The insurer has marked one year of its online platform designed to help its customers as the first point of resolution and by directing them to the right information.
nib said the chatbot has handled more than 21,500 member interactions, with a 70 per cent success rate, saving 535 hours of consultant handling time since its launch late last year.
The chatbot performs tasks like sorting calls, responding with information relevant to a customer's query, and where necessary connecting them quickly with a live chat consultant.
"With the help of digital technology, artificial intelligence, and cloud technology, we've enhanced our service capability, while still maintaining our high level of member service in a rapidly changing and complex environment," said nib chief information officer Brendan Mills.
"In just 12 months, nibby has also been expanded to support nib’s Group operations including our international students and workers' businesses with plans to roll out to our New Zealand operations soon. And as the chatbot continues to advance we will continue to see rapid development to further enhance our member service capability," added Mr Mills.
The chatbot is built on Amazon Lex. It is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Machine Learning (ML) service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text.
Amazon Lex enables nibby to capture intentions and missed utterances. It continuously taps into this knowledge to further improve and better understand variations of member enquiries.
"nib has taken an agile approach, using AWS Machine Learning to solve the business challenge of improving their customers' experience. Only one year into their journey with ML, nib is already proving that the AWS Cloud can not only help them remediate technical debt, but is the ideal platform for genuine, customer-focused innovation," said AWS managing director Australia and New Zealand, Paul Migliorini.