Inside the Shift Toward Smarter Automated CX - with Paul Cuglietta of Simplyhealth

Daniel Faggella (0:12)

Welcome everyone to the Emerge AI in Business Podcast. Today's guest is Paul Cuglietta, Customer Services Director at Simplyhealth. Paul discusses how his organization is using agentic AI to reduce complaints and speed up claims handling, while keeping a strict human in the loop process for most sensitive customer moments. He explains how testing new channels in stages, tracking the real phrasing customers use, and building a long-term automation vision tied to company purpose determine whether that shift earns lasting customer trust. Today's episode is sponsored by NiCE Cognigy. Quick note for our audience that the views and opinions expressed by Paul on today's program are his own and do not reflect those of Simplyhealth or its leadership. In this episode, we cover how disciplined testing and cross-team governance determine whether a new AI-powered customer service channel earns trust at scale. To go deeper on this topic and learn how to structure landing pages for higher conversion and how to use self-qualification systems to prioritize high-intent leads, download our free PDF report B2B AI Lead Generation Guide at emerge.com-aig1.

That's emerj.com-aig1 to download your copy. Now, the conversation with Paul.

Paul, welcome back to the Emerge AI in Business Podcast.

Paul Cuglietta (1:53)

Thank you very much for having me.

Daniel Faggella (1:54)

It's been a while since you've been here, and a very different conversation that we're having today in comparison to the last one. So, a lot of, I've brought this up on the show before, and in the research that I do, I see it just prove itself over and over, and that is that customer experience keeps on ending up as the first place that enterprises try agentic AI for real, not just pilot after pilot. And that's normally not the flashiest part of the business, right? That's just where the pressure shows up first, and where customers notice that something is wrong or something is off, and that then obviously causes leadership to notice the cost just after that. So, that's where I want to start, and that's where I want to ask you the first question, and that is, what is really pushing organizations to move past the old check button script setup and to add something that behaves more like an intelligent automated team member?

Paul Cuglietta (2:47)

Yeah, it's a really, really interesting question, something that we've been spending quite a bit of time on thinking about in our organization.

What we're looking at with customers is that people want fast and accurate responses at a time that is suitable to them. So typically, 24 hours a day, seven days a week really, but whenever they do their home administration, that either might be first thing in the morning or last thing at night or anything in between, that's when they want an answer. Actually, they want that answer quickly, and they want that answer to be personalized and they want that answer to be accurate. So using agentic AI in that particular space, whilst it is focused on looking at the customer experience, it's really resolving that customer's question at the first time of asking and as quickly and as efficiently as possible. So I think it's a really good edge case for agentic AI to work in that space.

Daniel Faggella (3:48)

So would you then say that the pressure is mostly coming from customers themselves and not necessarily for leadership noticing what the competitors are doing?

Paul Cuglietta (3:56)

Exactly that. We analyze data from what our customers are telling us, what our customers are thinking and feeling, what their blockers and barriers are, what's causing them frustration. Analyzing all of that data can then determine what do we need to do to improve their customer experience, and also really thinking about the user experience internally as well. What we know from analyzing the data is that customers want that fast personalized response. But equally then, it frees up the space for the team that may be dealing with customers through other channels to be dealing with the inquiries that they need to deal with, that may be more complex or maybe from vulnerable customers.

But customers that genuinely need us, rather than the ones that actually can self-serve themselves.

Daniel Faggella (4:47)

We've also noticed that there's still some pushback from team members on this. When we bring up the idea of Agendic AI and customer experience, they're all, not they're all, let me not say all, but a lot of them still feel like, oh, we're not ready. Yes, that is the future, but we're just not ready to really think about it yet. Where do you see teams underestimate their readiness? Where they actually are ready, they just don't know it or they're just not confident enough.