Aviva’s 2025 tech investment drives increased service speed – Rebecca Gambrell

After implementing a range of technology improvements within its digital and schemes division over the course of 2025, insurer Aviva has recorded a series of service improvements so far this year – this includes 84% of new business referrals being responded to in less than an hour, according to Rebecca Gambrell, the firm’s managing director of SME and delegated authorities (DA).

During 2025, Aviva implemented four new pieces of technology that Gambrell believes has driven “a really marked improvement in our service, particularly on the digital side”.

This includes “real-time resourcing” functionality, which helps the insurer “understand where the demand is coming in [so] that we can shift [our] people to where the demand is”.

She continued: “If we know there’s more [enquiries] coming through on the phones, for example, that means we can make sure we’re still being quick and responsive in real-time, which has been a big game changer.”

In addition, Aviva has utilised artificial intelligence (AI) to drive “proactive outbounding” – so “that when something comes in that is within our target appetite, we can be on the phone to the broker really quickly to have a conversation with them” – as well as launched tech that “means brokers don’t have to wait on the phone for us” and that they will “get a call back as soon as someone’s available”.

The other key bit of technology Aviva introduced last year, in October 2025, was speech analytics.

This enables Aviva to “analyse the conversations that we’ve had with brokers to understand what is the demand? What are they calling up to speak about? We can feed that back into our propositions or ensuring that our underwriters have got the right training for those conversations”, Gambrell added.

Being proactive

These technology integrations over 2025 have yielded “a really consistent and sustained improvement” in Aviva’s quality of service for broker partners, Gambrell said, both in terms of “speed of response” and “the quality of that response as well”.

For example, following the launch of these new technologies last year, Aviva has recorded a reduction in its live chat wait times to under three minutes, 100% of its mid-term adjustments are now being completed in less than 24 hours, 84% of new business referrals are being responded to in under an hour and around 60% of incoming calls are being answered in 30 seconds or less.

“We’ve seen a dramatic reduction in our wait times, both across telephony and live chat, but also in terms of how quickly we’re turning around referrals or speaking to the broker when it’s us proactively outbounding,” Gambrell noted.

Aviva’s internal metrics are supported by findings within Insurance Times’ Five Star Rating Report: eTrading 2025, which was published in May 2025.

The insurer’s extranet, Fast Trade, has received the highest five star rating from the report for the past seven years, while Aviva’s service via software house partners has also achieved a five star ranking for the last four years.

Despite these lofty heights, Aviva recorded notable improvements against the report’s quality of support metric. For service via Fast Trade, Aviva’s quality of support improved by 0.15 points between 2024 and 2025. This improvement was 0.14 points for the insurer’s quality of support via software house partners.

For Gambrell, Aviva’s ongoing investment in technology means the insurer can better home in on “proactive trading” around outbound calling, new business referrals or quotes and renewal activity.

She explained: “It means we can really proactively go out and speak to the broker about that piece of business, what we can do to support them, what we can do to support the customer.

“[The technology investments have] been fantastic and we’ll continue to invest in that space.”