insurance industry

Voice Technology plays an important role in enhancing customer experiences. It can be viewed as a competitive advantage and advanced speech recognition to increase customer satisfaction. 

For the insurance industry, Voice technology provides new opportunities to actively engage and inspire customers. Customers are using chatbots for seeking information, shopping, playing music, etc. 

Convenience, accessibility, and simplicity are some reasons behind user adoption of this technology. According to a recent World Insurance Report, digital agility is a key to long term productivity and is the best idea to involve customers.

Although the voice may not be the solution for all the queries, its effectiveness cannot be undermined. The world is moving into deep digital connectivity and tall digital pillars. Agility is a powerful pillar to leap digital transformation that enables businesses to unleash their full potential.

Virtual Assistants and Chatbots

Virtual assistants and Chatbots are shaking up the service sphere. It is estimated by Gartner that by 2020, 30 % of the web browsing will occur without a screen.

Customer satisfaction will soon rely not on keyboard buttons but a simple chat with a device. This is the age of Alexa and Siri. It is a plausible solution for the insurance sector to go for advanced speech recognition.

  • Alexa for Insurers

Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa is a great tool for insurance companies to leverage voice recognition. It offers customers with auto insurance quote estimate through speech interactions.

An Indian text to speech and speech to text recognition startup is also spreading the horizon for voice technology. Indian TTS, an India based startup aims to provide the best audio to text converting solutions that are beneficial for customer questions about insurance policies. 

Also Read: What is RPA Technology? How it Amalgamates with Speech Recognition System?

Benefits of Voice Technology for Insurers

Our life is rapidly becoming automated. Technology has revolutionized the way we take up things. The digital revolution has occurred and had attributed to rapid advancement. Using speech recognition, you can even control the appliances at our home.

World’s biggest brands are now integrating voice recognition technology into everything they do. Businesses in the insurance industry need to take notice of this transition, as customers are expecting that same level of effortlessness in everything they do.

It is not because of just consumer expectation that the insurance industry should be taking notice of this technology. It is a technology that has a lot to offer for reducing the burden of the insurance industry. It will offer the industries to deliver better security and make them stay ahead of the competition. 

  • Focus on Security

The GDPR and MiFID II regulations have emphasized personal data protection like never before. This means companies across different sectors have to look for new ways to enhance security.

One of the biggest advantages voice recognition offers to the insurance industry is pre-detection of fraudulent offers. By checking a caller’s voiceprint against a blacklist of known fraudsters, voice recognition can contact centre staff to act immediately.

The credibility of a business lies in the fact of how they offer best-in-class security and protect customers personal data. Security is the key, and the insurance industry should not miss the chance of making customers feel safe while making their lives easier at the same time. 

  • Easier for Customers, Productive for Businesses

Voice recognition works best in customer contact centres. It helps customer service executives to operate more efficiently with the customers. 

By automating authentication, this technology assesses and verifies the human speech using 140 different parameters bypassing the need for passwords. 

On functionality level, this gives you practical ability to manage up to 80% of insurance claims without the need for customers to speak to anybody at all.

Speech recognition makes use of sentiment analysis to accurately determine emotion and tone in the customer’s voice. Not only does this free up employees to handle complex tasks but also save you valuable energy, time, and money.

Through automation of low value, repetitive processes, employees have more scope for development and engagement with their roles. This eventually leads to great productivity and revenue generation for the company. 

Also Read: The Next Big Thing for Call Centers: Text to Speech Solutions

  • Harness More Quality Data

It goes without saying that voice technology gives the insurance industry the chance to bank upon quality data. This, in turn, can be used to customize specific products to various customer groups.

For example, using audio to text convertor, you can dig into phrases and keywords to build solutions for the information you discover.

Voice recognition enables you to process damage reporting calls in a fully automatic way. Be it in the form of a letter, an email, or a call about a replacement unit.

There exist many people with visual impairments who rely on screen readers along with text to speech dictation systems. And converting audio into text can be very crucial for hearing impaired people.

Speech technology or Hindi text to speech software can work as hands-free technology to let them understand conventional speech. This technology can also help them understand the insurance quotes and claims for a better and secured future.

Are Insurers Ready for Voice Recognition Technology?

In the past, queries and solutions have included insurance agents, company websites, or customer helplines. Today, however, customers are increasingly engaged with Alexa, Siri, or Cortana.

As voice assistants gain popularity in cars, smartphones and homes, they are also used as a great marketing tool. Based on recent sales trends, 40% of households are expected to have a smart home speaker with voice assistance enabled in their houses by the end of 2019.

Insurance customers will prefer to include digital channels in their search for casualty insurance or property. One in four wants their voice assistants to give valuable information on insurance agents and products.

 One in three wants to use voice assistants to book appointments with a particular insurance agent. Service-based companies offering highly personal and highly complex services are most suited to thrive in the era of voice search. And insurance is one of them.

Also Read: How Does Speech Recognition Work? Which Algorithm is Used in Speech Recognition?

And while the conversation about technological innovation often is all about younger users, voice assistants are increasingly famous with older insurance customers. A recent study has unveiled that 30% of consumers age 50 and older think that are comfortable using speech assistant because simply speaking is easier than swiping, tapping or reducing a question to its key search terms.

The insurance sector remains the most data-intensive sectors considering the growth of this industry. The Indian insurance industry is expected to grow to UD$280 billion by FY2020 that contributes to a major part in the country’s income.

In its entirety, the insurance penetration in India reached 3.69 per cent in 2017 from 2.71 per cent in 2001.  These numbers are a testimony to the fact of how rapidly the insurance sector is growing.

For last so many years, data corruption has been a major problem for the insurance industry. For a data-intensive industry like the insurance industry, voice recognition or AI-enabled chatbot is a boon. AI-enabled products of Indian TTS can work in multiple Indian languages like Bengali, Kannad, Tamil, Telugu, etc.

As per the report by various leading technology consulting firm, 74% of insurance employees believe Artificial Intelligence(AI) will transform the industry over the next 3 years.

Based on the maturity of AI technology, an insurance claim can be reported or assigned without any human intervention. Virtual assistants, along with good Natural Language Processing(NLP) can efficiently handle First Notice of Loss(FNOL) thereby increasing productivity.

AI-based investigation tools play a pivotal role by using external data sources from social media platforms and extract data to build a timeline of events. This eventually aggregates the data to form a correlation between the claim and the people associated with fraudulent activities.

To sum it all, in this era of cut-throat competition, companies need to shift their strategies to meet the best-personalized customer service. For the insurance sector, they must mould the business models on the lines of advanced speech recognition. This is the era of Voice Technology and you can’t deny that fact.