2019 may have been the ‘year of the chatbot,’ with brokerages increasingly looking to adopt this popular option of communicating with customers – however, two major brokerage leaders say chatbots are far from the ultimate solution.
NZ brokers CEO Jo Mason and Steadfast’s managing director and CEO Robert Kelly both spoke at ICNZ’s recent conference, where they discussed how chatbots actually compare with speaking to a broker. Both agree that although the idea looks good for speed and efficiency, the reality of insurance is that advice from a chatbot is often not enough.
“In the broker world, there’s a lot of inefficiency, and there is a lot that a broker can do when it comes to being efficient,” Mason commented.
“There’s a two-stroke model that a broker can adopt around whether the customer wants advice on their insurance policies or not, and that’s the kind of model that we might start seeing in the broker world in the future.”
“What’s interesting is that I had a strategy day with my team recently, and we had millennials sitting in the room,” she continued.
“One of them mentioned that their partner had tried to talk with a chatbot. I asked how long that took, and she replied ‘around 20 minutes’. With me – I just text my broker, tell them my issue and ask if they can fix it, and they come back to me immediately saying they’ll get it done.”
Kelly noted that he’d personally spent a lot of time thinking about digitalisation, and Steadfast itself has rolled out a number of technological efficiency initiatives for its brokers over the past few years. However, he says the ‘human touch’ aspect continues to be just as important as it ever was – and that’s something brokers need to bear in mind if they are thinking of experimenting with chatbots.
“One of the first digital brokers was set up in North America, and the first year was sensational for them,” Kelly said. “But by the end of that first year, they realised they were in trouble.”
“They set the business up with nine people, but realised they would actually need about 900 – because they realised that many people actually wanted to speak to someone, and the whole process had been set up with no contact,” he explained.
“I’ve spent a lot of time on digitalisation around the world, and the first thing people do is automate their initial process and put it out to the market. But what they need to do is establish points of contact.”
