How Simplyhealth scaled voice AI to resolve 30% of calls with Paul Atkins

Almost a third of Simplyhealth's incoming calls are now resolved by AI, and email handling time has fallen from 12 minutes to 2. The company is achieving those gains while maintaining the service standards that placed it 31st in KPMG UK's Customer Experience Excellence report.

In this episode, we're joined by Paul Atkins, Head of Business Optimisation at Simplyhealth, the UK's member-owned health cash plan provider serving around 2.5 million customers. Paul explains how Simplyhealth introduced voice AI gradually, tested more than 1,000 real customer calls and built trust across a highly regulated organisation.

We also get into how Simplyhealth measures resolution, quality and customer effort, why intensive human listening still matters during rollout, and the organisational call to define what "good enough" looks like rather than letting advisors over-engineer every reply. Paul talks through the role of business readiness teams in driving adoption and why knowledge management could become the next major challenge in making AI work at scale.

Show notes


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