Automation and AI drive better, more empathetic experiences
While it might sound counterintuitive, technology can actually help insurance organizations foster a culture of empathy.
Insurance providers have long grappled with challenges caused by manual and siloed processes. Traditional insurance processes often involve a series of paper-based, time-consuming tasks — from making simple policy updates on behalf of a customer to prioritizing and assigning claims across the organization — that lead to slow resolution times and increased operational costs. These inefficiencies also hamper productivity and prevent agents from providing frustration-free and empathetic service when it matters most.
In recent years, property and casualty insurers have taken note. Insurance providers have started to prioritize digital transformation to simplify processes and eliminate manual interventions — leading to faster service, better experiences, and happier customers. For example, one Fortune 500 insurance company used automation to help streamline and replace legacy systems, enabling its underwriters to focus on customer service and complex tasks. The company now automates more than 30% of its work, making a notable increase in quality and timeliness of tasks.
What’s more, in the latest EY Tech Horizon survey of insurance CIOs, respondents listed, “meeting changing customer demands” and “improving the quality of products and services” as the top priorities driving their digital transformation initiatives. These priorities should come as no surprise to property and casualty insurers who need to balance increasing expectations for efficiency and self-service with the human touch needed to serve customers during difficult or stressful times.
Digital transformation and the empathy ROI
Empathy isn’t always associated with insurance, but the reality is that it’s incredibly important to any service organization. When a customer is facing a stressful situation — they just got in an accident and need to file a claim; they’re managing the chaos of moving into a new home while also trying to get clarity on insurance coverage — they’re likely juggling a range of difficult emotions from anxiety to shock that make it difficult to answer questions or make decisions.
If a carrier has built a culture of empathy, and defined what this means for their organization, they can better serve customers during difficult times. At the bare minimum, this means that customers feel heard, understood and safe. And while it might sound counterintuitive, investment in technology can actually help organizations foster a culture of empathy that enables agents to anticipate customer needs, provide personalized service, and build confidence in every interaction.
Digital transformation is helping the insurance industry automate repetitive and manual tasks like document management, data entry and approvals, opening the door to increased cost savings and improved customer experiences. And as adoption of AI accelerates, it’s driving even greater levels of automation — detecting sentiment, extracting data, and recommending actions — to boost agent productivity and improve customer outcomes.
Driving empathy with generative AI
In times of vulnerability and distress, policyholders need compassionate support. AI can play a crucial role in developing empathy through both internal and customer-facing applications that allow organizations to:
- Build an empathy model: Generative AI can drive better experiences in a variety of ways, enabling more personalized experiences during live interactions with tools like sentiment analysis that gauges a policyholder’s emotion and offers proposed responses and recommended actions. With guidance from management, data scientists, and their top empathy performers, carriers can also use AI to create or program an empathy model, or a playbook with real-time coaching and guidance, for other agents to follow. This empathy model helps representatives navigate complex conversations effectively at scale, fostering positive customer experiences that improve loyalty and positively impact brand image.
- Meet customers where they are. Generative AI models, combined with workflow automation, can help carriers connect with policyholders personally and proactively across any channel. Consider a policyholder who filed a claim after their house was damaged. To check the status of the claim, it’s not uncommon that the policyholder would need to make a phone call, and then get rerouted or a promise of a call back to get the information they need. With digitally connected workflows, anyone fielding these calls can have access to a 360, real-time view of the claim, and this same information can be shared directly with a policyholder through a self-service channel. Generative AI can help deliver the message with empathy. Whether it’s through generative AI-powered scripts at a contact center, generative AI-assisted email responses, or generative AI-powered virtual assistants, policyholders can get the information they need in an empathetic and human tone. This leads to happier customers, call deflection and a reduction in overall workload for agents.
- Ingrain empathy across the enterprise. Modern generative AI models can analyze historical data of successful interactions and customer feedback to identify “empathy champions.” Companies can continuously feed those insights and best practices into how they communicate with and serve customers and leverage technology to implement those learnings at scale in a very automated way. That said, technology is an important catalyst, but it doesn’t substitute for those moments that require human touch. Recognizing and rewarding employees who excel at delivering excellent customer service is essential for building a culture of empathy across the organization.
As the insurance industry continues to embrace AI and automation, the focus on empathy should remain at the forefront of innovation. By harnessing the full potential of AI for empathy-driven customer service, insurance companies can build lasting connections with policyholders, foster a culture of compassion, and set new standards for service excellence.
Tammi Shapiro is vice president and global head of product for Financial Services at ServiceNow.
This article is published with permission from the author and may not be reproduced. Any opinions expressed here are the author’s own.
See also: