Conversational AI insurance & Chatbots for insurance companies

In this blog let’s dig deep on how a chatbot can prove to be a game-changer for the insurance sector:

Challenges in the Insurance Industry:
The insurance industry today is facing countless challenges. With the current pandemic, agents cannot visit customers and this has created anxiety and fear in the customer’s minds. And this is where chatbot has come to rescue and insurance companies are not leaving any stone unturned to become tech-savvy and transform their business model. Consumers now look for policies from online websites and compare prices themselves before contacting an agent. As information has been made easily available to the consumers, the insurance industry is looking towards insurance bots to overcome these commonly faced challenges to build better relationships with their policyholders.

Trust Issues
According to a recent survey, people trust insurance companies’ way less than they trust any other sectors. People are very hesitant to invest in insurance policies and they are worried about the hidden clauses, terms, and conditions. To overcome this challenge, insurance companies are moving towards bots on their website that can make quick and reliable engagements in real-time while building trust among its users. Chatbots communicate with the consumers; provide them with details and quick solutions in simple language which builds a good rapport between the consumers and the brand.

Lack of Understanding
Insurance claim and renewal filling is a complicated and time-consuming process when done through an agent. This is the reason why insurance companies are opting for bots to move their processes from reactive to proactive. Online Bots have helped this sector to improve customer experience and have proved to be a boom for those who had a tough time deciphering the complex terms and jargon commonly used by the agents. Chatbots can easily communicate these terms to the customers in an interactive manner using simple language, aiding customers in having a clearer picture of the policy, and many things as such.

Complicated Claim and Payments Process
No proper mechanism to notify a customer about the payment date, they are dependent on the agents or they have to maintain their own records. Claim processing itself is a complicated task. Chatbots can notify customers on time to time basis and all the paperwork and document submission can be done in a hassle-free manner.

Traditional Sales Method
Insurance companies are heavily dependent on Agents and brokers for selling Insurance policies, but now consumers are becoming much more aware and are flooded with options. There are different websites and channels available to compare policy details and the role of agents is diminishing. In order to up their game and overcome the difficulty faced in managing agents and brokers, the insurance sector is moving towards Digital Assistant or Bots that are making lives simpler both for companies and customers.

How Chatbots can transform the business:
Streamlining Sales Process
An insurance chatbot not only bridges the gap between potential customers and the brand but also segments the customer base contextually. The data on user preferences can be instrumental for the sales team to get a clear picture of potential customer needs. With a chatbot, the leads that lie at the bottom of the purchase funnel can be assigned to the sales representatives for better targeting.

Personalized Insurance Policy Recommendation
An ML chatbot can understand both the customers’ current intent and past intents based on previous conversations and purchase history. This helps the bot to recommend the right insurance product that is mapped to the customer’s specific, unique needs.

Automated Custom Policy Plan & Quote
A bot can ask a series of questions and create a plan and quote premium that match the policyholders need

Sales Support/Training Bot
The bot can keep sales updated with any new or upcoming products which they can plan out to reach customers.

Customer awareness & FAQs
Chatbots can take up the redundant task of educating the customers on various static FAQ’s like – process flow, policy comparison, and policy suggestion based on a rich database.
Chatbots are available 24/7 to answer FAQs about items like insurance coverage, premiums, documentation, & more.
A chatbot can even allow prospects to compare as well as suggest the optimal policy, from multiple carriers, based on the customer’s profile and inputs.

Speech to Text Bot – WhatsApp/Messenger
The multilingual bot with speech to text conversion capability helps customers understand the conversational context in detail & with ease & helps the bot throw the correct results.
Even with no language barrier, people can use the feature as a voice search agent which is getting enormously popular among millennials.

Lead generation and conversion
Chatbots also come in handy for customer segmentation and preference recognition. They can easily identify the query and consumption patterns (along with basic user info) to suggest the most appropriate offers. Also, their 24*7 availability and quick responses help in converting potential customers and generate more leads.

Claim processing and payment assistance
Chatbots can be of tremendous help if programmed to address your customer’s insurance claims. This one task comprises the majority of an insurer’s daily workload. Additionally, chatbots can also follow up with customers regarding existing claims and notify for payments. The entire cycle will be simplified with just a conversation!

Customer experience and feedback
The company’s website is the face of any brand and they become much more interactive with chatbot integration. It is obvious that chatbots can deliver superior customer experiences by minimizing the need to reach out to personnel or skim through multiple webpages. They can also collect valuable feedback for the brand, product, or even website development which can help companies to calculate their CSAT and NPS.

Conversational Advertisement
Chatbots can be used across social media channels, E-commerce sites, OTT platforms, and web browsers help insurers to gather customer details and key interest areas from customers directly and push the same to integrated CRM systems.

Summing up!

Conversational Insurance is the future. Today Chatbots are providing much-needed transformation, innovation and value add to this sector. Tasks such as claim processing, providing quotes, and 24/7 immediate cover to customers has become a cakewalk. Chatbots have benefited both the consumer and the companies as they can be deployed as a customer’s personal insurance managers while equipping the sales team with valuable and contextually relevant insights at the same time.
These Digital Assistants have transformed the industry in a big way, the sector that was once characterized as a complex, manual, and full of time-consuming tasks such as form filling, document verification, background check, etc has become much more streamlined and untangled. So looking at all these scenarios a surge in the adaptation of Bots is completely justified and days are not far when the insurance industry will become seamless and chat-intensive.