There isn't an insurance business within the land that's not talking about digital transformation. Whether talking about AI, robotics or platforms, the majority of the market is confident it's heading toward a brightly lit, digital future.
The motivation for transformation? We are told customers are demanding a much better experience: an interaction that's quick, clean and has got the job done with minimal fuss.
But, for all the effort made, the customer experience of insurance is fundamentally the same as it was Ten or fifteen years ago – will still be according to call centers. I believe this is because, as the stated driver for digital change could be the customer, its primary purpose has been to reduce costs.
That efficiency-first approach has resulted in many organizations looking to webforms to digitize their customer-facing processes.
Webforms perform a decent job leveraging digitalization to automate the start of processes normally done manually. Yet any claim from a webform still necessitates the capable hands of the operations employee, who'll carry out the rest of the process and communicate the end result towards the customer. Additionally, webforms can't converse — reducing them, essentially, to digital monologue. While customers desire a quick, hassle-free experience, many want so now through conversation of some type. Conversations are comforting, familiar and make up a feeling of engagement that a static form can't ever replicate.
A true digital experience is a that can take all the advantages of a one-to-one conversation and automates it using conversational process automation (CPA). That is the world that webforms were trying to create but didn't produce because of the focus on efficiency.
CPA leverages a chatbot conversational interface to deliver an efficient customer experience, taking into consideration the customer first while saving cost. It allows for that execution of high-value, customer-facing processes, integrated into insurance platforms and systems and complying with security and audit requirements.
CPA will, In my opinion, bring the digital change that so many seek. They can replicate the conversational style and effectiveness of a human call handler for that majority of recurrent insurance interactions – from quote and purchase through to claim notification.
CPA has the ability to handle call volumes that just a really large, very costly call center could match. Obviously, you will find limits as to the CPA can currently do, but it is improving all the time — getting smarter at predicting queries, reacting to something which doesn't squeeze into this area and leading the client through complex processes. Webforms, for those their value, can't ever do this.
As we collect more and more data through CPA, performance becomes more accurate and, according to a report from IT advisory firm Gartner, by 2022 70% of white-collar workers will interact with conversational platforms every day.
The mixture of process automation and superior customer experience will drive efficiencies. A current report by McKinsey estimates that, within the claims process alone, automation could reduce the price of that journey up to 30%.
For insurance to be part of that digital future and also to reap its rewards, the has to have customer experience as its main motivator, replicating all of the value that a one-to-one conversation brings and putting the client in charge of the experience and keep costs low.
If we persist in letting costs saving alone drive transformation, we are going to end up getting fancier, more expensive tools than webforms that delivers marginal efficiency while continuing to leave customers frustrated. Which would be a failure of purpose and progress.
