Automation is becoming the backbone of futuristic businesses by driving the entire workflow, starting from customer outreach to continuous customer loyalty.
Manufacturing is the leader in using automation for better supply chain efficiencies. However, the insurance industry is increasingly adopting automated insurance agents to propel growth.
Using conversational interfaces (chatbots), these automated agents transform the way insurance companies facilitate the customer journey. They are being used to increase awareness, drive purchase decisions, and ensure a smooth experience throughout the customer life cycle.
How To Effectively Use Chatbots at Each Stage of the Customer lifecycle
Plan Recommendation
A well-designed bot can understand the customer’s needs and identify the right plan to suit those needs. These recommendations are instant, so the chances of conversion increase manifold.
Such recommendations can also boost sales as the bot, through predictive analysis, can identify the best plan for the customer with the highest probability of conversion. It derives these predictions by analysing millions of historical data points.
Quotes/Illustrations
Chatbots use natural language processing to get to know your audience effectively. It allows them to personalize the service offering that best suits each policyholder. Based on these preferences, the chatbots can generate and send quotes to the customers directly. Such personalized offers increase the chances of conversions.
Support
Chatbots can act as dedicated support agents for customers 24/7. It can help your customers find information and documents, guide them through the processes, or answer their queries with the standard answers it has been trained with.
For issues they can't solve, chatbots can help customers reach an appropriate person.
The accessibility of chatbots for customer interaction through multiple devices, including mobile phones, makes them perfect tools as virtual assistants. Not only that, through integrations and APIs, chatbots can also create support tickets in the help desk systems for customers.
Customer Education
Customers find it difficult to understand and remember every aspect of the policy. They also have questions about their unique needs, situations, and requirements. A bot helps them ask the right questions and then provides them with the answers immediately.
The questions can range from the eligibility requirements to procedures for purchase, premium payments, and filing of claims. Chatbots can provide answers using any appropriate medium, including text, documents, audio, and even video.
Document Submission
The conversational agents can guide customers through the standardized document submission process. With the help of supporting algorithms, it can identify deviations and raise flags if additional documents or information is required. By utilizing computer vision, natural language processing, and anomaly detection capabilities, these automated agents can also enable fraud detection early in the process to mitigate risks.
Policy Issuance
If there are no deviations or red flags on the information customers provide, the insurance bots can issue the policy. In that sense, you can use them for the end-to-end process from the inquiry to the policy issuance.
The customers get the choice to access the policy anytime through these bots.
Payments
The automated insurance agents can also integrate with payment gateways and banks to seamlessly accept payments. As the banking sector is also undergoing a digital transformation, real-time banking and payment transactions are no longer difficult to achieve. The insurance industry can leverage these capabilities to provide frictionless payment processes for its customers.
Customer Queries
With the capabilities to enter into natural conversations with customers, conversational bots can help insurance companies nearly eliminate their support woes. Customers no longer have to wait for answers, and through simplified, natural patterns of conversation, every piece of information they need is easily available to them.
Policy Renewals
When it is the time to renew the policy, chatbots can proactively follow up with the customers and guide them through the renewal process. From determining the underwriting changes, bots can ensure the customers have the smoothest path possible to renew their policies.
Alerts, reminders, and status updates
Chatbots can share notifications through websites or mobile apps, informing customers of any important information or events. They can send out personalized alerts and reminders, too, so that the customers can take timely actions for their policies, like paying premiums.
To Sum Up
The experience of using automation in insurance has been positive for the insurance industry. Overall, conversational interfaces and text-based communication are becoming the preferred mode of exchange, and the insurance sector needs to follow the trend.
Experts predict that more than 80% of insurance underwriting will undergo automation. Despite these trends, less than half of the insurance industry is using automated agents. For those who start using them soon, there will be a considerable competitive advantage.