The customer experience as a disruptive force
The interaction of customers with their insurers has changed dramatically over the last decade: today's insurance customers want to receive targeted information quickly, they expect fast reactions, they want personalised, scalable offers, they want to compare them with other offers at any time, and they are usually prepared to adapt their needs to new situations without any hesitation.
In the pandemic, this increased customer expectation has manifested itself in an above-average number of enquiries in the customer centres – enquiries about claims for cancelled trips and events, about premium reductions due to non-use of insured activities (driving, travelling), and even enquiries about the insurability of pandemics.
The demands of today's insurance customers in the area of customer experience – targeted and proactive information, personalised advice and offers, short reaction times – can be exceptionally well implemented with machine learning and AI methods. For example, using systems based on Natural Language Processing (NLP), enquiries to customer centres (via e-mail, SMS, telephone) can be automatically differentiated by topic and assigned to the right employees. At the same time, important information for processing the request is automatically gathered from the text of the request and fed into the insurer's systems. An additional algorithm prepares the customer centre for increased volumes of requests for specific topics ("hot topics", such as the topics described above).
Such systems can be linked as required to other tasks in the customer process: if the customer files a claim, for example, AI-based claim management systems can automatically check the claim for fraud, estimate the amount of the loss and recommend action to the claim handler. As a result, the processing time for a claim can be reduced from days to just a few minutes, massively improving the customer experience. Each interaction can in turn be used to collect data on individual customer needs and thus to further personalise offers and information.