Ajay Torgal
Most insurance agents spend about 30 minutes to calculate premium, 2 hours to feed details of the policy to the computer and a month to convert a lead into sales, according to a study. Insurance companies also have to allocate additional budgets for training whenever a new policy is designed. Aren’t insurance agents wasting a lot of time in doing mundane jobs?
What if the agents get the opportunity to focus only on marketing and sales while smart systems take care of the repeated tasks? If it happens, the efficiency of agents will increase, and the companies can generate more business.
Now let us understand the magnitude of the problem at the industry level. There are about 2.5 million agents (March 2018) in about 30 major insurance companies in India. Out of them, LIC alone has almost 1.2 million insurance agents.
All these agents earn about 2-15% commission (most are in 2-5% bracket) for new enrolments and 1-2 % for renewals. In FY17, a total of Rs 1.75 trillion was collected towards various insurance policies as premium amount. This means that insurance companies paid a whopping amount of Rs 25,000 crore as commission to agents. The number is going to increase by leaps and bounds in the coming years as insurance penetration in India is less than 4%.
What can chatbots do in the insurance industry?
We suggest insurance companies use intelligent chatbots, developed using Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tools, which take inputs from prospective insurees and do the enrolment process. Filling application forms, validating the information provided, providing quotes and premium receipts – all these can be done easily with chatbots. As data entry and premium calculation are done through automation, it gives leverage for the companies to concentrate on creating innovative marketing strategies, fresh products and thus use their human agents for a bigger goal.
With the advent of RPA, automating repetitive and mundane tasks and placing them in chatbots make them the new-age automation wizards. With Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), chatbots can also help organisations in collecting data, understanding customer behaviour and helping them to make decisions logically, quickly and effectively.
The chatbots used to fetch details like Insurance Quote , Eligibility , Process Information , Documents handling swiftly and efficiently. Chatbot users in industry say these bots has reduced the latency time by 35% in fetching these details to the customers from back end. Also they saw an increase in the number of queries handled-- a whopping 22% compared to manual support.
The author is Executive Director, ATCS India
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