AI is Changing the Face of Agent-Customer Interactions

Keeping up with the ever-changing behavior of consumers is hard for businesses of all sizes. Especially in times like these where technology is regularly evolving, people have high expectations for personalization, service, responsiveness, and delivery. 

To meet these expectations, companies are adopting the use of Artificial Intelligence along with human intelligence. Statistics revealed that IT spending of Insurance companies for AI has increased from 76 million in 2016 to 751 million in 2021 US Dollars. Which is indeed a big revolution. 

And why not, we are in an era where contact channels are expanding rapidly, and the amount of data created – both structured and unstructured are mountainous. Organizations are drowning in data, but starving for actionable insights. 

This adaptation has bridged the gap between businesses and customers that is more efficient and impactful than ever before, and interaction with a vast customer base has become a cakewalk.

Before digging into how AI is changing the way agents or businesses interact with customers, let’s first clear primary public concern. 

Debunking The Biggest Myth

“Successful Agent – Customer Interactions will have AI working with humans, not replacing them.”

While AI is a boon for businesses, some people consider it a negative change that may take over humans’ jobs. But the reality is that AI can help reduce the monotonous tasks and workload of multiple staff members and often do it faster and more accurately.

Read: 5 Reasons why Customer Service Chatbots are the Need of the Hour

Valar Afshar, chief digital evangelist at salesforce quoted “AI allows companies to deliver these smarter, more personalized and predictive experiences that customers have come to expect, but the human touch is still table stakes for customer success.” 

In other words, human interference isn’t and will never be over, and people will not be losing jobs to AI. However, the mode of operation will be modified, and humans will have to work hand-in-hand with artificial intelligence to achieve customer’s expectations. 

How AI Is Aiding Agent and Customer Interactions

Customers’ satisfaction is an integral factor. A brand is being judged on behalf of it. Therefore, it becomes extremely crucial to have an excellent service that connects your agents with customers smoothly. And AI-powered customer service is something that has the potential to do this.

Let’s roll down to some significant positive changes AI has made in the customer interaction processes:

1. AI for Hyper-Personalization

Hyper-personalization leverages AI and real-time data to deliver content that is relevant to a customer in no time. It eliminates the traditional way of agents to think, waiting on hold for a phone call, or clicking through tons of pages to find the right info. 

Based on the historical data stored, AI serves a personalized experience and eliminates all the pain points in a customer journey. Hyper-personalization focuses on 3Rs- Right products, at the Right time through the Right channels. Therefore, a lot of insurance companies are adapting this to deliver the right products at the right time through the right channels.

2. AI for Capturing Customer’s Intentions

“Predicting the future isn’t magic, it’s artificial intelligence.” – Dave Waters 

Artificial Intelligence helps insurance businesses in detecting the intent of the customers based on their behavior and gives actionable insights to the agents. It maps and analyzes the current customer journey to understand the touchpoints and experiences that customers have with your brand — from discovery, presales, sales, customer service, and beyond. 

AI uses billions of data points to systematically develop customer’s personas. Which help agents to:

• Match customers to the packages they’re more likely to opt
• Display the most relevant content and apt answer
• Save time and make a hassle-free customer experience

3. Enhanced and Errorless Lead Management

It’s a human tendency to make errors. Therefore, it is often possible for agents to fail to take follow-ups and keep regular contact with potential customers. 

However, if Artificial Intelligence backs your representatives, the case would be completely different. AI can aid representatives by sending out relevant messages to a lead via emails or text messenger in a timely cycle. Thus, the sales team can focus more on qualified leads that require full human interference, and the AI takes care of the rest. 

In simple words, Artificial Intelligence is improving the way we engage and nurture our leads, and make follow-up easy in a regular fashion.

4. AI in Fraud Detection 

As per the studies, the insurance industry collects over $1 trillion per year and the cost of insurance fraud is estimated to be $40 billion every year. Therefore, it becomes extremely important for insurance companies to dodge frauds.

 With the help of AI, the insurance companies or agents can analyze historical data of genuine customers and identify a set of patterns. This pattern can be used to detect fraud at an early stage and prevent them before making a big loss. Moreover, the technology can also help you in deep dive into a sea of data and unlock hidden insights.

5. Claims Management with AI

AI empowers agents to streamline the end-to-end process for claim management. With the minimal management of humans, AI can efficiently manage all the processes from data capture, settlement creation, authorization and approval, payment tracking, salvage and recovery tracking, legal matter processing to communication management

Moreover, the AI-based bots can review the claim, verify policy details, check for fraud, and process payments, making the claims process faster and efficient. 

The Final Brew 

So far, we have seen many ways in which AI and automation can influence agents and businesses to keep the graph growing. One major thing to keep in mind is that Artificial Intelligence is not here to replace humans but to work along with them and make things more productive. 

AI is smart enough to compile and find information quickly but struggles to replace real human relationships. Therefore, It’ll create more opportunities for us to do and manage things in a better way.

Like any other leading business and the giants like Google, Uber, and Amazon, you should also embrace Artificial Intelligence to please your customers and workforce. The more efficiently you connect and help customers, the more they’ll do business with you, and the churn rate will be reduced.