An intelligent conversational agent is a technology capable of interacting with humans through natural language, particularly in sectors like the insurance industry.
Whether it's a voicebot, chatbot, or even a callbot, conversational AI is a handy and effective solution for interacting with your insured customers or potential customers through your customer service when taking out insurance or making a claim.
In this article, let's see the many advantages of conversational AI in insurance and the steps you must take to integrate it into your customer service ecosystem.
The Advantages of Conversational AI in Insurance
24/7 Personalized Support
An intelligent conversational agent can offer 24/7 customer support, answer frequently asked questions about taking out insurance, conditions, the types of claims covered, etc. Offering uninterrupted customer service leads to improved customer satisfaction. You’ll be available, involved, and listening.
Fraud Detection
Intelligent systems can prevent 90% of scams and reduce 92% of the losses they cause. As an insurer, you can reduce detection time by 95% and help your security service prevent more attacks by integrating conversational AI into your call center.
Improved Agent Productivity
Process automation reduces customer request handling time by 35% (Pegasystems study). Your AI can transcribe calls, direct customers to the right service departments, classify tickets, collect customer data, etc. Human agents will see their productivity increase as they can focus on high-value-added tasks.
Automated Common Customer Queries and FAQs
Intelligent callbots and voicebots can handle around 80% of repetitive tasks without needing a human agent. To automate customer service processes, you’ll need to follow these steps:
Identify which recurring tasks will be automated.
Choose the automation tools: Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, call handling systems, callbot implementation, etc.
Implement automated scripts.
Integrate tools into the current ecosystem.
Train personnel on the new AI-powered tools.
Reduced Operating Costs
Investing in an intelligent conversational agent might seem costly, but you'll significantly reduce operating costs once you install AI as the call handling times will reduce, and you'll need less from your workforce.
Consider this: answering a query on social media is 6 times cheaper than answering a request via a call center with a human agent.
Improved Customer Experience
You might be resistant to integrating a callbot into your customer service as an insurer, especially if you want to maintain customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. According to a study by Replicant, 80% of customers would be willing to talk to a bot if it meant less waiting. However used, reducing waiting times on the phone will increase customer satisfaction.
Use Cases for Conversational AI in Insurance
Managing Claims
Your customer contacts you via chatbot to complain about a claim. The conversational AI answers them.
Managing Bills and Payments
Your customer gets in touch to settle an outstanding bill. Your conversational AI manages everything with a fast and secure payment process.
Customer Support and Call Transfers
A potential customer would like to talk to a human advisor to get an insurance policy for their new home. Your virtual agent takes care of authentication confidentially and securely before redirecting them to a human customer service agent. The human agent can then help the customer, who's already been verified, take out their new insurance policy.
Fraud Detection
Your customer contacts you via your website's chatbot to reset their password. Your conversational AI asks the right questions to ensure that they're not robots or committing fraud.
Managing Policies
Your customer has several insurance policies with you for several rental properties. AI can simultaneously manage all of these policies and keep them updated.
How to Implement Conversational AI in Your Customer Service
In insurance, voicebots, chatbots, and callbots can improve your productivity, profitability, and customer satisfaction. What else could you want? Here are the steps to implement conversational AI at the heart of your customer service.
1. Identify Your Contact Points
Before installing a conversational AI, you need to know what your points of contact are. To do this, you must define your insurance company’s needs in terms of AI:
What are the questions most commonly asked by your customers?
Which channel do customers mostly use to contact you?
What are the top 3 channels your customers use to contact you?
By channel, how do I communicate with my customers? (open/closed questions, etc.)
Is my customer service omnichannel or multichannel?
What services are most likely to answer our customers’ questions?
Which communication channels are most in need of automation?
2. Identify Situations Where AI is Applicable
Define the use cases where a conversational AI could be:
Useful and beneficial to your growth as an insurer.
Compatible with the current customer service ecosystem.
Appreciated by your current customers.
You can also automate several processes, the goal being to choose those that will be useful and cost-effective. For example, you could use AI for:
Customer authentication.
Routing to other services.
Scheduling appointments.
After-call or after-order feedback requests to continually improve your customer service.
3. Choose an AI Model
There are several AI models. You could install a callbot in your call center, a chatbot on your website, or a voicebot on another platform. To choose your conversational AI, ask yourself:
Which platform do my customers use to find more information and share their problems?
Which platform is best suited for AI integration?
Which platform would be best for implementing an insurance customer service conversational AI?
Choose conversational AI experts like YeldaAI for the best model. YeldaAI offers a next-gen no-code callbot platform that meets the insurance industry's needs. For example, L'Olivier Assurance, a subsidiary of Admiral Insurance, installed a new YeldaAI voice assistant on its websites to help potential customers choose the right offer and help them register.
4. Train the Conversational Agent
Once you've completed practice questions, train your conversational agent in real situations. The goal is to provide correct and accurate answers to your customers. If the tone used by human and virtual agents differs, you could damage your brand image, especially in the insurance sector, where good relationships are essential.
5. Test and Deploy Your Conversational AI
Finally, test your bot in real conditions with customers.
Does it meet the needs initially outlined in the brief?
Is the customer experience improved?
Are customers satisfied? If not, why?
Once tested and deployed, provided it meets the specifications from the brief, you can launch your conversational AI. But there’s still one last step.
6. Evaluate Results
Implement a regular evaluation program to detect potential problems and optimize the performance of your virtual agent. To do this, you could implement quality monitoring for your call center via:
First call resolution rate (FCR).
Average handling time (AHT).
Abandonment Rate.
Integrating conversational AI in insurance can transform the customer experience and optimize the whole process. Automating recurring tasks allows human agents to focus on more complex problems. Fraud detection becomes more effective, and operating costs decrease. By adopting a structured approach to integrating this technology, insurers can improve customer satisfaction. Conversational AI is no longer a choice but a way to stay competitive in insurance.