Both voice and chat assistants construct this framework, so it’s crucial to use them together to reap all the benefits. The benefits exceed a simple increase in productivity and customer satisfaction. What value can you extract from AI, and how? Read on to find it out!
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How AI Chatbots & Voice Assistants Improve Customer Support in the Insurance Industry
Let’s start by listing all the benefits of AI in insurance customer support. While the general perks are increased efficiency and enhanced customer experience, this is all achieved through smaller improvements. That’s why we want to present you with a more detailed breakdown of the advantages of such technologies—take a look below.
Customer Experience: Convenience
Firstly, AI chatbots & voice assistants have the benefit that they are available at any time—you can set them to operate 24/7. This way, your clients may get detailed information about their insurance deals whenever they want, without the need to match your opening hours.
This is especially important from the perspective of those clients who cannot contact your company during your opening hours. Instead of waiting for the next day, or finding ways to make the contact possible, for instance when they’re at work, they can simply communicate with the bot whenever they want to. Naturally, an AI assistant will have a limited potential when it comes to more complex cases, but it will still be capable of handling the easier once contributing to efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Productivity: Automation
AI chatbots keep the human in the loop, while automating some tasks at the same time. For example, an AI Assistant works as an automated search engine, where human agents can prompt specific details from your repository. Or, an AI chatbot can begin every ticket and send only those clients to your agents who need more sophisticated support. Thanks to this, your agent becomes more productive and can focus on the most value-adding task, with all the mundane and repetitive work automated or simplified.
Productivity: Compliance
Another crucial benefit of AI-powered chatbots and voice assistants in the insurance industry is connected with the regulations over this sector of finance. Such bots rely on the data you feed them, which can include:
- your internal documents and regulations,
- official documents and regulations from the governing bodies in your region or state.
This way, you can teach them to underline any compliance issues (if you use the bots internally), and you can ensure that the information provided to your clients via front-office bots is always accurate.
Customer Experience & Sales: Accessibility
Chatbots and voice assistants also support remote insurance sales and customer experience among people with limited access to standard insurance platforms. How does this work?
You can design multi-lingual chatbots and voice assistants to provide seamless customer support for national minorities in the target market. Naturally, such bots might still make mistakes, but in many cases this will be easier than hiring a language specialist.
Customer Experience & Sales: Personalization
AI chatbots and voice assistants are capable of accessing and analyzing customer data—including previous encounters with your agents. This way, they can provide personalized support based on factors such as:
- tone of voice/messages preferred by the customer,
- customer risk profile,
- existing insurance policies owned by the customer,
- insurance & life events history,
- and more.
They might also provide your employees with tailored product proposals based on the data collected on each customer. This way, you will be more likely to upsell your products and increase your income.
Customer Experience & Productivity: Payment Collection
AI-powered chatbots can also help you automate the payment collection process. They can take over the whole workflow:
- providing the customer with the payment information,
- reminding customers about upcoming payments,
- automating form fill-out for customers,
- verifying and confirming payments.
You can also use tools like LiveBank24 AI Prompter to extract such data about a given customer if needed to solve a specific case.
Customer Experience & Productivity: Speed
Internal AI chatbots (AI Assistants) speed up the customer service process. Instead of searching your CRM or document databases, your employees can prompt out their questions in said assistant, which will do the task for them in a matter of seconds. This impacts both:
- productivity by reducing manual work,
- customer satisfaction by providing clients with quicker responses.
How to Harvest the Benefits of AI in the Insurance Industry?
As you can see, AI chatbots and voice assistants create a major advantage for any organization operating in the insurance industry. Nevertheless, this does not mean that they are easy to implement in practice. Badly designed bots can have as many downsides as the good ones’ benefits, so it’s crucial to prepare a thorough implementation strategy. What do you need to know?
Keep the Human in the Loop
Human-AI synergy should be the backbone of your efforts. Bots can be faulty at times, or some customers might simply prefer to talk to a real person. Therefore, you should leave ways for your customers to switch to human support if they want to.
If it’s during the opening hours, let the customer who asks for a human consultant switch to your chat or call your employee. If you’re running a 24/7 AI-powered bot, make sure that if a customer is dissatisfied with it, they can ask for human support… and make it so that your employees get notified and contact the client themself to show your proactivity. You need to find a golden means between AI and traditional customer service to deliver the best customer experiences possible.
Make the Decision: Digital Insurance Platform vs. a Separate Bot
You can implement two types of chatbots or voice assistants: ones that come with a larger digital platform for insurance companies and ones developed as separate solutions. This choice may impact your organization in multiple ways—here’s a brief overview in a nutshell:
| Digital Insurance Platform | Separate Chatbot/Voice Assistant |
| Requires lower initial investments, since the solution is already developed. | Requires a lot of resources from your IT team/an outsourced team to create a chatbot. |
| Limited customization, based on the solution you select. | You can customize it as you wish. |
| The vendor carries out support, maintenance, and updates. | You have to maintain the bot yourself. |
| The chatbots are integrated with other features of the platform. | You have to ensure that the bot can be integrated into other software components. |
In the end, it’s easier to use a digital insurance platform—especially since it comes with other features that might streamline your operations. Nevertheless, the choice will also be affected by your current IT infrastructure, so this is a decision that you need to make based on the circumstances and your specific situation.
The Takeaway
How do AI chatbots improve insurance customer service? What is the role of voice assistants in the insurance industry? The answer is that they can support sales, help you deliver better customer experiences, and boost productivity. They do this by creating multiple smaller benefits that build these three main advantages. But, to harvest them, you need to build a good implementation strategy.
Despite AI’s power, don’t rely purely on it—remember to leave the human in the loop! Also, make the difficult decision between a fully-fledged insurance platform and a separate chatbot solution, as it will define the direction you’ll pursue with your business in the long run.
Did you like this article? You may also read: Asynchronous Communication: The Key to Servicing Modern Customers
