Tawuniya is a Saudi Joint Stock Company, incorporated on January 18, 1986. Tawuniya was the first national insurance company licensed in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to offer a full range of insurance and reinsurance services. The authorized, issued, and paid-up capital of the company is SR 1,250 million. Tawuniya offers its clients more than 60 types of insurance services including medical, motor, fire, property, engineering, casualty, marine, aviation, Takaful, liability insurance, and many others. Through its 37 years of experience, the company has been able to enhance its competitive advantages and quality of services to be perceived as the first preference by the Saudi community among other insurance service providers.

However, such massive expansions and remarkable evolvements come with significant challenges. The main challenge was the complexity of business procedures and regulations related to insurance services and how to convey this knowledge to clients in the most easy-to-use, fast-paced, interactive, and personalized way. Realizing this fact, Tawuniya has robustly set its clear vision to become the leading insurance company in the Gulf region providing on hand channel using a strong AI engine (without the need to install a mobile application or visit a branch) that facilitates interaction with its clients. This interaction involves answering general inquiries, issuing an insurance policy, and facilitating different payment methods. This channel should be accessible through different platforms mainly WhatsApp, it should also support integrations with any other software and digital solutions. Moreover, to ensure maximum engagement levels, the proposed channel should be highly flexible to support different languages with slang.

Therefore, the requirements have been concluded as a digital channel provided by AI and machine learning platform that has the capacity of the following:

• Handling different insurance procedures including issuing an insurance policy, renewal, ownership transfer, etc…
• Acting as a live agent (customer service, retail sales)
• Providing feedback on general inquiries
• Facilitating payment using different methods (credit card, SADAD “payment gateway”, STC payment “Operator payment gateway”)
• Accessible through WhatsApp, being the most easy-to-use communication channel.
• Integrating with different internal systems in Tawuniya in addition to external systems for payment and other services, as well as other workloads over VMs and Databases.

Oracle…WIND-IS and A Noteworthy Implementation 

At that point, Tawuniya had a clear target, which is implementing a “Chatbot” solution.  Tawuniya; positioned to offer a bespoke service to its clients, started a thorough tendering process that included a set of distinguished vendors (multinational and local ones) and embarked on several technical comparisons. These comparisons have settled that Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA) with its powerful AI engine and flexibility in implementation and integration was the most preferred option. Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA) was used to build a chatbot over WhatsApp as an initial channel and build integration using OCI and OIC to act as a unified integration layer with Tawuniya internal systems and the already existing live agent system. This decision was based on a set of demos and POCs performed by a prominent Oracle Partner… WIND-IS. Several factors have positively contributed to that choice, on top of these factors is having an Oracle data center in Saudi, as well as the remarkable past experiences of WIND-IS in implementing similar solutions across a wide variety of bespoke organizations.

In 2022 Tawuniya launched their chatbot named “Norah”. Tawuniya Chatbot is exclusively the sole Chatbot in the Gulf region that is equipped with the technical capacity of performing the whole set of transactions involved in the insurance process; this ranges from policy issuance, policy renewal, service activation, payment settlements (using different payment methods; e.g. credit card, SADAD “payment gateway”, STC payment “Operator payment gateway”), covering complex queries through a live agent, and handling verifications and complaints.

Significant performance improvements could be rapidly captured since “Norah” was launched. In the first month, generally and based on our experience we expect 50+% saving of the total number of calls received by its call center. This was combined with an initial indicator to achieve more than 150% ROI. Furthermore, Chatbot receives 1500+ unique conversations; and indicators refers to 150+ new sales in policies monthly and more than 1K digital leads.