How Conversational AI Can Help Insurance Companies Attract and Retain Customers

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Insurance customers keep insurance companies busy! From filing claims, making payments, and inquiring about quotes—there’s never a shortage of customer traffic. Conversational AI with Natural Language Processing (NLP) can help insurance companies streamline processes, improve customer service, increase workflow efficiency, and lower overall costs. Here’s how you can attract new customers and retain current customers by implementing conversational AI. 

Personalized Experiences

Conversational AI offers unlimited personalization options. As customer data is collected, conversational AI functions according to individual customer needs and behavioral patterns. For example, it can personalize options based on the line of insurance the customer has, or whether a recent claim has been filed and might be in question. The customization helps personalize the communication and results in an overall better customer experience. Customers can interact more naturally by asking questions or making requests rather than pressing numbers or repeating keywords to progress to the next level.

A step up from traditional IVR, IVR powered by conversational AI (also known as IVAs) also improves average call handling time. Customers ask simple questions and get what they need immediately, without having to wait on hold and without having to navigate tricky phone menus. Your current customers will appreciate the personalized, streamlined experience, and potential customers will love your respect for their time.

We find the best way to use conversational AI is to incorporate the technology into your contact centers to support your existing live agents. Conversational AI can manage most customer queries—anything from common questions to making payments and checking account details, and this frees up live agents to handle more complex matters. 

24/7 Availability

Utilize conversational AI to extend your hours of operation. Let customers get answers to their questions 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and 365 days a year. Not everyone works on the same schedule, and expanding hours means every customer has an equal opportunity to interact with your company. Your customers will appreciate the reliability of your business and the flexibility with their time. 

Multilingual Options

Don’t let language barriers stop you from growing. To strengthen customer relationships in other countries, and even on your own, multilingual engagement is necessary. Increase your company’s reach and improve your global communication. Conversational AI engines operate in multiple languages and reduce your hiring challenges for multilingual agents.

Voice Applications

The more communication features, the better you serve your customer. When shopping around, consider how many communication features vendors offer. For example, Plum Voice offers a wide range of options with platform subscriptions, including automatic speech recognition (ASR), artificial intelligence (AI)/natural language processing (NLP) and text-to-speech (TTS) engines, call recording, transcription, voicemail detection, and unlimited user accounts.


Here are a few examples of how conversational AI can help insurance companies communicate with their customers through voice applications:

  • Policy Quotes – Do you have new customers looking for quotes on new insurance policies? Conversational AI can automate the information collection process for potential customers. 
  • Policy Information – Policy coverage questions are bound to occur. Plum’s cloud IVR application uses conversational AI to get customers the information they need. 
  • Claim Status – IVAs with conversational AI can help customers access active claims, check the status of those claims, and assist when customers need to submit or dispute a claim. 

Notifications

Proactively communicating with clients is a great way to exercise customer retention. Conversational AI allows customizable alerts, reminders, and notifications in various channels. Engage with customers quickly and effectively via inbound/outbound SMS messaging, emailing, or voice. Let them know about policy changes, payment due dates, or critical deadlines. Notifications free up live agents’ time by providing information to customers before they even think to contact you. Your customers are sure to appreciate the effort. 

Surveys and Analytics

One way to make sure you retain current customers is to utilize surveys. They provide immediate feedback about customer experiences and concerns and help you gauge current customer interest in your services. They help determine which areas you need to improve and give you an idea of how your products and live agents are performing. Surveys can also grade employee satisfaction and enable your company to respond to challenges before they grow larger and costlier.

But while surveys provide a vast number of benefits, it’s the survey data combined with analytics that gives your company a 360-degree view of exactly how you are performing.  When thinking about surveys and analytics, one product to take a look at is Plum Voice’s VoiceTrends, a data and analytics toolkit built into Plum Voice’s DEV platform. It offers advanced voice analytics and reporting and provides a complete view of your company’s entire service operation.

The unique features of VoiceTrends help you monitor application performance with graphic representations of data and a performance tracker that keeps track of application errors and identifies trouble areas. The data is easily filtered, making it easy to find important data and allowing you to compare multiple ranges while navigating so that you can better understand trends. VoiceTrends also will enable you to optimize customer-facing applications and use data to analyze continually, optimize and maintain communication applications to create an improved customer experience, better call containment and reduced costs. 

Payments 

Automating payments greatly improves efficiency by managing simple tasks and thereby increasing the availability of live agents to handle more complex issues. Customers often have a few ways to make payments on an account, but over-the-phone payments remain one of the most popular. Conversational AI can manage this for you with ease. Current and potential customers will appreciate the convenience, reliability, and flexibility. You can even proactively contact customers via outbound voice or SMS messaging to inform them of upcoming or past due payments. 


Just make sure you have a PCI-DSS compliant IVR solution to ensure your insurance company and your customers that you have the security needed to protect sensitive customer information. And to improve the customer experience even more, Integrate IVR payment applications with your CRM databases. This allows data exchanges and a more personalized experience. 


In one real-life example, a Major Insurance Company (MIC) had a bustling call center that used live agents to process customer payments over the phone manually. MIC’s most frequent calls were payment requests, and agents spent a ton of time processing them manually. This resulted in longer call handling times and wait times. MIC chose Plum Voice’s DEV platform to automate its payment processing needs for several reasons. Plum specializes in IVR solutions, they offer unmatched development flexibility and have a secure, PCI-compliant network. Plum’s DEV platform also includes VoiceTrends, a robust analytics software. Using Plum’s automation and analytics software helped MIC get an 89% call containment rate for payment calls, better overall customer service, and a 350% cost reduction. MIC’s live agents now have the automated support they need to focus on more complex customer inquiries. 

Security

The bottom line is that you need to ensure your customer data is safe. Data breaches are real—but your customers will feel confident knowing that their data is secure. When considering implementing conversational AI into your insurance company contact center, look for security and compliance features that customers expect, like PCI-DSS Level 1, and don’t compromise customer experience for safety. This will help to attract new customers and retain your current ones.

For example, Plum Voice built a cloud infrastructure to meet rigorous security standards for our clients. We’ve achieved PCI-DSS, SOC2, and HIPAA compliance, and we’re also a Visa Verified vendor. Consider which security features the insurance industry requires and your customers will trust. Also, consider building additional measures into your applications to further improve security and strengthen customer trust. 

Final Thoughts

Above are just a few examples of how conversational AI can help insurance companies attract and retain customers. When it comes to customer service, customer expectations are high. And competition between companies isn’t going anywhere.

Conversational AI is the future. To step ahead, modernize your insurance company. Implement conversational AI into your contact centers and let IVAs work collectively with your live agents to support the work they already do. The technology is easily integrated into businesses to improve efficiency, effectiveness, and even lower overall costs. And by automating these simple tasks and processes, customers are helped quickly and efficiently, and live agents are more readily available to assist with more complex matters.

Talk to an expert to learn more, or if you’re ready to start building with Plum, contact us for a free trial.