Voice assistants, chatbots driving insurance to new, more personal frontiers

September 24, 2020
Agustin Morcillo

Digital forces and AI are disrupting the Insurance market with new expectations and enhanced, easy experiences. User can access everything at their fingertips without using a keyboard. We’re talking about conversational commerce!

This refers to applications enabled by conversational AI solutions like chatbots and voice assistants. From product discovery, to consideration, to final purchase, the complete shopping experience is driven by conversations. As voice and AI technologies have leapt forward, the opportunities to leverage AI-driven chatbots and voice assistants has increased dramatically with much experimentation taking place within the insurance industry.

1. Why voice assistants or voice bots are important in insurance industry?

For the insurance industry, voice technology provides new opportunities to actively engage and inspire customers and optimize underwriting, servicing and claims processes. Buying any insurance requires a lot of time to be invested by the customer – they need to analyze the situation, understand the product they’re buying, fill out the application or other forms, and many other steps. Customers tend to drop out of the buying journey when they have to invest a lot of time. The average sales conversion rate for insurance websites is approximately 10%-15%. Hence voice makes browsing and other activities easier and quicker for the customers.

In the last few years, text or voice-based interfaces that are smart algorithm-powered have multiplied and taken their place in the digital industry. Consider Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant, and Microsoft’s Cortana – the advent of voice-based personal assistants have made complex interactions between humans and machines a reality.

smart watch with voice recognition
Source: Adobe Stock

2. How will the voice commerce help the insurance industry?

Security

The pre-detection of fraudulent offers through voice recognition will be a big benefit for insurers. The voice of the customer can be verified against the list of known fraudsters. By authenticating accounts with voice instead of a traditional password, we can avoid hacking and unauthorized access to customer information. The secure and easy login method of voice passwords enhance the customer experience who no longer need to worry about the tedious task of keeping track of their passwords.

Customer service/browsing tasks

Voice search can be used to browse through any website with vast content resulting in specific and quick responses. Speech to text technology can be used to understand the multilingual conventional speech.

Voice recognition uses sentiment analysis to accurately determine emotion and tone in the users’ voice. Not only does these free up employees to handle complex tasks, but also saves you valuable energy, time, and money. This will eventually lead to great productivity and revenue generation for the company.

Voice assistants will also help in the usability of the website/service by aiding the visually and hearing-impaired individuals as well.

Acquire more quality data

Quality data received through voice implementations can be utilized by the insurers to customize the products or services and improve the efficiency of communications. For example, using an audio to text convertor, you can dig into phrases and keywords to build solutions for the information you discover. Voice recognition enables you to process the customer complaint calls in a fully automatic way. The voice collected data can be used for optimizing the existing processes.

3. How do I leverage voice commerce to ensure organic conversion of leads, improve the customer service experience and effectively utilize time?

Here are few examples where voice assistants/bots can replace the conventional method:

 While the customer visits any insurance site, a voice bot can greet them, give a personal touch and guide the user through the voice of the user.

 Voice-to text-functionality can lead to a very smooth user experience when buying policies online, providing basic details, and filling out a necessary form.

 Customer servicing functions like renewals, claims, quote generation and claims can be eased.

 Data capturing during the claims and underwriting processes where data capturing and analysis is involved for the insurers.

 Authentications using voice recognition.

 Multilingual customer reach and support can be very useful in a market like India where there are more than 22 languages and 19,000 mother tongues are spoken.

4. Current research in the insurance industry for voice technology

Voice technology is not only used by young users, it is increasingly popular with the older generations as well. More than 30% of Age 50+ users find it more convenient than the conventional keyword search, swiping, entering data or tapping. As the consumer base becomes more comfortable with the latest trends in technology, the benefits of your innovation will only increase.

three smart speakers on a table
Source: Adobe Stock

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