By Casparus J H Kromhout, MD & CEO, Shriram Life Insurance
Technology and automation has been continuously changing processes and ways in which we work – in some cases even disrupting. The financial services industry has also undergone a drastic shift over the years with the advancement of technology.
Use of AI by banks and insurers has proven to be beneficial. With AI it has become possible to use develop processes and financial products that are driven by strong analytics, have a good understanding of the results being delivered and have better monitoring, control and flexibility in the services offered. Combined with natural language processing (NLP) and speech recognition technology AI based Voice Bots are soon becoming an important part of the BFSI customer service strategy
There are many use cases of the AI driven Voice Bots being used in Insurance and the overall BFSI sector where they provide an instant service and response to a customer or prospect which may not always be possible with a human agent.
Thus, Voice Bots help enhance customer communication to the next level. Some clear use cases where insurers have been utilizing voice bots are to answer process related queries, sharing information about products including premium details, assistance in KYC verification, renewal reminders, collect customer feedback.
Voice BoTs have the ability to immediately offer value to customers bypassing the need to wait in que or go through an IVR menu. This helps in a big way in not just reducing the response time but also reducing cost for a Life Insurer. This helps in enriching the overall CX for the organization.
Collection efficiency as similar as human connect
We have noticed that Shriram Life Voice bot ShriA is getting 75% customer connectivity which is equal to the connectivity we get through a human agent since we operate in Tier II & Tier III where connectivity is always challenging. Even collection efficiency is similar to that of human agent since we use collection propensity analytics models for both Voice Bot & physical Agents to get better collections.
Lesser cost in comparison to human deployment
Since Voice Bots can be made available 24 * 7 unlike Human voice agents, there are no resource attrition issues, can handle much higher volumes, except the high initial cost of development and training of the BOT, in the long run Voice Bots are lower on cost vis a vis to deploying human agents.
It also helps release bandwidth of the human agents for other things.
Fraud detection
Bots have the incredible capability of data mining and qualitative analysis of data. They help in reducing the cost and data analytics helps in detecting the fraud.