Contact Centres continue to be the most important and the main channel through which insurance customers decide to contact companies. In fact, this trend has increased in the last year due to the impact of COVID. 

Before the pandemic, customers used to make many queries or formalities in person, but now they do so by telephone. In other words, users have tended to use the Contact Centre channel as their preferred means of communication with insurance companies. 

IVR or recorded voice menus were used before the advent of Artificial Intelligence. However, these systems are not operational to provide solutions for specific cases, such as, for example, reporting an accident at home to your insurance company. 

Applying CCAI in the insurance sector is not a futuristic issue. It is a change that we can already see in several insurance companies in Spain. Therefore, in the medium term, only the companies that have adopted Artificial Intelligence will have a competitive advantage.

Advantages of implementing CCAI in the insurance sector

Contact Centre AI technology offers multiple advantages, starting with the improvement of the User Experience. But it also allows the capabilities of a support center to be increased, increasing the Return on Investment (ROI).

Seeking efficiency

The volume of calls made by insurance customers is not linear. That is, it varies by day of the week and even by the time of day.  For this reason, one of the most common problems for contact centers is how to manage the demand for queries. 

In this context, virtual assistants become the most successful and useful tool, as they are available 24/7. Not only are they operational around the clock, but they can scale as much as necessary. In this way, human agents are placed where they provide the most value: solving the most complex queries. 

Automating processes

Implementing CCAI in the insurance sector makes it possible to automate advice from start to finish: 

The virtual assistant starts by identifying the question posed by the user: doubts about the policy and its coverages, status of a claim, etc. 
During the conversation, the conversational agent asks open-ended questions to find out more and resolve the issue.
Finally, whether there is no understanding or the query is complex, the virtual assistant refers the call to a physical agent. 

Improving customer service

One of the objectives of insurance companies is to improve the customer experience. Indeed, customer service is one of the differentiating values in insurance. That is why it is so important that customers feel that the assistance they receive from companies meets their expectations. 

Precisely, the efficiency of processes also has an impact on this improvement. Customers particularly value the CCAI:

• The speed with which incidents are resolved.
• Less routing between departments. 
• Queries only have to be explained once. 
• Shorter waiting times.

The Artificial Intelligence implementation helps to optimize not only these points but also many others related to UX.

Ways to integrate AI in the Contact Centre for insurers

Undoubtedly, the technology that insurance companies are betting most on is virtual assistants. This tool is capable of answering calls and interacting naturally with users. 

However, Insight AI and Agent Assist AI are also available, which are other decisive solutions for insurers to make better Customer Experience decisions.

Virtual Agent AI

In this implementation model, virtual assistants are the ones who receive calls from users. If the customer requires the intervention of a human agent, the conversational assistant will refer them to the corresponding department. 

Dialogflow is Google's solution for conversational agents. Using this technology, successful cases have been created, such as Mango's virtual voice assistant for order management, or Meliá Hoteles. Also others such as EME, the conversational agent of Mutua Madrileña.

Agent Assist AI

This solution consists of supporting the physical agents. In other words, they are the only ones in charge of managing calls with customers. And the role of the virtual agent is to provide real-time information about that user. 

The main difference of Agent Assist AI is that the virtual agent is an assistant to the human agent. In other words, it does not interact directly with the user but acts as an assistant to the contact center agent. In this way, the person answering the call can respond more optimally and has additional information to any query.

Insights AI

This technology is responsible for collecting past and current recordings. It then processes them and summarises the most recurring types of queries into categories. In particular, tagging conversations related to questions about the policy, making a new claim, contracting new services, etc. For example, if 80% of calls are made to report a claim, actions should be focused on training virtual assistants.

This tool is also able to perform sentiment analysis. This matter would help to filter conversations in different ways: by casuistry, level of sentiment, emotional contexts... 

CCAI use cases in the insurance sector

We will focus on two use cases to explain, more visually and graphically, how a CCAI works in the insurance sector. 

In both contexts, the virtual assistant is in charge of managing the flow of the conversation. However, when the virtual assistant detects that the query is complex, the call is referred to a human agent. In this way, there is always an exit plan to resolve the user's questions. 

Solving a simple flow, from start to finish

In this scenario, the virtual assistant answers the call and screens the query using an IVR system. Then, if the customer's query requires personal information, the agent will ask for details such as policy number, first and last name...

The last step would be an internal validation and registration in the systems of the insurance company. If the virtual agent does not understand the query, it will refer it to a human assistant. In this video, you can see a representation of the case: 

Detect the reason for the call

In this second case, we call it an "open question", as the user enters the conversation by directly posing his problem. In this case, the customer does not limit his query to the limited options suggested by an IVR system.  

The key to this use case is that the virtual assistant can detect the reason for the customer's call and, in addition, can refer the query to the appropriate Contact Centre staff. The conversation unfolds as shown in this video: