Freelance and contractor accountancy firm Brookson, has implemented an artificial intelligence (AI) based platform that provides much deeper customer insight and is allowing it to address customer churn.

The platform from context intelligence and insights solution provider Squirro, allows Brookson to access valuable customer insight via the unstructured data within the 30,000+ customer emails it receives every month, and to use that actionable insight to improve the overall customer experience.

As a provider of accountancy and professional services to the flexible workforce, Brookson has more than 16,000 contractor and freelancer customers. This means a high volume of customer engagement and interaction - mostly emails - on a variety of topics relating to tax allowances, VAT and much more besides. Gaining a detailed understanding of the customer conversation was challenging given the breadth of subject matter and the advisory nature of the interaction.

“True insight is found within our customer emails, but previously we could only find it manually, individuals would spend significant time reviewing email populations to try and gain insight,” said Brian Millrine, Strategy Director, Brookson. “This was not only costly and inefficient, but inevitably meant we were missing a lot of insight too – we couldn’t segment or identify trends and patterns at scale.”

Feeling that it did not have an accurate enough view of what its customers’ concerns were, Brookson began updating its business intelligence stack by implementing an analytics and business intelligence platform to get a better handle on its structured data. It then implemented Squirro to begin receiving immediate and actionable recommendations on the unstructured data within customer emails, connecting those emails with the CRM system.

“The sheer volume of emails we receive each month, along with the breadth and complexity of query meant that we just couldn’t effectively analyse the unstructured data contained within them,” continued Brian Millrine. “Squirro brought a level of insight that we just hadn’t encountered before, and gave us an enhanced single customer view that allowed us to deliver a better experience to every customer.”

Squirro applies advanced analytics to empower and equip Brookson’s customer communications teams with the tools to identify broken processes and areas that might be of concern to customers. It has an easy-to-understand dashboard that removes the need for data scientists and instead turns its staff into citizen data analysts, capable of segmenting and analysing data themselves.

“AI provides most value when it’s used for a specific purpose, and Brookson is a great example of this, demonstrating AI’s power for advanced customer insight,” said Dr. Dorian Selz, CEO and co-founder, Squirro. “Similarly, the most insightful data is nearly always unstructured data, and by applying AI to such data with customer emails, Brookson and its customers are all seeing the benefits.”