently, improve customer satisfaction.

The innovative nature of Anna NextGen

Demo

Anna provides BPCE’s customer relationship managers with instant access to thousands of documents, procedures, and customer information.

Thanks to LLMs, Anna NextGen now offers on-demand responses generated from BPCE Assurances’ specific data and documents, all within a secure and controlled environment. Advisors can easily refine their queries and obtain much more contextualized responses, even in very complex client cases.

These ready-to-use answers result in increased efficiency, but more importantly, they lead to a significantly more pleasant work experience.

The benefits

The benefits can be measured on several levels:

For Customer Relationship Managers:	• Clear and accurate information, eliminating the need to sift through documents. • Efficiency and product knowledge. • Personalized and impactful customer experiences.
For Solution Administrators:	• User-friendly, no-code interface for real-time adjustments. • Document processing and classification (turning content into graphics, headings, and key points)
For Experts:	• Frees experts to focus on complex cases requiring in-depth expertise. • Promotes autonomy and rapid skill development for less experienced colleagues. • Reduces reliance on experts for routine inquiries.
For the Team:	• Collaboration and synergy within teams. • Productivity and consistent service excellence.
For Customers:	• Faster, more precise responses → improving satisfaction.

Finally, customers benefit from more precise and faster responses, one of the key factors for customer satisfaction.

Conclusion

BPCE embraces GenAI to enhance employee expertise, diversify skills, and provide a flexible solution tailored to everyone – from novices to experts– across various aspects of the insurance sector. This integration ensures top-tier security for both customers and employees.

The potential for innovation is remarkable, and Anna NextGen stands as the first tangible outcome of this approach. The collaboration between Zelros and BPCE Assurances highlights how a major group like BPCE can drive technological innovation by focusing on practical, high-impact solutions that deliver immediate value.