Vikram Singh, our P&C Expert explains
Vikram, can you provide some background to how COVID-19 is impacting our Insurance clients?
Insurance carriers are under tremendous pressure due to the business continuity issues and client service concerns caused by COVID-19. Insurance organizations need to be pro-active, to model the impact of COVID-19 and then determine the best strategy to mitigate.
To ensure that service levels are aligned with customer’s needs, Insurance firms need to adopt new channels that incorporate the latest advancements in artificial intelligence (AI). This will help them handle the increased level of customer queries in an efficient manner that will improve their customers experience; key for driving customer loyalty and retention.
Please explain why Chatbots and AI are key in today’s world?
Conversational technology such as chatbots provides supplemental channels that offer a low-touch, 24 by 7 response that enables teams to focus on value-add, thereby helping to drive policyholder and agent satisfaction.
With many serviceable areas in insurance processes, Artificial Intelligence powered chatbots can play an important role across the insurance value chain. This includes:
- Educating interested buyers when considering purchase of policy,
- Enhancing customer service during life of policy (e.g. coverage, claims, renewals).
These cognitive chatbots are a convenient and non-threatening way for customers to ask questions and raise concerns. They can quickly provide information that simplifies insurance transactions, can enable online completion of policy forms, follow up on premiums, renewals, claim status etc.
Do you believe that the technology is mature enough to provide requisite levels of customer experience?
Yes, certainly. Chatbots are increasingly becoming an important part of insurers customer service strategy. They can be integrated easily within insurers websites; also within their social media sites to provide customers with accessible support around the clock.
Rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing capabilities have enabled chatbots to quickly develop into real value proposition for firms; this contrasts strongly with the Interactive Voice Recognition solutions of the past.
Novarica, a leading analyst firm recently observed that Insurers are increasingly interested in chatbots for call centers and self-service portals as a result of the increased maturity of the technologies1.
Can you provide further details on the likely chatbot use cases in the Insurance industry?
We find that the customer experience using chatbots varies based on the purpose for the call; if a customer is contacting the Insurance firm as dissatisfied over a service provided then chatbots are usually not the ideal solution. However, we see cognitive chatbots as the ideal mechanism to address initial queries efficiently, thereby removing frustration earlier in the communication timeline and helping to prevent issues arising.
Due to the ever increasing capabilities of cognitive chatbots they are fast becoming a core part of the service strategy for most insurance carriers; the figure below provides examples of where chatbots are being used today.
So how is Coforge helping clients leverage AI chatbots?
Coforge has created its own chatbot accelerator, called iVera.
It is a multi-channel insurance focused chatbot that enables conversational interaction via text and voice. It can be easily integrated with third-party chat applications, mobile devices using Google Assistant, Voice via Alexa, Cortana, Siri etc.
iVera uses a common language model to provide a consistent experience to the users regardless of channel they use.
It applies Artificial Intelligence, Emotional Intelligence and Autonomous Reasoning to provide an intuitive and intelligent conversational maturity.
It consumes both structured & unstructured data that is integrated using standard API’s with policy administration, underwriting, billing and claims systems to provide seamless omnichannel experience to customers.
As stated, iVera incorporates an AI-enabled conversational flow that can be accessed via variety of channels. It uses voice and or entered conversational text to initiate a query; it matches the intent of the user and subsequently provides the appropriate responses.
So, what are the benefits of iVera to our clients?
I believe that our iVera solution is a step change option as it combines our expertise with the latest digital technologies to deliver an insurance specific solution, it can:
- Help streamline customer experience.
- Reduce operational costs whilst providing a 24 by 7 service to customers.
- Help firms be proactive, reducing customer dissatisfaction.
- Self service capability that free up resources for value-add activities.
- Provides a new sales channel to customers.