How Conversational Experiences Create a Competitive Advantage for Insurers

Chatbots are an innovative conversational channel that can offer many benefits for insurers, such as around-the-clock support without high wait times for their customers. These automated insurance agents provide information instantaneously and guide consumers to appropriate resources for more actions, such as managed claims or customized quotes. KPMG’s recent study of insurance CEOs reported that most insurers are focusing on customer-centric technologies like chatbots. When this conversational channel provides quick, easy access to policy information and product offerings, an insurer can have a unique competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Although chatbots have become well adopted in the insurance industry, many still have a lot of room for improvement when it comes to fully solving customers' issues. A majority of customers try self-service during their resolution journey, but only 9% are wholly contained within self-service. This is because chatbots are not equipped to answer unforeseen questions specific to the insurer’s business - such as What is the difference between your auto and auto plus home policy?

There are hundreds of ways to ask the same question:

• How much is auto vs auto with home?
• How much more is auto and home?
• Is auto and home a better bundle?

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Insurance customer experience teams also have different high-volume periods, whether it’s summer time or holiday times, with varying policy questions associated with these periods.

To understand what better ways there are to handle customer conversations, insurers should turn to their own data. The increasing daily conversational data from call transcripts, help desk, social and chatbot transcripts is a goldmine for businesses to improve their chatbot performance. By leveraging this data and understanding the most common questions from customers, insurers can provide a new advanced level of customer service.

For example, Dashbot was able to help a key insurance customer decipher their existing chatbot transcripts and call center data to understand that their bot was not handling containment due to:

• Nearly 80% of all uncontained chatbot sessions being requests that the chatbot did not currently support
• Common requests such as adding or removing a vehicle, requesting a quote, making a payment, and change of address were not being handled

With Dashbot’s platform, this insurance company was able to better define their bot’s use cases and decrease bot interaction times to merely seconds - shaving off minutes of unnecessary cycles by providing immediate escalation of unsupported use cases. Moreover, the team immediately identified user journeys with the call center, which allowed them to transition to the correct call center resource. This shortened resolution time by over 50%.

Another insurance company found that many of their customers were requesting technical support when needing a password reset. Dashbot mapped the customer journey, allowing them to launch and test this new use case in under 45 days, whereas previously, it would take 18 months to roll out a new use case.

Insurers are finding that by optimizing their conversational channels with instant, easy access policy information and product offerings, an insurer can gain a unique competitive advantage in the marketplace.

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