Revolutionizing Customer Experiences: Harnessing AI and Advanced Analytics in Life Insurance
CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Mr. Pankaj Gupta, Chief Technology Officer, Bharti AXA Life Insurance
- How do you envision leveraging AI and advanced analytics to enhance the overall customer experience in the life insurance domain?
Segmentation and traditional marketing tools cannot meet today’s retention and loyalty challenges. As online experiences improve, customer expectations increase. Superior customer experiences require treating every potential customer as a unique individual (N=1) and hence AI driven hyper-personalization becomes critical in creating customized products, sharper risk management at time of on-boarding, frictionless customer servicing & retention
Conversational AI is changing how customers interact with life insurers, from using intelligent & contextual bots to use of voice assistants/humanoids, bringing in convenience & delight to the customer
- With insurance frauds on the rise, how are insurers combating this challenge in today’s digital age? What measures do you think are necessary to stay ahead of evolving fraudulent activities?
Insurance Frauds, in both on-boarding & claims have been on the rise. Insurers have significantly increased their investments in using AI/ML based risk profiling, predicting early claims & persistency, Video based verifications with liveliness checks as first line of defence to minimize fraud while on-boarding a customer. Insurers are strongly promoting online payments as opposed to use of cheque/cash to prevent frauds. Regular communications over various channels like SMS, E-mail and WhatsApp are further helping customer be aware of the potential frauds and their prevention.
- How is Bharti AXA Life driving digital transformation of its services?
Bharti AXA over last three years has transformed journeys & processes across the value chain, right from pre-sales to Sales & on-boarding, Customer Servicing & retention. As part of the digital transformation, customer journeys have been re-imagined to deliver a superlative frictionless experience across all customer touchpoints. The re-imagined journeys have been implemented using best in class Web/Mobile technology stack using Microservices & Cloud. The transformation is fully supported by use of APIs, robust integration technologies, DevSecOps, big data management driving analytics, AI & ML and use of enterprise platforms for Marketing, Communications & Customer relationship management
- How has technology helped you in reducing the overall turnaround time in insurance procedures?
Technology has significantly transformed the business processes around life insurance to bring down the turnaround times. With automation technologies like Robotics, System Integrations, using Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, integrating with larger ecosystem have greatly helped in reducing the time for customer journeys & processes leading to significant reduction in human intervention and increase in Straight Through Processing. For instance, On-boarding, Underwriting & Customer service processes TATs have reduced dramatically by leveraging financial bureaus, digital Identity, AI technologies like Intelligent Character/Image recognition, Account Aggregators enabling faster & robust outcomes with instant gratification.
- A major challenge for insurers is striking the right balance between automation through AI and maintaining a personalized touch with customers. How do you approach this challenge to ensure that AI-driven interactions are still empathetic and customer-centric?
Customer centricity is a critical aspect of any business, and as technology continues to advance, AI-powered customer support systems are gaining popularity. AI based solutions provide various benefits with faster response times, reduced cost of operations. Scalability & personalization. However it lacks customer empathy and emotional intelligence and hence it requires a hybrid approach of combining AI with human agents for a balanced conversation with the customer. The AI performance needs to be thoroughly trained on continuous basis using customer feedbacks, high quality data to bring more human like conversations
