How do insurance agents use AI chatbots?
An AI chatbot is often integrated into an insurance agency website and can be employed on other communication channels as well. The chatbot engages with customers to answer common questions, help with service requests and even gather information to offer instant quotes. Over time, a well-built AI chatbot can learn how to better interact with customers and answer questions. Agencies can create scripts for their chatbot and teach it to transfer the chat to a human staff member when the visitor has a complex question or specifies that they want to talk to an agent.
Why should insurance agents use chatbots?
- Engage with website visitors 24/7. Chatbots work for you round the clock. They can ensure that clients who visit your website outside of work hours get the help they need – and that you don’t miss out on website leads when you are out of the office.
- Provide a better customer experience. Chatbots can chat with multiple people at once. There’s no lag time or busy signal. Customers get the instant gratification they have come to expect from businesses.
- Reduce busywork for your staff. You can train an AI chatbot to answer common questions and help customers with simple service tasks. This frees up your staff’s time so they can focus on sales and interactions that help build deeper client relationships.
- Drive revenue growth. Liberty Mutual and Safeco research found that AI chatbots were highly correlated with revenue growth.
Chatbot stats
We built our 24/7 chatbot at Excalibur a few years ago. Now, we view AIDEN (Artificial Intelligent Digital Excalibur Navigator) as a crucial part of our team.
AIDEN can help keep the conversation going when our staff isn’t in the office. She doesn’t take any time off and can handle inquiries from multiple people at the same time. Plus, she documents every interaction.
Right now, AIDEN can only give people real-time answers to about 125 questions, but she’s constantly learning. Chat bots like AIDEN will soon be able to do way more. I anticipate that in a few years, AIDEN will be able to better provide advice and be able to do a lot of things our staff does. That’s not to say she’ll replace our staff, but she’ll be able to handle many routine questions and tasks, freeing our staff up to do more.
It’s important for independent agents to give customers options for how they want to interact with the agency, and chat bots will play a large role in that. As I recently heard someone say, “artificial intelligence will never replace an agent, but agents who use artificial intelligence will replace those who don’t.