The Bots Will Help You Now
The Intelligent Takeover of Insurance
The chatbot is your new best friend. It answers all your questions.
It knows all.
Or does it, really?
The types of chatbots vary — see here. There are the basic widgets that greet you on practically every website nowadays and quickly transfer you to a real, live person. Then, there are the more advanced bots that interact with you in almost the same way a human would — the ones you can ask questions to and expect well-formulated answers in return.
Everyone from UPS to Sephora to Pizza Hut is using chatbots to improve customer experience. It’s a craze that’s sweeping all industries.
But the insurance industry, surprisingly, outspends all others when it comes to the utilization of chatbots. The Global Trends Study reports that in the insurance industry, companies spend an average of $124 million (per company) on artificial intelligence.
Surprising? We know.
Artificial intelligence is sexy. VentureBeat has deemed the insurance industry as one that is “typically perceived by outsiders to be one of the more decidedly unsexy industries today.”
Poor insurance. At least it doesn’t have to have a Tinder profile.
There’s even an annual summit — the Insurance AI & Analytics USA Summit. Their website says, “AI and machine learning are proving to be the only methods in which insurance carriers will be able to meet customer demands at scale.”
On that note, let’s take a look at some bots with jobs in insurance.
Customer Help
Liberty Mutual’s Alexa — Liberty Mutual has created a new skill available for Alexa, complementary to its Liberty Mutual and Safeco brands. Add the “Insurance Advisor” skill to your Amazon Echo, and you’ll have a guide to insurance terminology, be able to locate a nearby agent for a quote, and contact an agent to get answers to your more complicated questions.
GEICO’s Kate — Kate is an intelligent assistant, currently available within the GEICO app for iOS and Android. According to their website, Kate can help with questions about policy coverages, billing information, or help you get a faster answer to other inquiries.
Agent Help
Allstate’s Context-Sensitive Help System — Earley Information Science (EIS) created Allstate Business Insurance Expert (ABle) for Allstate, to answer questions and help locate documents. They deem ABle the “next generation in knowledge management.” Currently, this assistant handles over 25,000 inquiries from agents per year.
Co-operative Banking Group’s “Mia” — This internal assistant was created to answer banking and insurance questions. Mia was built with Natural Language Interaction (NLI) technology, meaning that it interacts in a more human way than most chatbots.
Bonus
SPIXII — Based in London, this chatbot company aims to improve consumers’ experiences with insurance companies. They design, build, and implement insurance chatbots that insurers can simply plug into their website or app. Follow them on Twitter here.
Omnidya utilizes chatbots in insurance, too. But we’re a bit different. We have two bots: Omnibot and Consumer Bot.
Consumer Bot. Consumer Bot makes it possible for you to be in two places at once. The intelligent bot is tailored to each consumer’s background, then utilizes machine learning to become perfectly customized for each individual — even syncing with your calendar and emails. Consumer Bot does all the dirty work for you: analyzing data and searching for the best deals, so you don’t have to.
Omnibot. This intelligent assistant communicates with Consumer Bot, pulling information as needed to answer your questions and help manage your insurance or trips. If Omnibot needs additional information, it’ll ask you through your smart home assistants.
Yep. We have bots that talk to each other. Pretty cool, right?
