Chatbots are the automated insurance agents
There will soon be “a bot for that”
At 5PM, a notification on Brian’s mobile caught his attention. He was leaving to home from work. It was a chat notification. Brian opened his chat app and the message was from Leslie, at the Insurance Company where he had applied for his life insurance. She sent a ‘Congratulations!’ message stating that his insurance was through and confirmed. Brian had few questions on his mind, but he had to drive home. He messaged back Leslie at 8PM asking few basic questions about his insurance. He wasn’t expecting Leslie to respond until next day morning. Leslie, however, responded in less than a minute and kept responding to all the questions he put forth on details such as premiums, due dates, etc.,. Brian was very excited with the support. What he didn’t know was that the person he was chatting with on the Insurer’s app was not Leslie, but a Chatbot!
Chatbots can potentially create entirely new way of interacting with customers by providing automated ordering, notifications, helpdesk functionalities and so on. Chatbots, are making their presence on Facebook Messenger, Google and Skype, functioning as robotic customer service representatives. Rich API allows to efficiently process messages and respond with images, links, call-to-action buttons and direct payments. Bots make it more personal, more proactive, and more streamlined in the way that insurers would like to interact with their customers.
Chatbots can take over traditional customer service functions, and could spell significant savings of US$28 billion overall.
Relevance of Chatbots to customers
The tech has been widely used in the insurance industry for over a decade and interestingly, most of the Chatbots are given names to make them more human-like!
• Allie is Allianz’s online assistant available 24/7
• Arbie “works” for RBC Insurance in Canada
• Magda is the Chatbot for Link4, Poland’s first motor insurance policy sold online
• Nienke is in the Dutch market talking to NN’s customers about insurance
• Mia answers customer’s insurance queries for Co-op Banking Group
• Marc represents Credit Agricole’s health insurance offering in France
• Hanna has been around since 2003 for the Swedish Social Insurance Agency
Chatbots opens the door for the automated insurance agent. It allows insurance firms to deploy distribution, claims and customer service straight into the platform.
Vast majority of inbound calls are to either make very basic changes to a policy or to ask a question which for the most part would be easy to answer so long as the agent or system has access to contextual data surrounding the caller. Examples of this would be policy endorsements like requesting a basic certificate of insurance or asking a question related to current coverage. Questions like these could very quickly be answered by Chatbots.
It allows both the customer and the insurer to retain conversations from the last interaction. It makes sense for insurers to spend time and energy there–working on making the interactions for more efficient for customers. Customers will also be able to opt-in to receive personalized updates — like policy confirmation, premium reminders.
More than one-third of customers already prefer using social media rather than the telephone for customer support, and most consumers expect a response within an hour — if not faster. That’s a taxing load for insurers, but the enhanced AI through Chatbots makes it feasible to accommodate.
We live in the age of a socially empowered consumer, and they will continue to decide where and when they will engage.
Let the employees chat into productivity
Simplify complication: Answers questions, like, what’s a lapse ratio last quarter? Or train an employee on Insurance terminologies.
Overstock uses ‘Mila’ a Chatbot to chat in sick instead of calling or using call center to leave a message. Company can fill schedules and replace workers faster. In addition to chatting in sick, employees can use Mila to schedule time off, check their schedules, and do a variety of other tasks that used to require making a phone call, sending an e-mail, or talking to a fellow human. Those seconds for each employee turn into dollars.
A bunch of big companies are betting big on bots, including Microsoft, Slack, Google and Facebook. Facebook’s Messenger has 1 billion regular users each month and supports over 60 billion messages every day.
Insurers can integrate Chatbot into their own apps and/or develop them for chat apps like Messenger. Which one would you do?
Listen up, whichever you choose: The age of the chatbot is upon us.
