Overview
With a focus on improving both member services and employee experience, Southern Cross Health Society engaged Arinco as a partner on their journey to AI-enabled business transformation. Our partnership has focused on AI-driven solutions that support call centre teams. Through Azure-based applications, Southern Cross has demonstrated the value of AI- streamlined post-call workflows, new approaches to agent onboarding, and better outcomes for staff and customers alike.
A member focused society
Southern Cross Health Society (Southern Cross) has been supporting New Zealanders on their health journey since 1961 and today serves over 954,000 members. As a not-for-profit organisation, it operates solely for the benefit of members, focused on providing better value healthcare for the community.
Operating in a competitive landscape
Southern Cross operates in a competitive healthcare market, facing rising provider costs and increasing demand for private care due to pressure on the public system. Despite this, Southern Cross remains committed to providing affordable, high-quality health insurance for its members.
To address these challenges, Southern Cross turned to emerging technologies like AI. The goal was to improve member experiences, streamline operations, and empower its workforce, while maintaining a responsible, ethical approach to innovation. Arinco was engaged to guide this journey, identifying impactful AI use cases, upskilling internal teams to build new capabilities and advising on the business changes needed to scale AI innovation effectively.
AI-enabled call centres
Arinco worked with Southern Cross to design and deliver AI-powered web applications, hosted on Azure App Services, to better support call centre staff. The solution integrated multiple Microsoft Azure technologies, including:
- Azure Document Intelligence to ingest and extract information from healthcare-related documents.
- Azure AI Voice Services for automated call transcription.
- Azure OpenAI to analyse and generate structured content for summarisation, categorisation and query handling.
Two proof-of-value solutions were developed to support the organisation’s call centre operations:
- Post-Call Assistant: A tool designed to streamline post-call workflows for agents by transcribing calls, generating summaries, categorising conversations and enabling automated quality checks.
- Real-Time Knowledge Assistant: An AI-powered chat application integrated with Southern Cross’s internal knowledge base, helping representatives answer customer queries more effectively during live calls.
The solutions were built with scalability and extensibility in mind, providing a strong foundation for future AI initiatives.
Arinco has also supported Southern Cross in defining its AI strategy by:
- Leading a successful pilot of GitHub Copilot, demonstrating clear ROI and enabling a full rollout to all developers.
- Collaborating with business teams to develop a prioritised backlog of AI-driven business workflows opportunities.
- Providing strategic advice on the capabilities needed to scale AI, including change management, organisational readiness, engineering practices, and benefits realisation.
- Working with Responsible AI owners to develop a plan for embedding RAI tools and practices across the organisation.
- Contributing to a compelling FY26 roadmap to scale and expand initial PoVs, strengthen AI foundations (e.g. security, infrastructure, engineering), and drive further innovation.
Ensuring impactful enhancements
The AI solutions delivered by Arinco enabled Southern Cross to realise several key benefits across their call centre operations and broader organisational planning. This included:
- Reduced post-call processing time: Automated transcription, summarisation and categorisation significantly streamlined post-call workflows, allowing agents to focus more on customer interactions and less on administrative tasks.
- Improved quality assurance processes by 30%: An increase in the volume of call reviews enabled quality assurance teams to deliver more targeted feedback and coaching, ultimately improving service quality and compliance.
- New approaches to onboarding staff: The AI-powered tools support new approaches to training, focusing on helping agents ‘to find the information they need’ not memorising ‘facts and figures.’
- Enhanced operational insights: Structured data extracted from calls provided valuable insights to support decision-making, workforce planning and service improvements.
- Increased productivity with adoption of Copilot: GitHub Copilot was rolled out to over 60 developers & testers, with productivity improvements between 6 to 25%. This is saving them up to 2hrs every day, depending on the nature of the work. Microsoft365 Copilot is seeing a return of over 136% ROI across 100+ users.
Future innovation
Southern Cross Health Society is now focused on expanding its proof-of-value user groups to further validate and refine the AI solutions in real-world scenarios. Building on the success of the initial implementations, the organisation plans to continue exploring Microsoft AI technologies to identify additional use cases that drive operational efficiency, enhance customer experience and support workforce enablement.
Arinco’s support of Southern Cross on this innovation journey, has helped embed AI capability across the organisation and ensure that future projects are scalable, secure and aligned with responsible AI principles.
