Highly regulated industries, especially those that deal with critical moments in customers’ financial journeys, can be a tough nut to crack when it comes to contact center automation. Situations are often complex, customer stress runs high, regulatory requirements are stringent, and operational margins are tight.
Financial services companies, especially insurance, need the ability to automate complex transactions to ease customer effort and reduce operational costs, while having the assurance that their IVA is compliant with regulatory demands. Let’s take a look at common insurance customer service challenges in depth and how your company can build a better customer experience with a state-of-the-art IVA.
The complexity of insurance interactions
Insurance, by nature, is driven by complex transactions, from signing up for a new policy to making a claim. The stakes are high: Consumers are protecting their homes and their families. Claims can make or break their finances.
Yet despite their critical role in our lives, insurers have few chances to win customers over with good service. Most people just call to start or update a policy, and if a claim occurs. This low frequency contact, coupled with the relative ease of switching insurers, puts tremendous pressure on insurance carriers to get every interaction right.
What’s more, insurance is a true omnichannel experience. According to the McKinsey survey of more than 8,500 insurance consumers, six in 10 customers switch channels pre-purchase. About one in six said there was no follow-up after initial discussions, and for those who did hear back, 40% reported interacting with two or more people—demonstrating a potentially disjointed experience. Digital channels didn’t fare well in the survey either. More than 30% of surveyed customers weren’t satisfied with the digital channels available and just 20% preferred digital channels as their top choice for contacting their insurance company.
These survey results point to a preference for live agents and a high potential for poor customer experiences. Insurers who automate customer interactions by voice and digital channel must tread carefully to provide the level of service consumers expect.
Insurance industry requirements lurking under the hood
While seamless, easy-to-complete transactions are essential to elevate the customer experience, your company also requires rock-solid scalability and reliability. It’s impossible to staff for “what if” scenarios like natural disasters; when call volumes spike, customers in need can end up on hold for hours. How can you scale for incidents that rarely occur, unlike an expected seasonal rush in other industries? And critically, when times are busy, the underlying technology infrastructure of the IVA needs to hold strong.
Compliance is another serious concern. The use of AI often sounds alarm bells for compliance teams. Insurance companies must know exactly how proprietary and protected data is being used, and have control over the automated, customer-facing dialogs. You need robust identification verification and compliance measures that can be automatically applied to customers wherever they may live to meet all regional requirements.
Robust automation with a human element
These complex requirements require an innovative, robust solution. Many off-the-shelf solutions or DIY IVAs struggle with the accuracy necessary to complete complex self-service interactions and the customization needed to meet personalization and regulatory needs. Instead, insurers must look for an IVA partner with extensive industry experience, white-glove service, groundbreaking technologies (and the patents to prove it), and a keen combination of human and AI intelligence.
Interactions IVA automates and unifies customer experiences across voice and digital channels, significantly reducing wait times and customer frustration, while delivering significant ROI. What distinguishes Interactions from other IVA solutions is our unique blend of advanced Automated Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and proprietary Human Adaptive Understanding (HAU) technology. The result is near-human levels of intent recognition and the ability to handle much higher levels of complexity.
When the Interactions IVA can’t understand an intent—whether due to background noise, the caller’s accent or phrasing, or an uncommon intent that the system hasn’t yet been trained on—a human agent in the background can interpret the intent and tag it correctly. This data is fed back to the IVA so it can continue the interaction seamlessly.
This innovative capability allows the Interactions IVA to accurately grasp shifts in topics, manage multi-tasking requests, and overcome common challenges that trip up other IVAs. It also adds data to the system; every human-assisted interaction is not just sent back to the IVa, but it’s fed into machine learning to help the IVA continuously improve. To sum up, unlike conventional systems, our solutions are built to learn and adapt to the user, not the other way around.
An independent analysis of Interactions IVA against competitors shows that while simple transactions yield similar success rates (90-100%), as transactions grow more complex—often exceeding eight utterances—Interactions demonstrates a 400% higher rate of successful automation. This means our IVA automates 75-80% of extensive dialogues, contrasting sharply with the 13% typical of other solutions.
This means customers can quickly self-service more issues and need fewer escalations to live agents. This makes it easier to scale contact center operations without adding staff, meeting operational goals while improving customer ease. Even for calls that ultimately require a human agent, such as a complex claim, the IVA can verify identity and gather much of the information the agent requires and pass it on. This allows the live agent to immediately get to the heart of the matter, reducing the frustration of asking the customer to repeat information and lowering Average Handle Time (AHT).
White-glove implementation
Equally critical to the success of Interactions IVAs are our success teams. During implementation, we work hand-in-hand with clients to design the IVA you need, not just set up a generic system. We work to understand your company’s personality and tone, and match it with one of our voice artists to ensure the IVA truly represents your brand. We listen to your calls to design the right self-service flows that will ease customer effort, reduce costs, and improve agent productivity. You sign off on every word spoken by the IVA, so you know exactly what your customers will experience.
We also work with your technology teams to optimize back-end integrations, as well as your contact center and business leaders to identify critical KPIs for custom dashboards. You’ll also sign off on exactly how your data will be stored and used.
A continuous partnership
A successful IVA cannot stay static as customer needs and business priorities evolve. Interactions work alongside you through the life of your IVA. Through comprehensive analytics by actively listening to and analyzing calls (especially those that have human intervention), we can identify additional automation paths or underlying operational problems that might have gone undetected. Then, we use our extensive experience in insurance and across other industries, to develop creative solutions.
We can help keep your IVA up to date with new product launches or policy changes, and even record banners (dialog shared at the start of a contact) that can be activated by your teams during emergencies or other events when you need to share critical information. And speaking of emergencies: Our triple-redundant platform, purpose-built for the evolving needs of AI, offers industry-leading service levels with 99.995%+ uptime, 24/7. And with improved accuracy and more calls handled through automation, your company can weather intense spikes in contact volume.
To learn more about why 95% of our customers stay with Interactions and how we specifically address challenges for insurance customers, reach out for a demo or visit our page just for insurers.
