Conversational AI – Reshaping the Insurance CX
Feb 17, 2023
The insurance industry is often synonymous with legacy processes, complex affairs, and hefty paperwork.
Besides, with the rising competition in the insurance sector, customers have far too many variations to choose from, and they expect seamless services & a more personalized experience. Therefore, if an insurance provider fails to meet their expectations, it will rapidly shift to a competitor. It is pretty difficult to imagine having these expectations met with conventional and complex processes.
But, with the world undergoing digital transformation, legacy systems in the insurance sector are upgrading. Digitalization has demystified insurance processes for clients. Today, they can have quick access to information, shop for policies online, and compare premium offerings of various insurance providers.
But how can this digital transformation help insurers to respond to their clients rapidly? In what way can carriers enhance customer experience?
This is where conversational AI comes into the landscape. In the insurance industry, conversational AI serves as an automated insurance agent – educating prospective clients regarding insurance, helping them compare plans and policies, and making customized recommendations based on their requirements. Conversational AI enables insurers to deliver an omnichannel experience and expedite the process of addressing and resolving client queries.
That being said, this blog talks about how the implementation of conversational AI-powered chatbots is enhancing customers’ insurance journey and aiding in business growth.
Top 7 Use Cases of Conversational AI in Insurance
- Customer Engagement:
The first step of interaction between a customer and an insurance firm is through inquiry. Generally, client service executives spend a considerable amount of time providing insurance information to customers, which is quite tedious. But with conversational AI, these things can be managed easily.
The chatbots can handle repetitive queries or FAQs from insurance clients, agents, or stakeholders. With this, the customer service team can deal efficiently with complex issues and requests where they are needed the most.
- Claims Processing & Settlement:
Settlement of claims is a tardy process that takes around a month or sometimes even more. Meanwhile, the policyholders have to constantly follow up with an executive to check the status of the claim.
With the help of conversational AI or a chatbot, checking up on claims has become relatively easy. Customers just have to tell about the claim nature. Then the bot asks for a few additional details, pulls up the client’s policy from the organization’s CRM, and immediately initiates the claims filing process.
- Premium Collection:
In the insurance sector, the process of recurring involves two parties. One is the client who wants to pay, and the field agent who is responsible for collecting those premium payments. But customers tend to face numerous confusions like deciding where and how to pay, etc.
Today, premium payments have become truly easy. Chatbots can be set up to run the payment service smoothly. By leveraging conversational AI or chatbots, policyholders can be reminded of upcoming, late, or missed payments. Furthermore, payment gateway integration becomes effortless, enabling clients to pay their premiums with a single click.
For instance, chatbots can guide clients through the entire payment process. It makes it easier for a customer to get better acquainted with the platform and make payments seamlessly.
- Lead Generation:
Leads are generated by various marketing campaigns that insurers run. By using chatbots, insurance carriers can effortlessly automate the lead generation process. Hence, the sales team has all the necessary information to go after the most qualified leads and increase their conversions.
Not only lead generation, chatbots also play a crucial role in scoring leads and ensuring qualified leads are shared with the sales team. With chatbots managing lead generation and conversion, the marketing team can concentrate on devising more personalized and engaging campaigns.
- Cross-Selling & Up-Selling Opportunities:
When a customer purchases a particular product or service, there is a small opportunity for cross-selling and up-selling. Here, making relevant product suggestions is extremely significant for efficient up-selling and cross-selling.
Chatbots or conversational AI can be integrated with recommendation systems and learning models that can logically guess which product the client is more likely to incline towards. By remembering the client profile and the product bought earlier, the chatbot has deep knowledge about the customer, which creates a higher purchase probability. Chatbots utilize this opportunity for cross-selling and up-selling.
- Document Submission:
Insurance documents are a complex maze of terms, clauses, and conditions due to the constant flow of documents and stringent rules in the industry.
Insurers can integrate conversational AI to educate agents about their policies, benefits, pricing plans, terms & conditions, etc. Customers can also use this chatbot to furnish requests for documents and raise a query related to document submissions. This enables carriers to improve organizational communication and enhance customer servicing.
- Self-Service Purchase:
Customers often struggle to manage time for choosing the policy best suited to their needs amongst a vast range of policies. Navigating through complicated websites often results in frustration for multiple customers, ultimately leading to no purchases.
Chatbots can reduce the overwhelm and revolutionize the purchase experience by helping clients to choose the right approach in the shortest possible time. Customers can easily read and evaluate plans and policies, ask questions, obtain guidance, and purchase insurance plans by themselves while saving time. It can collect customer information and available policies and help clients narrow down their choices based on their risk profiles and coverage needs.
Chatbots & Humans: The Lucrative Duo of Tomorrow
So, are you wondering if conversational AI will replace the need for human agents?
Do not worry. The reality is conversational AI will complement the workload of human agents. Both are indispensable without each other.
With conversational AI coming into the picture, the role of human agents will transform, and they will be able to concentrate on helping clients manage their insurance portfolios.
Future of Conversational AI-Powered Chatbots in the Insurance Sector
With several use cases in the sector, conversational AI is expected to play a vital role throughout the insurance value chain. From pre-purchase, purchase, client service, marketing, and other back-end operations, conversation AI is poised to bring innovation to insurance.
For instance, think about this scenario at some point in the future:
You are driving to an out-of-town place when you meet with an accident. Immediately as the car stops, you receive a call from your auto insurance provider’s chatbot, who informs you to take pictures of the damaged car. Just after you share the photos, the chatbot makes the damage calculations, requests the claim on your behalf, and replies with approval – all within a few minutes.
Yes, this might sound a bit improbable. But in a few years down the line, we can expect to achieve this advancement level close enough to this scenario.
So, what are you waiting for? Get in touch with us to initiate your AI transformation journey today.
