The idea of deploying a bot with an insurance system and its various platforms seemed unlikely a decade ago, but it has changed in the last few years. Numerous insurance companies have been investing in chatbots to enable their potential prospects and existing policyholders with around-the-clock support. Experts believe AI-powered insurance bots have the potential to wear many hats. Intelligent chatbots have proven to educate customers on different policies, assist with policy comparison, manage claim applications, validate claims, and provide customer support.
But, can bot adoption simplify traditional insurance functions? The answer is a simple yes. Address the below-listed long overdue insurance challenges that were swept under the carpet for the last four decades with intelligent insurance bots.
In recent years, the insurance sector saw a state of flux. With a sudden wave of digital transformation that includes the adoption of AI, RPA, and bots, along with data-driven processes and growing customer demands, the insurance sector is bound to face several issues.
Here are the key insurance challenges that came along with innovation, their relevant solutions, and what they mean for your business:
According to the Customer Compass report by EIS Group, less than half of policyholders trust insurers to be responsive to basic customer needs. The global survey observed three key factors responsible for consumers while making a policy decision and choosing an insurer: the ability to purchase products and services online (44%), the ability to offer customer-driven pricing based on their specific needs (42%), and having an easy-to-use mobile app (32%).
Solution: Bridging information gaps with guided conversations
Considering how customers choose an insurer, it should be the utmost priority of the insurance carriers to close information gaps. Integrating an AI-driven bot makes the job easier. They can answer complex customer queries with the help of guided conversations. The technology enables bots with a set of pre-selected answers, offering detailed information on any given query.
A guided conversation looks like a flowchart that leads customer interactions to a specific territory to deliver the right insurance solution.
Insurance bots integrated with artificial intelligence offer a quick and reliable way to build customer trust and deliver personalized policies.
Business benefit: Run successful lead generation with effective customer engagement
The bots built using conversational AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) offer interactive interfaces for better customer interactions. Their underlying technology, such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, makes them an ideal solution to increase visitor engagement.
Bots can drive visitors to submit their contact information by making humanlike conversations that result in lead generation.
Bots are designed to gather data and transfer it to policy agents for lead nurturing and improvement of sales funnel efficiency.
Customers with limited awareness of insurance and its benefits add another challenge for insurance companies. For instance, a lot of customers find property and casualty insurance complex and hard to understand. Buying policies, and applying for renewals and claims can seem complicated but insurance chatbots provide clarity and help customers with policy recommendations and comparisons.
Based on the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, in early 2022, the uninsured rates of adults among the age group of 18-64 have reached 11.8%.
Often, millennials buy insurance policies less than their predecessors. Though this data changed since COVID-19, the primary reason behind the apathy remains the same – not having enough knowledge.
Solution: Humanlike empathy to understand the concern
The complex web of technical terms, insurance rates, and other information mentioned under any typical insurance policy is difficult to understand. But a bot can simplify the terms and conditions in layman’s terms. The same technology can be used for the claim application, issuance, and status updates, eliminating the paperwork while addressing related customer queries.
Business benefit: Increases conversion rate, keeping customer acquisition cost in check
Bots can self-evolve with AI technology. They can also be trained to provide better responses to customer requests. Having access to customer chat history helps insurance bots tailor their responses and improve customer relationships and quality of customer support offered in the future. The capability allows them to save as much time and effort as possible. AI bots are programmed to educate existing as well as potential customers on different insurance policies in native languages. Their customer engagement feature allows better chances of conversions.
Customers usually experience that buying, renewing, and claiming insurance are long and complicated processes. Insurance companies relying on manual processes for claims processing, background checks, and data extraction, spend a lot of time and resources on avoidable activities.
Solution: Integrate bot technology with process automation – RPA
Though insurance processes come with numerous sub-functions, bots can automate a lot of them. Consider Robotic Process Automation (RPA) as a subset of hyperautomation that enables insurers to transform processes to keep their businesses afloat.
In insurance, RPA is used as a rules-based, low-code software “bot” that handles repetitive tasks of human workers.
Deploying a smart bot enables insurance carriers to help their customers through various processes, such as form filling, initiating claims, and browsing new policy plans. They can also be utilized to automate backend operations, making it a lot easier for customer service operators to streamline their work.
Business benefit: 24*7 customer support reduces team workload and improves operational efficiency
Integrating RPA and AI with bots can cover double the responsibilities. Automating insurance work processes reduces the workload of the sales and marketing team. As the bot resolves the basic customer queries, human agents can invest their time in taking up complex concerns. With bot technology, professionals get dedicated time to focus on urgent issues.
According to a popular misconception, though digital transformation is the key to innovation, it is giving birth to various challenges in insurance. Bot technology has the potential to manage decade-long as well as present-day challenges. It enables insurers to modernize their back-end operations and their offerings that can help in increasing customer satisfaction and revenue. Explore how you can deploy a bot today without disrupting your underlying technology and infrastructure.
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