The insurance industry is shifting and making digital transformations for good to match increasing expectations and the changing landscape of modern technology.

The market dynamics are in constant development as more personalized services that suit the customers’ needs and provide all kinds of flexibility are being prepared.

The insurance sector needs to manage big databases with a lot of information and prompt operations, these can become a burden if not managed and organized correctly. With deteriorating services, the company may lose its reputation and deal with a negative experience. This shows that customer engagement and experience matter, too, while selling policies. This means making their insurance availing and acclaiming journey a smooth process without any hassle. With increasing digital advancements, people tend to look for personalized services and automated self-service options, which help save time and give prompt responses. A preliminary proactive approach by utilizing artificial intelligence, Machine learning, and IoT can change the way a business interacts with its customers and make each operation effective.

Automation and digital advancements can enhance everyday operations and provide a seamless experience. Agencies can also approach experts and professionals to provide insurance agency management software development services which can give 24/7 assistance and high-quality services. Insurance companies can improve their integration of policies and ensure that immediate actions are taken with a frictionless method.

Why is customer experience an important part of insurance companies?

Any business or sector, be it large-scale or small-scale, depends highly on customer satisfaction and experience. It plays a vital part in ensuring that a business is running efficiently and growing substantially. Unsatisfied customers will swiftly move on to providers who can give an exceptional experience and ensure a seamless transition. This is a competitive area that is dynamic and changes rapidly due to market statistics. With a preventive and automated approach, the company can identify risks and alert the customers beforehand to avoid issues. It can help in resolving recurring issues which can be easily reported and taken care of.

The companies are moving on to various software and mobile apps to provide prompt services anywhere and assess the costs involved. These help a customer to take immediate action and get a quote for their damage, loss, or expenses.

• AI-powered chatbots: These are very advanced and can give quick responses to any query. With 24/7 assistance, customers can get answers for anything related to their policies, claims, or situations.
• Advanced devices and wearables: Trackers, locators, and smartwatches are the new changes that help insurance companies evaluate valuable health information, fitness levels, and data to personalize health insurance services based on real-time statistics. This helps to improve health policies and upgrade various schemes for medical expenses.

Other benefits that the company provides are using the latest technology

• The traditional days of purchasing a policy are over as quicker methods become the norm. Lengthy paperwork and complications with information are avoided altogether by using digital assistants, automated bots, AI, and other advanced technologies that tailor the exact services when needed.
• The claiming process can become seamless with no disruptions and potential risks. This saves time and helps the customer focus on fixing their problem rather than making long calls and filling out forms.
• Better understanding is formed between the insurers and customers as daily activities are enhanced tenfold through automation, which leaves room are data analysis, useful interactions, and encouragement toward a preventive approach.
• Data from various sources can be used to create on-demand products, personalized policies, and the right type of premium relationships that form the right blend with the market.

Conclusion

The future of the insurance sector is becoming more humanistic and proactive as specialized services become a part of daily operations. This can contribute to more open collaborations, project expansions, and substantial growth, which will positively affect the insurance industry and brand loyalty.

As the insurance sector competes to win market share, Henry Jinman at EBI.AI discusses three ways companies can benefit from the power of Artificial Intelligence. 

The UK general insurance market continues to be fiercely competitive. While the battle for repeat business keeps downward pressure on pricing, a constantly changing regulatory agenda increases costs. Whatever the industry, successful companies know that building a business based on price alone is not sustainable.

Customer service is what matters most. It’s a sentiment that is reflected in the latest findings of multinational professional services company Ernst & Young (EY). It claims that non-life insurance companies in particular should “invest to create innovative and satisfying end-to-end customer experiences” with optimised technology that helps them become “data-driven and insight-enabled” in everything they do.”

It’s time to consider the benefits of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Through its ability to capture, analyse and learn from massive amounts of data, AI should be at the centre of every enterprise serious about creating amazing customer experiences. AI tools should also support everyone, employees, managers and customers, to ask and receive the information they need, whenever and wherever they need it, quickly and using engaging, natural language.

3 ways to boost CX and win market share using AI

In EBI.AI’s experience, companies that introduce AI solutions such as AI assistants are rewarded with multiple benefits. By reducing the number of repetitive calls in the contact centre or customer service departments and frontline staff are better equipped to handle more complex and rewarding tasks. Meanwhile, scaling today’s virtual AI solutions is easy, enabling managers to adapt to unexpected events and emergencies as they happen such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Data-driven AI solutions also make formidable weapons against the common problems facing insurance managers such as highlighting fraudulent claims and mitigating claims leakage.  

Here are 3 ways AI can help the insurance industry in key areas:

1. Front-end sales – train the latest AI tools to answer the most common questions quickly then maximise their ability to use critical customer data to offer personalised recommendations on policies and pricing. Integrate AI with sophisticated telematics in-car sensors or health analytics platforms to identify your most careful drivers or health-conscious clients to reward them with lower premiums so they keep coming back.

2. Product and marketing – deliver customers an exceptional experience with AI tools that are welcoming, efficient and secure. Use AI’s image, video and natural language capabilities to assess and analyse claims and issue fast, accurate pay-out decisions in seconds. Then build confidence and loyalty with AI’s ability to flag up potential threats from scammers and hackers to keep customers’ sensitive details safe. Once these important foundations are in place, make AI an intrinsic part of your marketing toolkit. AI can propose personalised offerings based on customer needs and then swiftly identify opportunities for intelligent lead generation.

3. Customer management – AI tools guarantee round-the-clock customer service – they never sleep, go off sick or need a holiday! Virtual Customer Assistants (VCAs) for example, are a bonus to customer service departments through their ability to cross-sell, upsell and prevent agent churn. AI tools can match customers with the most qualified available agents to handle their queries or, when applied over large data sets, provide analysis of general customer sentiment over time. Maximise machine learning to add feedback functionality to insurance bots. That way, you’ll better understand client needs, improve services and deliver a highly personalised experience.

Don’t rush in!

To make AI a success, follow a few golden rules. First of all, involve the right people in the company including budget holders, the IT department and everyday users from the very beginning. Set and manage expectations by educating your organisation about what AI can and cannot do.  Be realistic when sharing timeframes for results – machine-learning takes time to perfect! Also remember that AI tools thrive on good data so build a bank of reliable data that is up-to-date and above all, relevant. Finally, test AI in a real-world environment while maintaining business as usual.

Learn from real-life success stories

Follow the lead of Legal & General, General Insurance now part of LV=General Insurance, part of the Allianz Group, at the beginning of this year, EBI.AI worked with the company to create SmartHelp, an AI assistant designed to enhance the company’s customer service. Since that time, nearly 11% of Legal & General’s customers use SmartHelp on the available web pages, on some of the pages usage is as high as 40% and the virtual AI assistant regularly provides over 300 answers to thousands of the most commonly asked questions.

To lean more, download the case study or visit www.ebi.ai for more ideas on how to create amazing customer experiences through conversational AI.

About the Author

Henry Jinman is Commercial Director of EBI.AI

Established in 2014, EBI.AI is among the most advanced UK labs to create fully managed, Enterprise-grade AI Assistants. These assistants help clients to provide their customers with faster and better resolutions to their queries, and liberate front-line customer service agents from the dull, repetitive, and mundane.

EBI.AI selects the best AI and cloud services available from IBM, Amazon, Microsoft and others, combined with bespoke AI models to deliver its AI communication platform, called Lobster.

Combined with it over 19 years of experience working with big data, analytics and systems integration it has successfully implemented AI Assistants, that now handle hundreds of thousands of conversations a year across Transport & Travel, Property, Insurance, Public and Automotive industries.

For more information, please visit www.ebi.ai

Consumers looking for insurance are always looking for the best deal: they search the web, compare the price, and take out the policy. It’s easy to swap provider, and as such, the insurance industry has high customer churn. So how can companies keep their customers?

Alistair Burton, Business Development Manager for Insurance and Healthcare at Genesys, argues that insurance companies are missing a genuine opportunity to engage with their customers, and need to provide a more proactive approach to customer service in order to provide a better, more fulfilling customer experience and increase customer retention. The answer to this is proactive web and mobile engagement.

For consumers, one insurance company is always replaceable with a better deal. Consumers switch from insurer to insurer for a variety of reasons better prices, better reputation, and quite often, better customer service. The customer experience is essential to ensuring loyal, repeat customers.

Websites are the first point of contact with businesses for many people and with insurance it’s generally the customer’s only point of contact. It’s therefore essential for insurance companies to be proactive through web engagement.

Website Make it Happen

Nearly half (45%) of UK adults abandon filling out forms and transactions midway through completion after becoming frustrated over the length and complexity of the process, identity validation and security checks, and it’s the same when filling out forms for insurance cover.

Sorting out insurance can be a complicated task the sites can be difficult to navigate; there are multiple questions to answer, forms to fill out, and pages and pages of terms and conditions to read. All this can make sorting out insurance quite a task.

If the customer can’t find what they’re looking for, too often, it means that the customer must end their digital interaction and perhaps go to another insurance provider. If they chose to persevere, pick up a phone, and call into the contact centre, this would be the last chance for the provider to secure their business. It is essential that the agent has knowledge of what the customer was doing on the digital channel. However, typically this is not the case, resulting in having to start all over again which is very frustrating for the customer.

Proactive engagement can change this by matching the prospective customers with the best person to help with their query at the precise moment of need and through their preferred channel of communication. This intervention can be the difference between an abandoned purchase and a new or retained customer.

Targeted Web Chat

Many insurance organisations try to connect with shoppers via web chat, deliver pop-ups at a time when help is not wanted and they only serve to irritate customers. When shoppers do take up the offer for assistance, the experience often gets worse, which serves to kill the sale and tarnish your brand.

Pop-ups that are proactive and offer precise assistance at the point of need by providing an invitation to communicate using whichever channel is most convenient to the customer, and identifying the best possible person in your company to give help can enable agents to resolve customer issues quickly and efficiently.

Using targeted and proactive web chat can reduce call handling, help to maintain customer loyalty and boost retention a particularly difficult task in the insurance industry, as customers choose insurance for price, so it’s even more important to provide a good service to keep them.

Customer Loyalty

Proactive engagement solutions provide great value to customer service delivered on the web; it provides agents with real-time visibility into the customers’ online behaviour. This provides the agent with insight and context, allowing them to achieve a higher rate of first contact resolution. Therefore helping the insurance company improve customer experience and reduce the customer effort. Lower customer effort equals a happier customer, which ultimately leads to additional sales and increased customer retention.

The Future’s Mobile?

A key constraint in the insurance industry is that there are fewer customer touch points than in the retail and banking industries, for example. However, as customers are increasingly turning to their mobile phones to seek information, interact and purchase, insurance providers need to look towards mobile as a way of interacting with their customers.

While live chat has long been a proven tool for traditional online customer engagement, the challenge is how and when to apply chat to an overall mobile web strategy. For example, insurance companies that could monitor hesitation over an online application form or related access to FAQs could engage at that point.

Another approach is to create an app that has the capability to notify the customer when they need to renew their insurance, tell the customer when they’ve received their information, or that their claim has been processed, could see conversions raised. Seamless interactions with mobile visitors in real-time could increase both customer satisfaction and conversions.

Insurance companies need to embrace mobile for the future, as it’s a critical new interaction point that can drive customer satisfaction. Just as important as engaging with customers on the web at the right moment, developing the same proactive engagement strategy across mobile will allow insurance providers to deliver a mobile chat experience through an app, which will help create a mobile experience that meets and exceeds the expectations of their customers.

It’s All About the Experience

The insurance industry is a prime example of where good customer service can transform a cost into a revenue generator and in fact help insurance companies keep customers and even cross-sell additional insurance products and services. It’s therefore crucial for insurance companies to have numerous proactive touch points to continue to deepen the customer relationship.

It’s no longer about how to sell the best policy at the cheapest rate. Instead, it’s about how to provide the best policyholder experience. Higher engagement with customers using proactive engagement could mean the difference between customers renewing their policy automatically, and searching elsewhere for this year’s quote.

About the Author

Alistair Burton is Senior Account Director for Insurance, Healthcare and Media at Genesys.