A few years ago, I once asked my dad, “What’s the best way to make money” I expected an answer in the lines of “Work hard and hard.” But he didn’t!  What he said still lingers in my head. He said, ‘the best way to make money is to spend on something that can save you during the hard times’. Well, it has been many years, and now I understand the depth and meaning of his intriguing words, not just at a personal level but also at an organizational level.

When an enterprise is going through days of trouble, the first check would be on the customer support and then on the sales. And in sectors like insurance, customers come to customer support when they face some issue with payments or policy selections. Besides, challenging personal situation changes can make customers enter the cycle of missed or delayed payments. And if customers don’t get help real quick, it would not take long for the situation to go extremely unmanageable along with lapses floating all over. It may impact the whole insurance value chain, from acquisition (brokers) to policy management, claims processing, claims management, and compliance, across all insurance product groups.

Statista published a study about insurance organizations investing in technology like AI to streamline claims process came to $72.53 billion in 2020. Pretty crazy investment, right?

Okay, stats are fine. But how to support your customers and boost operational efficiency at the same time?

How about streamlining collections first?  How about enabling a tracking system to track lapsed customers? How about timely renewal reminders?  Woah, how about an ability to call customers continuously, without an agent’s involvement?

Now, that’s a big list of wishful thinking. But what if you could address all of it at one go?

Well, conversational AI can do that job for you while keeping your agents and customers happy at the same time.

This is why insurance providers should focus on investing in Conversational AI solutions to achieve streamlined, seamless, and fast renewals and claims settlement process.

Why has conversational AI become the need of the hour for the Insurance sector?

The rising numbers of lapsed accounts and expiring policies have pushed insurance industries over the brink and forced them to bring the premium income under their roof. Many insurers are still steeped in slow agent follow-ups to inform customers about their due dates, renewals and lapses.

In addition, there is the consistent question of how to reduce contact center costs while serving customers.  For years, insurance industries have been trying to become more efficient, with minimal efforts and limited resources. However, it is not easy to expect cost savings in an environment with  low premium income rates, which is why insurers should increasingly look toward AI-based technologies to reduce lapsations and increase policy buying rates.

Here’s how implementing can improve your bottom line.

• Information Gathering to Create Unified Profiles

Gather all kinds of information to identify reasons for non-payments, payment due dates, history of lapses, type of policies, and use insights in real-time while reminding or calling customers

• Multilingual Capabilities for impactful engagements

Due to Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing capabilities, conversational AI can pick up any language, dialect, and accent as per the customer’s language preferences. AI bots can engage in relevant conversations that resonate well with customers in their vernacular medium.

• Easy integration

AI technologies can seamlessly integrate with CRM systems and backend platforms to identify the context and personalize conversations

• Persistency Calling for faster retrievals

AI bots can call, follow-up, remind customers about their due dates and lapses through persistent calling every week without involving human agents.

How can Gnani.ai help you streamline collections?

Gnani.ai worked with a leading insurance provider and streamlined collections and reduced up to 70% overall Opex. The goal was to get conversions from the lapsed customer base and save exorbitant costs involved calling and informing customers for renewals and avoid lapses.

One of the most important features was automating outgoing calls to customers (nearly 4-5 times a week) by targeting lapsed customers and policyholders whose policies were nearing expiration. We went a step ahead and made sure the customers of the clients who were due for their renewal got informed with several alerts and calls, thereby triggering on-time payments and obtaining 33% of renewals in a span of six months without any agent support.

So here, the persistency calling capability of the conversational AI-bot became the agent of change in the client’s contact center, bringing about some imperative vital benefits such as:

• 33% renewals achieved – On par with human efforts
• 100K+ policies handled MoM
• 70% reduction in overall Opex

Last but not least, we built the FAQ module for basic and complex query handling while obtaining a higher degree of scalability and cost optimization. Along the same vein, the client could see a boost in the revenue as they could now retrieve a considerable amount from the deep lapsed customers.

So yes, what my father told me still holds right for me as well as for an organization. An ideal way to make money is to spend on something that can save you during tough times! But he did miss out on telling me that if you plan to invest in ‘Conversational AI’, you would make and save money at the same time

We will be talking more about the strategy that is needed to bring in automation in the insurance sector in our upcoming posts. Stay tuned and watch out for this space!

Want to know how AI will impact your bottom line? Talk to Us for more insights!