Facilitating a digital transformation has been slow going in some industries compared to others; for the insurance industry, digital change is finally making its way in.
Insurance has proven resistant to change for decades. Agents are still amazed that it took so long to move to an online application and quote structure. But with the emergence of new algorithms and technologies that make it possible to transform how insurance agencies do business, it’s clear that conversational AI can positively impact insurance agents, underwriters, customers, and everyone else involved in the insurance process.
In fact, tech is causing such a disruption in the insurance sector that experts are expecting exponential growth over the next couple of years, meaning cost savings within the insurance industry to the tune of $1.3 billion by 2023
Why Is Conversational AI Important For Insurance?
The insurance policy and insured-carrier relationship is wide and slightly convoluted — there are many people who review documents, make changes, and look over information throughout the process of getting insured. This leaves a lot of room for human error and the possibility for mistakes.
Someone submits an application and that application now needs to be reviewed and verified. The application needs to be sent to the right people through the proper channels in order to ensure that it has all the language and necessary coverages, and it often needs to meet certain requirements. And these factors vary depending on the type of insurance.
The good news is that many people are on board to change things. 73% of insurance executives are in favor of adopting technologies such as predictive analysis and conversational AI to deliver a better customer service experience.
Conversational AI has helped to streamline much of the process. We’ve all interacted with applications powered by algorithms that help produce insurance quotes and on the backend underwriters are able to produce insurance policies without too great of a lift.
These digital changes are great for both insurers and customers, so to give some more insight into what AI is doing for the insurance sector, let’s go over five things conversational artificial intelligence is doing for insurance businesses.
A lot can be lost and misconstrued during this process, and many of those aspects could be automated with the help of conversational AI.
Conversational AI solutions can help automate the most repetitive and redundant aspects of insurance. It can automate answering frequently asked questions, insurance quoting, and provide a first level of support. Conversational AI helps agencies handle claims, eliminate wait times, and can revolutionize how businesses interact with their customers.
How Do Companies Use Conversational AI for Insurance?
Conversational AI can do a lot for insurance agencies. By intelligently analyzing data and providing valuable insight, those in the insurance industry can virtually and proactively advise customers to help them meet their needs. Here are five ways conversational AI is transforming the insurance world.
Virtual Agents To Automate Customer Issues
The biggest help that conversational AI provides is being a virtual agent that can automate customer issues. Whether a customer wants to know about a specific insurance coverage or is wondering what day of the month their payment is scheduled for, there’s a lot that can be in place to increase self service rates and decrease response times.
We’ve all interacted with chatbots in order to ask simple questions from the companies we do business with. Why should insurance be any different?
Insurance policies are often long and full of jargon that is difficult to translate into layman terms. People have questions about what an ‘additional insured’ means or have questions about adjusting their coverage. Conversational AI can assist in automating supporting these issues.
Reduce Agent Time Spent On Repetitive Tasks
Did you know that support agents spend up to 3 hours of their day doing work that could easily be automated? Whether they’re replying to repetitive questions or are manually managing support queues, there are a few things that could be changed to help agents do their jobs better and ultimately support customers better.
AI can help agents reduce time spent on tasks by providing them with assistance when replying to customer inquiries. Gone are the days of agents not knowing where to find a piece of information and not being able to reply to a support question in a timely manner. These days agents have access to a tool that can suggest answers based on previous similar tickets. AI can help pull up the most accurate and up-to-date information and keep customers satisfied.
Accurately Label & Route Tickets
Often, agents are tasked with the most mundane of tasks, such as labeling and routing incoming support tickets. If a ticket needs to be escalated, sent to the claims department, or labeled with a completely new tag, it takes time and energy to do so.
Automated ticket triaging involves evaluating and directing incoming tickets to the right person based on importance, topic, or urgency.
With the right tools at their disposal, agents will be able to see tickets be automatically labeled and routed. This can be done with the help of algorithms that train on your company’s past data to accurately direct tickets where they should be. By automating ticket triage, you free up agent time to get to the bottom of their queue and help customers find answers that can’t be easily served to them.
Efficiently Scale
When you’re using the right tools and you have the right people trained to use them (and use them well), you’re setting yourself and your business up for success. Tools and people are two out of three aspects you need in order to build a team that can efficiently scale. If we’ve learned anything from the past few years it’s that businesses, and especially their support teams, need to be able to pivot in order to meet customer needs and customer expectations.
Conversational AI can help teams efficiently scale by giving them the one-up and allowing for automation that likely prevents other teams from taking off. By removing redundancies and enabling your teams (and customers) with the appropriate technology, you’ll be able to efficiently scale.
Reduce Customer Wait Times
The power of artificial intelligence is obvious in the eyes of customers looking for fast answers and agents looking to better assist them. No matter what industry you’re in, the quality of your customer service is the best indicator for success, and for many that indicator is based on how quickly they can get an answer.
Virtual assistants powered by conversational AI can help reduce customer wait times and provide an improved customer experience. We’ve seen bots reduce response times by up to 45%. Boosting customer satisfaction within the insurance sector will lead to further trust in artificial intelligence and help potential and current insureds find the information they need.
Frequently Asked Questions About Conversational AI In Insurance
What Is Conversational AI in Healthcare?
AI is becoming more prevalent in many industries, one being healthcare. AI in healthcare is assisting customers with monitoring their health, facilitating back-and-forth conversation between medical professionals, filing insurance claims, finding support for specific diagnoses, and much more.
How do Insurance Companies Use AI to Mitigate Risk?
Data powers the world. Without it, we have nothing to analyze and learn from.
The insurance industry is using AI to mitigate risk by using a much more trust-worthy source—i.e algorithms and machine learning—to analyze insurance applications and insured history in order to provide the most accurate and necessary insurance claims for individuals. There is a wide range of uses for AI in insurance, but the biggest is mitigating risk by reducing human agent error during underwriting and increasing the use of tech adoption.
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