AI in Sales: Augmenting Sales in the Insurance Industry using Artificial Intelligence
Insurance companies are fast recognizing the significance of artificial intelligence. From computer vision to detect property damage to improving key operational business processes such as billing, claims and other operations. Perhaps the most interesting — and possibly high-value — intervention for AI in the insurance industry is applying it to sales and distribution.
Sales and distribution within the insurance industry is extremely complex and comprises a large number of people — agents, distributors, sales managers — a large number of products and a massive customer base. The P&C insurance industry is also remarkably competitive and hence insurers are looking for technology-focused solutions that can help bulk up their topline performance.
Impact of AI On Insurance Sales:
Whenever we discuss AI intervention in any use case or for any industry, the first, most important thing is to have a holistic picture of the challenge being solved for. Once we understand that big picture, it becomes easier to identify specific AI capabilities that can add value and transform each individual part of the process. In insurance sales, those individual parts in the overall value chain are:
- Identifying the characteristics of agents and their customers
- Determining the lifetime value of agents and customers
- Analyzing the customer personas and aligning the right products
- Delivering a win-win experience for agents and end customers
Benefits of AI in Sales & Distribution:
Based on the points mentioned above, here are the key areas for AI interventions for sales and distribution in the insurance industry.
1: Generating Potential Leads:
AI can be an important force in helping agents identify prospective customers. By gleaning the data for each customer and applying algorithms for hyper-personalization, agents can be armed with information for what the potential leads are most likely to buy, enabling them to engage in win-win conversations that can help in both closing the deal and maintaining a satisfied customer base for the future.
2: Improving Customer Engagement:
By employing virtual digital assistants on their online properties, insurance companies can massively improve customer engagement. For instance, virtual assistants can look at customer journeys and identify which intervention is most likely to improve conversion. Is it a discount? Is it a comparative study vs the competition? Is it a conversation with a human agent? Virtual assistants can auto-analyze which intervention should be provided at which juncture that has the highest probability of conversion.
3: Boosting Agent Productivity:
According to a study, a typical insurance agent spends only 36% of his/her time on sales. Only the best ones know how to be proactive and take the right action immediately. But not every agent has these qualities. Hence, to streamline the system and increase profit, sales agents can seek help from AI. It will record the customer response and refine the results as per relevance. This way, Artificial Intelligence applies propensity modeling to prioritize opportunities that are encouraging and most likely to become successful, thereby boosting the productivity of the agents as well.
4: Improving Service Quality:
Imagine a scenario where a customer entered the premises and ask you about their history. And you have to spend almost an hour to find their file and their records. By saving the time spent in data extraction, you can interact with the customers in a better way. This can be achieved through a simple AI-based customer intelligence system that can query large sets of customer records in natural language and allow agents to analyze and provide personalized results — allowing the agent to spent more time developing the relationship and improving the quality of service offered.
Future of AI in Insurance Sales:
The moment an insurance sales company combine human ingenuity with Artificial Intelligence, they can improve their sales and distribution. AI is an opportunity for all businesses to transform their organization by enabling intelligent processes.
From automation to predictive analytics, the future of insurance sales is AI without any doubt. Therefore, the collaboration of agents, sales teams and AI will help the companies to drive sales more efficiently.
