As customers increasingly demand a better experience once they communicate with companies, including insurers, help is coming from a counterintuitive source. It turns out that one of the best methods to become more personal is through- robots.
More precisely, the answer is turning out to be chat robots, or “chatbots.”
People don't like having to telephone call centers and through that phone tree – “Para continuar en espanol, oprima uno– For billing, press 2; for-.” Many, especially younger people, just want to have the ability to text a question and obtain it answered. That's how they handle anything else. So, many companies are realizing they have to have customer service reps that react to texts, and they are seeing a dent to make use of chatbots.
Using so-called natural language processing to understand a text message and then drawing on artificial intelligence to both discover the answer and generate a reply, chatbots can handle perhaps 70% to 80% of queries. They are able to hand a discussion off and away to a human at the appropriate interval and may go ahead and take conversation over again, without the customer's ever realizing that a bot has been involved or that a handoff occurred. Actually, the bots can wind up sounding much less robotic than the standard answering services company rep who is only permitted to read off a script.
The bots are extremely efficient about finding answers they actually have to become slowed up, so the customer doesn't think, “No one could type that fast,” and wonder if a pc is involved. (A particular percentage of typos can also be developed to appear, as can emojis or lots of exclamation points, to make the bots seem more human. It is possible to program the bots to possess different personalities.)
With so many mundane tasks handled by bots, the call-center reps reach deal with more interesting issues and may spend more time with customers, giving everyone a better experience.
Although they haven't shown up widely in insurance yet, they're in use in several other industries, with great success.
Why now?
Chatbots have been in existence for more than 20 years. Why must companies pay attention to chatbots now?
For starters, these days just about everyone is carrying a super-computer around in her own pocket. In 1991, 1GB of flash memory would have cost around $45,000. Now, most phones have a minimum of 32GB of memory. Processors are more than 1,000 times as quickly as these were in 1991. So, we've got the technology for chatbots is lightyears ahead of where it was.
Companies also have placed an increased focus on messaging, including with bots. Facebook Messenger uses a lot more than 11,000 chatbots to respond to messages. The chat app Kik recently asserted a lot more than 20,000 bots have been made specifically for its platform.
Perhaps much more importantly, the pendulum within the customer-business relationship has swung heavily in support of the customer. Companies no more control the message/brand; it's all regulated out there in the ether, and firms have to guard their reputations by taking care of customers. Some companies, for example Zappos, have virtually built their businesses around the customer experience, while some, including cable companies (Comcast, most notoriously), are vilified.
Insurance companies can easily see what is happening in other industries and find out what they need to complete. Net Promoter Scores (NPS) would be the insurance industry's most consistent measurement of customer loyalty, and, despite some pockets of brilliance by individuals, more often than not the insurance industry stinks. Chatbots can help.
Chatbots create a conversational web and conversational commerce. They can even be developed to wish the client a contented birthday or happy anniversary or make some comment about how long the client had been using the company.
Chatbots create a company's behavior more consistent overall, particularly in relation to elegance and simplicity. On top of that, it's easy to keep the bots on-message, and they only have to learn once.
In 2021, it was estimated that it requires five screens to obtain a user to where he really wants to go. In 2021, that number has increased to seven. Bots obtain the information almost instantly, even if that means seeing a deep link in an app or on the site or in a corporate data center.
Bots aren't “one size fits all.” They're “one size fits one.” So work needs to go into customizing them for an organization. But simple bots such as for frequently asked questions can go reside in a day, and an ecosystem of bots could be developed over time. Once a bot exceeds its ability to answer a question, it might initially pass the issue to some human, but, over time, the handoff may go to a different bot that has been developed.
Bots may also be able to take on more tasks, including outreach to customers. Bots could automatically alert customers of an impending hurricane and start a dialogue with them about what steps to consider to organize, who to call if they need immediate assistance, how to file claims, etc.
In insurance, there's nothing like the Domino's pizza tracker, that allows a customer to follow along with a purchase every step of the way, in the to the oven to the front door. But there will be, and picture how helpful that will be with claims. Many customer calls are about where their claims have been in the procedure, so streamlining it and providing a bot using the capabilities to reply to the client will make the process easier, eliminate lots of calls – and make the customer much happier.
Of course, an insurance coverage bot won't answer “what may be the meaning of life?” or “how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” like Apple's Siri can. But a bot could be tailored and educated to answer many questions, filling a gaping hole in the insurance world.
