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Conversational AI for Insurance

By Leah Phipps, Product Marketing
 | 
January 5, 2023
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Many leading insurance companies have been exploring and implementing conversational AI solutions to enhance their customer service, automate processes, and improve efficiency. This is improving customer experiences, but what about employee experiences? Pat Calhoun, founder and CEO of Espressive, identified early on that few companies were focusing on using conversational AI to truly craft a better employee experience. Conversational AI can be used in the insurance industry in several ways to improve IT and HR processes, reduce workload and burnout, and improve overall employee satisfaction within their job.

Below are some common use cases for conversational AI to improve employee experience in the insurance industry.

Employee Support 

Conversational AI can handle routine employee queries, provide instant responses, and assist with tasks such as  IT service desk support[CM4], HR policy inquiries, and on-site facilities support. This reduces the workload on those departments and provides employees with quick and efficient support. Conversational AI can make this support seamless by conversing with employees, asking follow-up questions, and providing real answers instead of just pointing employees to knowledge articles or another website.

24/7 Availability

With conversational AI, insurance companies can offer round-the-clock employee support. This continuous availability ensures that employees can get assistance whenever they need it, even outside of regular business hours or when support staff are out of office or unavailable to help.

Reduced Employee Workload

By automating repetitive and mundane tasks, conversational AI frees up insurance service desk employees from time-consuming activities. This allows them to focus on more complex and value-added tasks, such as handling complex claims or offering personalized advice to customers.

Human Resources in Insurance Companies

Conversational AI can assist in a successful onboarding experience by incorporating ongoing communication, training, and check-in points so managers gain insights into new employee progress[LP5][HS6]. An internal conversational AI tool can also reduce the time it takes to train new employees, helping HR teams focus more time and energy on higher levels of contribution to company culture.

Information Technology in Insurance Companies

By deflecting tickets away from IT service desk agents and addressing them via a conversational AI tool, your IT department can focus on more complex processes and support across the enterprise. IT is a perfect example of a place where conversational AI comes in handy for employees: it gives them real resolution to issues without human intervention, so whole departments can rethink how they utilize their staff’s time and energy.

Challenges of Implementing Conversational AI for Insurance

Implementing conversational AI in the insurance industry can improve operational efficiency, enhance employee satisfaction, and drive cost savings. However, it's important to ensure data privacy, security, and compliance with regulatory requirements when deploying conversational AI solutions in the insurance domain. 

While conversational AI offers numerous benefits to the insurance industry, there are several challenges that organizations may face when implementing and utilizing this technology. Here are some common challenges:

Data Privacy and Security

Conversational AI systems handle sensitive information within a company. Make sure that you choose a conversational AI tool that is compliant with the most stringent security protocols, to keep your company, its data, and its people protected. 

Accuracy and Understanding 

Conversational AI systems rely on natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to understand and respond to user queries. Achieving high accuracy in understanding user intent and providing accurate responses can be challenging, especially when dealing with complex or nuanced insurance-related inquiries. Make sure you choose a conversational AI system that can understand a high level of phrases across departments and across languages

Complex Domain Knowledge

The insurance industry involves intricate processes and procedures, not just for customers but within the organization as well. Training conversational AI models to possess in-depth domain knowledge and stay up to date with changing processes can be a complex and ongoing task. Make sure that your conversational AI tool understands policies and processes across departments, to provide the best efficiency for resolving employee concerns.

Integration and Legacy Systems

Integrating conversational AI solutions with existing legacy systems, databases, and backend processes can present technical challenges. Ensuring smooth integration and data synchronization across various systems with your conversational AI tool is essential for seamless operations.

User Acceptance and Trust

Employee adoption is everything. In our case, convincing your employees to trust and engage with conversational AI systems can be a hurdle. Some employees may prefer human interactions and be skeptical about the capabilities and reliability of AI-based solutions. Building user acceptance and trust requires demonstrating the value, accuracy, and convenience of conversational AI. For that reason, choose a conversational AI tool that has proven rollout success and high levels of employee adoption across the enterprise.

Overcoming these challenges requires finding a vendor with a holistic approach, including robust data governance, continuous training and testing, user feedback analysis, and close collaboration between technology experts, domain experts, and customer service teams. By addressing these challenges effectively, conversational AI can bring significant benefits to the insurance industry.

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