Conversational AI Done Right
Digital transformation is sweeping the insurance landscape, and insurance leaders everywhere are being asked to pick up the torch of modernization efforts for their companies. Conversational AI is an essential part of an insurance company’s digital arsenal as they play for modernization because it allows them to intelligently automate mission-critical components of their enterprise for increased customer satisfaction and employee engagement. But what is Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
Conversational AI is the application of learned patterns in historical conversation data in order to provide a human-like dialogue for your customers whether via text or voice – sans human involvement. In essence, conversational AI uses natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU) to communicate with users in a natural way using human language instead of computerized speech patterns.
Insurance carriers, like those in the three use case examples outlined below, are already using conversational AI effectively in their claims process and to afford a personalized touch to their conversations even when their operations teams can’t field calls. They’re using it to gather and update personal information, automate email responses, and streamline disability claims management. In every case, customer satisfaction increases along with the accompanying increase in NPS. Intuitive conversational AI saves time and money and improves customer communications.
Where Can Conversational AI be Found?
Conversational AI is now so commonplace that it’s already in many of the transactions that we make through voice assistants and virtual assistants, daily. From online purchases and bank transactions, to how we work with customer service agents at every level, the practice of evaluating and generating conversational experiences with automatic speech recognition to accomplish a specific task is now a mainstay.
This set of technologies has become expected and preferred because people are short on time and want to be able to resolve issues with customer support quickly. Very few people choose to wait on the line to “Speak to a Representative” if they have other options presented to them.
If you have ever asked Alexa about the weather or received a text appointment reminder or interacted with the popup chatbot in the lower right corner of your screen on a website, you have already used conversational bots and value their capabilities.
Benefits of Conversational AI for Insurance Carriers
Insurance carriers who use conversational AI lower operational expenses, grow their employee engagement and improve customer satisfaction for their companies. It offers alternative channels for customer interactions which lightens the load on call center workers and allows them to focus on high-value customer interactions. By leaving rote tasks to be handled efficiently with automation applications, insurance carriers can help employees work with less stress and more engagement; providing better service that in turn improves morale.
With advanced Conversational AI, users can choose from multiple channels-text, email, mobile phone, website-to get the information that they seek in real-time, when they want or need it. Customer satisfaction is improved, along with NPS, when customers’ questions are answered in real-time.
3 Examples of Conversational AI Done Right
Updating Personal Information
The claims processing journey is notoriously difficult to navigate because of the many different steps, the number of contributors, and the different types of information that it requires. From FNOL/FNOI to claim closure, there are numerous shifting variables to manage within each claim. It’s that variety that can be an opportunity for great service and customer satisfaction, or a series of missteps that lead to unhappy customers and dejected employees. Rather than dealing with the stress of those pitfalls, conversational AI automates claims processing for speed, convenience, and efficiency. It’s ultimately carriers’ brands and their consumers that benefit.
Tower leverages intuitive conversational AI in their business for claims processing to gather and update customer information. For example, Tower often sends letters to policyholders to update their personal information, and occasionally gets a letter bounced back to sender. When that happens, Tower simply uses Ushur to send an automated outreach to the customer via either text or email to securely update their profiles. When the customer responds, no matter which platform they use, the details immediately and automatically update in Tower’s backend systems. Tower has seen customer engagement and satisfaction increase with the convenience of providing the relevant information via the channel of their choice, and employees enjoy the additional benefit of being freed to focus on high-value transactions.
Automating Email Responses
It’s inefficient and time-consuming to use important employee resources to sift through hundreds or thousands of email requests every day and determine who is the appropriate audience. Further, manually routing each email request from one person to the next is prone to mistakes and it leads to missed opportunities. Here we can introduce digital assistants.
Conversational AI is a critical tool for scaling manual, human conversations. And, as it happens, Irish Life was looking for a way to decrease their email response time before they found Ushur’s AI-powered SmartMail. Immediately, it decreased the email indexing time of each email from an average of 2.5 days to mere seconds. It was also able to match classification metrics of human sorters exceeding 80%, instantly. And with the machine learning capabilities of AI, the sorting percentages tend to increase as its models see more samples and learn the patterns better. SmartMail uses advanced technology to address the lack of accuracy and slow processing of business processes that used to require user input.
Streamlining Disability Claims
Disability claims are fraught with asynchronous tasks that can slow down the claim resolution process. Missing information and documentation can elongate the process to days and weeks when one agent is responsible for contacting each party and then entering the information into the appropriate systems. While those risks for slow processing are enough, add to that the fact that claimants must contact that same agent for information on status. Adding documentation, data entry, and employee responsibilities all together, insurers have the perfect storm for terrible response times and the perfect opportunity for improving the process using conversational AI capabilities, such as Ushur’s Invisible App.
That inefficient use of resources, with its associated negative user experience, was exactly where one large 250 Fortune insurance carrier found itself, particularly with short term disability claims related to postpartum care.
In the case of this specific disability claim solution, the majority of the claims were processed manually and the insurance carrier experienced considerable delays collecting key dates needed from claimants to process their claims. Contact center agents had to individually call claimants to collect key dates or send paper-based forms to collect the data. On average, it would take six calls, and over three weeks, to get the information. In a typical case, it took multiple contact attempts to families who were adjusting to newborns; a sensitive and private time for most families. Suffice it so say that customer satisfaction was not high.
Using Ushur’s intuitive mobile-like experience via Invisible App, the carrier was able to trigger an automated outbound message to the claimant to request information in a convenient and white-labeled container, bearing the familiar look and feel of the carrier’s brand within the conversational interface. Once the customer provided the needed information, Ushur was able to automatically write the acquired data to the backend legacy systems. Essentially, the carrier could offer modernized customer experiences on top of existing technologies.
After implementation, 85% of claimants provided all the necessary information in less than an hour as compared to weeks. The resulting decrease to the call center agents’ time lowered expenses and allowed those same agents to focus on high-value accounts and claims. Additionally, customer satisfaction improved as users could respond within their own time frames and in their preferred channels.