Virtual assistants and intelligent speech interfaces. Insurance companies look to the future, embracing the new opportunities offered by IoT, smart devices and smart apps. Tools that will completely revolutionize the customer experience in the coming years.
While some time ago signing an insurance contract mostly meant purchasing a product – with an encumbering amount of paper documents attached – today, using an insurance company means using value-added services. Or at least, this is what will happen to companies that are more forward-looking and that go along with innovation. “Thanks to new technologies, a new customer journey is envisaged, with a completely different customer experience from the past. Digitization enables a new kind of customer-centered service, evolving the classic insurance product offering” says Ugo Di Iorio, Pre-sales & Business Innovation Director at RGI. “The insurance supply will take on a true ‘physicality’ and will become capable not only of limiting the effect of potential damage, but also of constantly interacting with users, responding to their needs in a truly personalized manner”.
In fact, VUIs – Voice User Interfaces – are making headway in the insurance field. They are very useful in improving the customer experience, creating greater involvement and strengthening the relationship of trust between the user and insurance. Juliet stands as a proof of this: it is the digital assistant developed by RGI and presented by Di Iorio during Annual Assicurazioni, the conference held in Milan on November 12th and 13th, an event organized by 24 Ore Eventi in collaboration with Il Sole 24 Ore and in partnership with RGI. Speaking on the topic “The future of software vendors”, Di Iorio explained that Juliet could radically change users’ insurance experience by communicating with them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and by giving clear, immediate and transparent information. “In this way,” noted Di Iorio, “even claim management could became faster and more accurate, reducing payment time and providing a truly customer-oriented approach”.
This will lead to a more holistic view and the new technologies of vocal interaction and Artificial Intelligence are central to this process. Moreover, we are now increasingly immersed in a reality that is composed of intelligent and interconnected objects. Consider smart portable audio speakers, with which users can interact through a speech recognition system. These systems are simple and intuitive to use precisely because they exploit the universal language of the word, and thus are part of the daily life of millions of people: there are already 50 million in America (just over 5 million in 2016) and it is expected that there could be as many as 220 million by 2023. Individuals and families use them to find answers to simple questions, for example, to receive traffic information in real time, or weather reports, but also for activities such as playing music, making shopping lists or setting alarms. And growth is also evidenced by the two main “brains” constituting the core of smart devices: Alexa and Google Assistant. The former has doubled the Apps with which it interacts in just one year, going from 15,000 to 30,000, while the latter went from 720 to over 1,700 Apps between October 2017 and January 2018. There could already be 25 billion Smart devices spread around the world, including smart home systems, wearable devices and IoT for wellness and health, set to become twice as many in the coming years.
A highly promising (and challenging) context for insurance companies, which will be able to improve the customer experience precisely by using technology based on Voice User Interface and IoT, creating more involvement and marketing personalized products and valuable services.
