How to make customer service in insurance companies better

One thing is always a certainty for insurance companies when the end of the year rolls around – policy holders receive their annual premium invoice. Information on changing annual premiums, no-claims bonuses or tariff criteria always raise questions for customers: Why did my premium increase? How can I bring it back down? What tariff can I change to? These and similar questions mean that customer service departments are stretched to their limits – and sometimes beyond. In turn, this has a range of negative consequences for the company, with increasing workloads and decreasing service quality leading to a drop in customer satisfaction.

The use of AI-based systems reduces the strain on customer service staff. Insurance companies can implement specific solutions such as using chatbots to answer standard queries. The benefit for policy holders is that they can immediately get in touch with the company at any time of the day or night, regardless of whether they prefer to do it over the phone, using their smart speaker, via e-mail or using social media channels. This means that customer service staff can focus on the more complex cases rather than deal with the tsunami of easy-to-solve standard queries, allowing insurance companies to offer a higher quality of customer service for the same amount of effort.

The AI application searches the IT systems for data on the policy holder for each query, which enables it to provide the customer with real-time information on new tariffs, deadlines and contractual changes. Chatbots can be configured to carry out transactions such as changing a tariff or recommend other offers (known as the next best offer).

Policy holders have a range of options available to them to get in immediate contact with their insurance company and sort out their issues directly. They can switch between channels in any way they want within a dialogue and a member of staff can take over, if needed.