The scope of Conversational AI has changed over the years. It’s no longer a question and answer system; it has evolved to develop complete business outcomes and improve client satisfaction while increasing revenue and lowering costs.
A report by Forrester Consulting study mentioned that a big company utilizing VAT services could save up to $5.50/conversation. In their recent survey, IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) mentioned an increase of 9% in customer satisfaction across all CSPs surveyed.
How to personalize sales?
With AI, you can transform the way you’re doing business. You can also change the way you make sales. Customers expect more personalized, intuitive experiences — where and when they want it. For example, personalizing the conversation with the customer by knowing what their needs are and how the product can help them to overcome those problems can be done through using Sales AI tools such as Salesken by revolutionizing the way we do sales. According to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), many insurance companies utilize natural language processing (NLP) and speech recognition to solve common questions and sell the right product to the right customers.
“According to them, imagine being able to seamlessly interact with new and existing policyholders to improve the conversion of new policy sales – if a policyholder starts the insurance process, but doesn’t finish, give them a call or send them a text to schedule a call-back with voice AI. You can also know when to offer complimentary insurance coverage to existing policyholders to increase up-sell by automatically scheduling outbound calls for follow-up. Integrating proactive voice AI into insurance companies call center strategy lets them seamlessly scale proactive customer service to increase conversion and ultimately revenue.”
But no matter what role AI plays in the sales department, Humans will play the most crucial role in the game. They will have to keep interacting with customers to fulfill their sensitive and high-level needs. AI is still not suitable for these types of interactions. EY commented, “The key is making human touch conveniently available when and how consumers want it and for the right products, even as most interactions happen through digital channels.”
The technology can help in scaling and securing sales and simultaneously providing all the information that sales reps need to summarise their calls. Salespeople can utilize their time to deal with prospects, educate them about your products, and further lead them into the sales cycle, making the perfect combination of AI and human collaboration.
Advantages of conversational AI for the insurance sector
There are many different benefits of using conversational AI in the insurance sector. Using a combination of chatbots, Natural Language Understanding (NLU), machine learning, virtual assistants, and conversational IVR can help you to achieve your goals quickly.
Helps in creating a strong brand image
Answering customer questions, solving their issues, and automating a series of different operational processes -like settling claims, calculating premiums, and conversational AI- can help you build a strong business personality and brand image. A strong brand image can speak lengths about that particular company’s commitment and what they do to deliver a good customer experience.
Increases Operational efficiency
Insurance companies still need the help of live agents to handle complicated problems or customer problems to speed up the customer journey, which AI still can’t solve. But the right combination of AI and human agents can create a well-built support system to efficiently address the customer’s requirements in the virtual meetings where human to human connection is built through technology also by using the good old sales best practices which helps to understand customer requirements and the product delivery better. AI and chatbots can handle generic queries and conversations, while live agents can handle the complicated part or wherever they feel their presence is necessary. Using the combination of both helps reduce operational costs and call durations, thus increasing the efficiency of the entire process like using conversational intelligence tools which shows real time cues, speech analytics and helps to identify the loopholes in the customer journey with real-time data.
Helps in reducing costs
The time spent interacting with a customer costs money. And any extra time spent interacting or solving their queries costs more money. But you can’t simply ignore your customer to keep your business costs in control. However, you can optimize your process of handling calls and reverting them to the necessary resources in a short amount of time frame, which can help keep costs under control and build upon your system. The easiest solution is to use conversational AI to automate the process for easy and quick transition while also providing customers with relevant information. This can help you reduce your call costs of every conversation from $15 to $200 to $1.
Helps in providing sustainable self-service
Conversational AI can play an essential role in the relationship-building process. It can optimize your end-to-end self-service, and you can offer a lot of new self-service models to the customers with more quick and personalized interactions. Because of the complex nature of insurance products, doing business with virtual assistants was unthinkable just a few years ago. The advanced solutions offered by conversational AI can understand customer needs and provide them with more complete and straightforward words. That’s possible because NLU can help improve virtual assistant’s responses so that they can become better at handling more complex customer inputs.
Provides better customer insights
It’s necessary to understand the customer’s requirements to recommend the products that suit them the best. Sometimes, it’s not possible to get customer feedback directly. Conversational AI can help you to solve this problem. Conversational IVR systems can gather data during customer interactions, analyze and summarize it with visuals to give you a better idea of what you need to change and what you don’t meet their expectations and requirements.
Helps in scaling the products
Conversational AI in insurance makes it easier for you to scale up your operations and expand into a new market. For example, suppose you want to grow your business on an international level. In that case, virtual assistants can be used to create a multilingual support system, meeting the needs and demands of potential customers from all over the world. Using the full potential of AI and NLU, you can interact with customers in different languages.
Conclusion
In recent years, conversational AI has developed a lot of potential in the insurance sector. It’s now easy to make claims, buy insurance or communicate with an insurer, and the process is more organized and streamlined. In the upcoming days, we can expect AI to handle more complex parts. But for now, they are more well-equipped to make customer’s buying journeys streamlined and less intimidating.
