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In today’s highly competitive insurance industry, effective customer servicing (CS) is pivotal in driving customer loyalty. Although how insurers perceive and execute CS has evolved over time due to technological advancements, insurers today are increasingly challenged by rising customer expectations around faster, more personalized interactions. Today, as we stand on the brink of a new era, Generative AI (Gen AI) promises to redefine the landscape of CS in the insurance industry by automating tasks, enhancing customer engagement, and delivering hyper-personalized services at scale. This article delves into the various facets of this transformation and explores the channels through which Gen AI can reshape the future of CS in insurance.
The Power of Gen AI
Gen AI, powered by deep learning algorithms, has enabled the servicing experience to move ahead of the pivotal. It can understand, generate, and respond in human-like text, making it a formidable tool for enhancing customer interactions and servicing.
Traditional CS, once entirely human-led, has evolved into a blend of human and technology-driven approaches. Now, the industry is embracing Gen AI, which enables proactive, personalized servicing. In the near future, we will see a shift towards hyper-personalized, anticipatory CS, redefining the way insurers engage with their clients.
Example:
Let’s understand the above use cases through examples of motor insurance with an insurer based in England.
Person A: Initiates a chat with the insurer and wants to know if his coverage extends to his wife while traveling to Poland.
Person B: Publishes a Social Media post mentioning how quickly the insurer helped him with a courtesy car when his vehicle broke down on the highway during odd hours.
The first interaction focuses on policy details and specific coverage information. The second interaction involves gathering feedback using Voice of Customer (VoC) and can be considered customer testimony.
Gen AI can help address both scenarios by providing the appropriate response based on attention, action and feedback tailored to each customer interaction. Top of Form
Omnichannel Customer Servicing
The customer has various touchpoints based on which intended or unintended interactions or transactions may occur. Traditionally, face-to-face interactions, voice, including Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Call Center, phone-based customer support, AI-powered chatbots, Live Chat on websites and WhatsApp as messaging platforms, email for asynchronous communication, and even social media platforms were leveraged for CS needs. Although all these are powerful channels, we have often seen a lack of personalization and contextual servicing, which leads to poor customer satisfaction ratings.
Leveraging Gen AI's multilingual capabilities, we can now break down these barriers, ensuring effective communication and hyper-personalized CS across various touchpoints during the customer life cycle.
With Gen AI having the potential to take the omnichannel experience to the next level, let's explore how various use cases can be built around servicing:
1. In-person
Enabling various human personas, such as branch operations, advisors, call center executives, and others, to use AI-driven customer profiles and recommendations could lead to effective and upfront servicing.
2. Upfront automated servicing:
- Conversational agents providing real-time assistance are available around the clock and help with upfront servicing, eliminating wait time and improving customer satisfaction.
- Intelligent and critical servicing are the key elements. These can be easily performed by connecting over social media platforms and leveraging Gen AI’s capabilities for:
- Identifying who is customer/ insured
- How does the issue linked to policy
- Understanding the sentiment
- Identifying and executing action
- Creating a personalized response
Gen AI can also go beyond servicing and help organizations build risk indicators by analyzing customer data and notifying policyholders of potential risks or opportunities to optimize their coverage.
Conclusion
The transformation of customer servicing in the general insurance industry through Gen AI is inevitable. As this groundbreaking technology advances, insurers must use it to stay ahead of the curve. An excellent use case for reference could involve leveraging Gen AI to empower existing customers to assist others through AI-enabled processes, further enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty. In this ever-evolving landscape, the ability to harness the potential of Gen AI in customer servicing will be a differentiating factor for insurers, separating those who thrive from those who merely survive. As we look ahead, the question is not whether to embrace Gen AI but rather how quickly and effectively we can integrate it to drive positive outcomes.
In our next article, we will examine the Gen AI-powered claims validation process and its effectiveness in depth. Stay tuned!