NFU Mutual: Revolutionizing customer engagement with Copilot for Sales and Dynamics 365

When seven farmers from Warwickshire in England, set out to attract new union members in 1910, few of them would have predicted how successful they’d be. Today, with its loyal customers, it offers a wide range of products, including general insurance, life, pensions, and investments, as well as health & safety and risk management advice. These products and services are delivered through a network of NFU Mutual agency offices, as well as through direct sales and service centres.

With 280 local offices located in rural towns and villages throughout the UK, NFU Mutual has become part of the fabric of rural life and remains committed to serving the needs of its members nationwide. NFU Mutual relies on Microsoft Dynamics 365 to provide the superior customer service and operational efficiency its members have come to expect.

Insuring the future of farming in the UK

NFU Mutual’s legacy is borne out of recognizing the needs of farmers who, at one time, were excluded from the insurance industry. True to its roots, the company works to make farming safer, supports rural initiatives across the UK, and looks after the environment as a UK Responsible Business. Ensuring long-term value is at the core of its operations. As a mutual without shareholders, the company is owned by and run for its members. The decision to be member-owned, putting people over profits, remains a core value of the company.

In practice, it means that NFU Mutual’s members enjoy local, personalized service from caring, knowledgeable staff from agencies around the UK who know you by name, are on the end of the phone and can meet you face-to-face.

But in today’s fast-paced, demanding world, providing high-touch service to thousands of customers can be challenging. That’s why NFU Mutual turned to Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Sales for customer relationship management (CRM) to help its staff be more effective more quickly. Nicholas Segger, Head of Sales and Agency Transformation at NFU Mutual, explains, “Prior to Dynamics 365, we didn’t have a CRM tool as such. The customer conversations, products, and key information were held in multiple systems and tools and pulled together locally to manage the member.” The company wanted to consolidate and centralize its member data into a single source of truth to replace the disparate systems and manually collated spreadsheets its agencies had used to track customer interactions and sales activities.

After a substantial vendor assessment, Microsoft Dynamics 365 came out on top. “Dynamics 365 was a good fit as it had the sales and service capability we needed, was in line with our vision to be in the cloud strategically, and offered a platform we could scale with additional services,” says Segger. “Being in the Gartner magic quadrant gave us the confidence that we had a product that would support protecting and enhancing the lives of our customers and rural communities, which is at the heart of everything we do.”

A comprehensive view, just in time

NFU Mutual’s journey with Dynamics 365 began in 2018 with basic CRM capabilities, such as recording what products and services customers held and what they were talking to their local agencies about over the phone or face to face. For the first time, staff had a comprehensive view of NFU Mutual’s members, regardless of where they and their customers were located—and just in time, too.

When the COVID-19 pandemic sent everyone to work from their homes, the effects on NFU Mutual’s local, personal model could have been disastrous. Hyper-local, high-touch service meant that staff were used to phone messages relayed by colleagues in person and members dropping in at the office, and local institutional knowledge was the norm. But with Dynamics 365, NFU Mutual was able to pivot to a remote model extraordinarily quickly and maintain its time-honored service model in a scalable way. Member information is kept secure even as the net of expert staff able to assist widened.

360-degree coverage with Copilot for Sales

To take advantage of having a central source for all member information, NFU Mutual staff aimed to record every customer interaction in Dynamics 365, manually logging their emails. But it takes time to parse long, complex email threads, and that was time that wasn’t spent with customers. So, when NFU Mutual introduced Copilot for Sales—seamlessly embedded within Microsoft Outlook and connected to its CRM solution—email logging surged, response times decreased, and both member and employee satisfaction soared. “We’ve logged more emails in one month with Copilot than we did in a whole quarter without it,” says Segger. 

The integration of Copilot for Sales, Microsoft Teams, and Outlook with Dynamics 365 allows staff to log emails and meetings, add and update contacts, and get customer insights in Dynamics 365 right in their email, saving them time and improving their efficiency. All customer interactions are recorded and easily accessible for more personalized and informed service. 

Copilot for Sales summarizes long email threads and even highlights questions and other key details, helping staff quickly understand their customers’ needs. When an employee is ready to reply, Copilot drafts an appropriate response, which the employee can revise before sending. Customers get more complete answers more quickly, even to complicated questions that might have been missed or misinterpreted without Copilot’s summarization.

NFU Mutual staff love email summaries in particular. A member might have multiple claims or be interested in several products and services, and important information is often buried in a long email thread. It requires a significant time investment for staff to review and account for each action item, but Copilot analyzes the entire thread in seconds, drawing out priorities, actions, and whom those actions are assigned to. 

With Copilot for Sales, errors and omissions are dropping and customers are getting better information in less time. Staff save between 30 and 90 seconds, on average, on each email—and with 4,500 people serving a million members every day, the savings add up quickly.

Copilot for Sales and Dynamics 365 give NFU Mutual a 360-degree view of its customers without the barrier of manual data parsing and entry. Staff can focus on what truly matters—their customers’ interests. “I love it when I join a Teams meeting late and Copilot for Sales provides a summary of what I missed. It’s also great for reviewing my calendar and automatically adding tasks in Dynamics 365. Copilot for Sales even summarizes and prioritizes my inbox for me! I feel like I’m just scratching the surface of what’s possible with Copilot for Sales,” states Chris Mould, Senior Agent at Winchester, Alton and Wickham Agency, NFU Mutual. 

Deeper, richer connections with customers

That richer view is available to everyone who works with a customer. The next interaction picks up right where the last one left off, regardless of who spoke to the customer last. That’s because Dynamics 365 consolidates customer information so that the network of agencies and contact centers, where calls are routed after hours, have a single view of the customer. Copilot for Sales brings email conversations into Dynamics 365, but as Seggers notes, all other customer conversations are managed in Dynamics 365 as well. “We’ve had previous projects that tried to knit the customer view together, but we never had the ability to log the rich interactions from which to pull meaningful insights,” he explains. “Dynamics 365 enables agencies at the local level to capture and understand detailed information about our customers, driving customer relationships even deeper.” 

Since going live, each agency is already saving up to 3.5 days of manual administrative work with Dynamics 365 and Copilot for Sales. According to Paul Shirley, Agent/Partner at Central Cornwall Agency, NFU Mutual, “Microsoft Copilot for Sales is changing the way we interact with customers. Using Copilot, we can capture all activities in real time, with a simple push of the button, and we can easily view the content and the tone of emails. Best of all we’re saving time on administrative tasks and using that time to interact and serve customers even better.” That’s a collective savings of 100 days over the previous year—valuable time that staff can now spend building more meaningful relationships with their customers.

A calmer, more accessible workplace 

Copilot for Sales isn’t just saving time, as important as that is to a busy workforce. NFU Mutual reports that it also simplifies complex communication with customers and reduces work pressures that stem from administrative tasks. Neurodiverse employees and employees for whom English isn’t their first language are extraordinarily relieved to have Copilot summarize their emails and draft replies for them to edit instead of staring at a blank screen. It gives them confidence that their emails are appropriate and accurately address their customers’ concerns.

Easier compliance with customer service regulations

As a financial services company, NFU Mutual is subject to strict regulations. Each customer complaint it receives must be reported to the regulator and reviewed; a process that’s made easier because NFU Mutual manages its award-winning complaint service end-to-end in Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

It starts with automatically generated letters, sparing employees this administrative task and giving them time back to focus on reviewing the complaint and making things right. Employees must review the entire case, which means looking at information from multiple sources. But as Segger explains, “With Dynamics 365, we’re tracking the customer interactions, enriching them with Copilot for Sales, and pulling in emails as well. Now we see three different contact points in one location.” 

NFU Mutual also uses Dynamics 365 in conjunction with its policy systems to make the process more proactive. Reviews can identify gaps and fill them before a customer has a chance to experience an issue.

What lies ahead

Dynamics 365 is now a key launch pad into NFU Mutual’s policy and claims systems, but this is just the beginning. NFU Mutual is exploring using Microsoft Azure AI Foundry to analyze phone calls to improve that element of customer experience even more. “I think there are some game-changing opportunities there for NFU Mutual to enrich and empower our agency network to deliver even better local personal service,” says Segger. “We're really focused on maximizing customer outcomes." And with Dynamics 365 and Copilot for Sales, NFU Mutual’s future is insured to be bright.