Insurance websites and marketplaces usually have pop-up chat boxes where customers can chat with advisers and support agents. But recently, chatbots have seen wider use, allowing automation of the early stage of the sales process.
Chatbots are artificial intelligence units that are programmed to acquire more knowledge the more it talks to people. In the case of PolicyBazaar, an insurance comparison portal in India, the efficiency of their support centers has improved by 50% since employing chatbots, which help it sort serious enquiries from casual browsers.
Ashish Gupta, the company’s chief technology officer, told
The Times of India: “We have 4-5 years of rich data from our call center as to customer interactions, questions normally asked and areas of contention. With this backbone, we have been able to come up with transcripts for our chatbots, which are very human.”
According to Joe Hukum, a provider of digital chat solutions, the traditional offline insurance agent understands their customers’ needs and helps them choose the correct insurance policy. However, costs and viability do not allow human agents to upscale. With chatbots, manpower needs could be reduced by up to 75%. As online chat is a friendly medium, it could lead to up to a 350% increase in lead capturing and a 35% increase in conversions, said a representative of the company.
However, a persistent question remains: what happens if the chatbot cannot answer the customer’s questions?
Gupta’s response was: “There’s human intervention as soon as the bot starts getting questions that require more sophisticated responses.”
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