Artificial intelligence (AI)- especially real-time transcription and large language models – is revolutionising customer service in highly regulated industries such as insurance and can ensure a much better customer experience.
That is according to Neil Titcomb, senior vice president of global sales at Creovai, a technology company based out of Austin, Texas who was speaking at the Health & Protection IPMI Summit that took place at the Easthampstead Park Hotel in Wokingham last week.
He was speaking on the topic of the practical applications of AI in the global insurance sector.
Titcomb said: “This AI era is more or less unprecedented – and I have never seen technology take hold so quickly.”
He noted: “The insurance industry is so heavily regulated, and AI can help with that.”
AI directly impacts customer call centres, how they can communicate with customers and the information and data that they can get from those calls.
“What is interesting is the number of calls isn’t changing – it’s the reason why people are contacting you.
“We are seeing the phone being picked up less – but we are seeing the phone being picked up for more complicated calls. So that puts more pressure on you and your staff to ensure that you adhere to the standards you want.”
But he noted: “The industry is not very good at providing automation through digital channels.
“None of us want to wait in line to talk to a business if we can avoid it. But what its left you with is the complicated conversations that no bot or app can handle.
“And that’s putting increased pressure on businesses to use automation and to leverage AI to give more information to the agent at the point when its most appropriate.”
But aside from helping the customer agent, AI is also a vital tool for gaining more from customer intelligence.
“AI allows you to understand more about who your customers are. Obviously we hold a huge amount of rich data on those clients, and the concept of personalisation and using that at the moment is most relevant and is becoming more important.”
He noted that “only about 30% of all contact centres around the world are effectively listening to every conversation that you record.”
But with AI you can record every conversation with the contact centre – potentially amounting to millions of hours of data per year.
Titcomb said: “We advocate you use AI to listen to every conversation you have in your business whether that is over the phone or digital.
“Then we’ve got to make sense of it – what are the drivers for people to cancel, what are the drivers for people to buy a certain premium, what are the drivers for people to complain or praise?
“AI helps you to make sense of that. – and then what, where and how do you act on it.
“That part is the most important of all – so understand how certain things contribute to a customer journey.
“The concept here is very much of using the past to influence the future.
“So if you imagine I record 10,000 calls from last week and that tells me that we have a leading indicator within a particular product or policy that is showing a negative trend for renewal – using that information these systems can now feed up-to-date process change in the future state of how that agent can make use of that.”
The system can then prompt an agent to say and do certain things to address that issue.
“The AI system learns when to coach and guide an agent so that a future agent doesn’t make the same mistake twice,” Titcomb continued.
“This is where things are getting quite interesting, because in the past you had to rely on the agent’s memory. Their training, the systems to do that – but of course they would never be 100% accurate.”