Several Indian insurance companies have, over the past few months, begun adopting chatbot and email bot technology powered by artificial intelligence to provide customers with better operational management services.
Bajaj Allianz General Insurance launched its chatbot named "Boing", which can answer customer inquiries about motor and health insurance. At least four other insurers, including ICICI Lombard General Insurance, Birla Sun Life Insurance, PNB MetLife India Insurance and HDFC Standard Life Insurance, have adopted intelligent sales-support technology.
"Today, chatbots or virtual assistants are the most widely applied intelligent technology in the financial sector," said Ajay Vij, Senior Vice President and Head of Financial Services at Infosys. "With the development of natural language processing (NLP) systems, chatbots are now able to answer questions, respond to voice commands and make recommendations accordingly."
Bajaj Allianz General Insurance's "Boing" already allows customers to register claims, obtain e-policies, and check underwriting and claim status, and provides locations of service branches, hospitals or repair shops.
Some insurers use AI tools to automatically reply to customer service emails. Uzma Rushdi, Vice President of Centralized Operations at HDFC Life, said the company began applying email bot technology in May this year, which can automatically send policy documents to customers.
K V Dipu, Head of Operations at Bajaj Allianz General Insurance, said that as insurance penetration rises, customers no longer need to spend time waiting for a human response, which is the most customer-friendly form of service. Even when faced with complex questions, the conversation can be transferred to a human representative without the customer noticing.
AI is expected to move into insurance sales next.
Sanjeev Mantri, CEO of ICICI Lombard, said the company has applied chatbots to answer sales policy questions. "Since our chatbot platform MyRA was launched in December 2016, it has been running for half a year and we have received positive feedback. Sixty thousand customers have used the chatbot, and 10% of them went on to request quotes from us. We have closed 850 policies through the chatbot."
Source: Asia Insurance Review, 2017-06-23