L&G is using Microsoft to unify its customer service technology, creating a single “pane of glass” that simplifies life for its 2,800 colleagues and more than 12 million customers.
For nearly 200 years, UK financial services giant L&G has helped its customers navigate life’s biggest financial milestones – from protecting their families to saving for retirement. Now, through a new multi-year collaboration with Microsoft, the company is transforming how that help is delivered.
The current project centres on an AI-powered customer service platform built with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Centre, designed to give colleagues a complete, real-time view of each customer’s relationship with the business.
It marks the latest stage in L&G’s digital transformation over the last three years, following the launch of its highly rated workplace pension app and its market-first digitised claims process, which has already cut customers’ claim times by nearly two weeks, L&G says.
Craig Brown, Chief Operating Officer, Retail, oversees a team of 2,800 people who handle more than 20 million customer interactions each year. The business’s decision to consolidate its retail operations created an opportunity to review the software they were using, too.
“We’ve combined several long-established operations into a single retail business, so the opportunity now is to create cohesive customer and colleague experiences across what were once separate systems,” he explains.
“This is about giving our people one view of the customer – a single pane of glass – that lets them focus on understanding, not just processing.”
Simplifying the everyday
The move to a unified platform was needed, Brown emphasises. Over time, different product lines and business units had accumulated their own tools and databases. When Microsoft’s team visited to see the legacy situation, Brown says they were “quite surprised” by what they found.
“Our teams were delivering fantastic customer experiences while cutting and pasting across multiple systems,” he says. “Dynamics brings that all together. It’s a game-changer.”
Consolidation isn’t just a technical improvement; it changes the rhythm of work, he says. Colleagues will now see a customer’s full history at a glance.
That creates a better experience for customers, too: fewer transferred calls, fewer repeated explanations, and more space for genuine conversation.
“Reducing complexity means colleagues can serve more customers, more efficiently — and focus on the conversations that matter most,” Brown adds.
AI with a human touch
L&G’s approach to AI is deliberately human-centred. It’s about making the most of employees’ time. Dynamics 365 Contact Centre uses Microsoft Copilot to automate time-consuming administrative work, such as call transcription and case summaries, freeing colleagues to focus on empathy and problem-solving.
“Some of the moments we deal with are deeply emotional – helping someone who’s lost a loved one, for example, or who’s approaching retirement,” Brown says.
“AI’s role here is to sit in the back – give our people more time to listen and guide the customer, while the technology takes care of the wrap-up and admin.”
That same technology brings new intelligence to how L&G improves its services. The AI can analyse the tone and sentiment of conversations, highlight emerging themes across thousands of interactions, and even prompt advisers with suggested next steps or relevant products.
“In the past, if you wanted to learn from customer calls to improve a process, you had to listen back one by one,” he says. “Now we can surface summarised insights across accross thousands of customer interactions seeing where processes can improve or where customers might be struggling. That continuous learning loop is hugely powerful.”
Smarter insights, safer systems
The insights will help shape product development. By understanding why customers call, what frustrates them and what delights them, L&G can refine communications, simplify processes and design better experiences.
“The possibilities are almost endless,” Brown says. “We can overlay data to understand where friction exists, what’s working well and what’s not. It gives us more power to keep improving.”
With sensitive customer data at the heart of the system, security remains paramount. Brown is clear that AI’s role is to enhance, not endanger, that trust.
“We take data protection incredibly seriously,” he says. “Our approach to AI is always human-centred and governed. It’s about helping our people have more time to spend on what matters most and ensuring every customer interaction is secure and respectful.”
Building for the future
The new platform sits within L&G’s existing Microsoft ecosystem, which already includes Azure and Power Platform. This consistency helps the company scale up securely as its customer base grows.
The collaboration will unfold over several years, with the first phase focusing on workplace savings schemes, retail protection policies and annuities. Each stage will extend the platform to new products and teams, creating what Brown describes as a step change in how the business operates.
“It feels like the start of something that will really raise the bar,” he says. “We already have very strong customer satisfaction ratings – this just makes it even better. The potential once we move beyond the first phase is almost limitless.”
L&G’s purpose has always been to help customers achieve better outcomes at every stage of life, it says. By combining its sense of purpose with Microsoft’s technology, the company is taking a big step towards making every interaction simpler, smarter and more personal – one enhanced conversation at a time.
Source: ukstories.microsoft.com
