How Voice AI Is Changing the Insurance Industry
The insurance industry has been facing challenges to provide on-demand — anytime, anywhere — services to their customers that also offer a human touch. However, with the growing expectations of the policyholders, it is more important than ever for insurers to tackle customers’ need for convenient, personalized, and seamless experiences. Therefore, the insurers are moving toward deploying conversational AI technology via text or voice to scale their customer-facing processes.
Insurers are leveraging conversational Voice AI as a powerful customer interaction tool with the ability to emulate personalized and meaningful conversations. The main goal of any voice AI application in the insurance industry is to help customers by making insurance buying and claiming as easy as possible.
Major Benefits of Voice AI in the Insurance Industry
The insurance industry can benefit from Voice AI technology to improve different aspects of their business — from driving conversions to increasing customer service satisfaction to reducing operational costs.
1. Deliver better customer experience with conversational voice IVR
Insurance providers have been using traditional IVR systems for customer services for a long time. Callers are dragged through a series of prompts where they answer questions with specific keywords or commands like ‘yes’ or ‘no’ that advance them down a maze of complex menu systems. However, IVRs are not handling any queries; they are merely categorizing customer issues and routing them to a live agent. Customers are likely to be left on hold forever or possibly get lost in the IVR mazes, leaving them highly dissatisfied.
Conversational voice interface takes IVR to the next level by enabling more human-like interactions with automatic speech recognition and natural language processing. It gives callers the flexibility to speak naturally and explain their problems and concerns similar to how they might interact with a live customer support agent. Conversational voice AI understands the context of the conversation, the speaker’s intent, the domain of its solution, and, most importantly, learns from every interaction. It is empowering insurance providers to have natural, meaningful conversations with customers at scale in real-time and deliver better customer experiences.
2. Build higher customer engagement and increase satisfaction
Insurance businesses receive huge volumes of queries every day, from new prospects looking for suitable policies and existing policyholders looking for help. It is not always possible for human agents to manually handle these conversations with the speed, efficiency, and accuracy that the customers expect. Long waiting time during high incoming traffic or no agents’ availability during off-duty hours sometimes leaves the customers stranded for answers.
Based on voice AI technologies like natural language understanding (NLU) and processing (NLP) and automatic speech recognition, voice bots autonomously engage customers in a two-way interaction and resolve their issues. They can handle a number of real-time requests at scale. Customers can have immediate answers to their questions — claim eligibility, policy details, expiration dates, renewal, and premium dues — anytime, anywhere, without calling the customer care representatives. Thus, by implementing voice AI, insurers can provide a seamless customer service experience and significantly improve the CSAT scores.
3. Collect routine information automatically and improve claim management efficiency
Manually collecting and filing routine information can take up a lot of claim adjusters’ time, keeping them away from serving real customers issues. Voice AI-powered virtual insurance agents can streamline this mundane task. They identify and understand the intent of customer enquiries, pull up policy details from database or CRM, ask preliminary questions to determine the next-best-action, and route enquiries to specific agents and teams.
Voice assistants substantially optimize claim management efficiency in cases like FNOL (first notice of loss) by extracting and entering relevant information from conversation into the claims system and providing structured data to the adjusters for further assessment.
4. Increase sales with personalized policy recommendations and quote illustrations
Customers want personalized product recommendations without going through complicated form filling or paperwork. As per Capgemini Consumer Survey 2019, 53% of consumers have used a conversational AI interface (chat/ voice assistant) to learn about banking or insurance products.
AI-powered voice assistants detail out different policies and generate a quote based on customer inputs. A frictionless interaction that informs customers of the coverage term, quotation, and benefits leads to higher sales conversion.
5. Reduce operational costs and workload
Automating end-to-end resolutions of routine policy and claims-related queries reduce the manual workload and the agents’ handling times of customers by 40%. This leads to less pressure on the agents and higher satisfaction.
At the same time, insurers can handle almost twice as many support calls at the same time with the same workforce. This helps insurance companies save up to 80% of operational costs.
Final Thoughts
Voice AI technology is transforming insurance services by elevating customer experience, increasing customer satisfaction scores, minimizing support costs, and improving operational efficiencies.
