Over the last 10 years, the value of the Indian insurance industry has grown at a compounded annual growth rate of around 20%. Nevertheless, today, there are several issues inhibiting the continued expansion of the sector. One major concern is the high cost of onboarding and serving customers across the nation, given infrastructure deficiencies and linguistic complexities. Furthermore, fraud is on the rise, causing Indian insurance companies a collective loss of Rs 30,000 crore in 2012.
In order to tackle the challenge of customer interaction across the country, most insurance companies have built a large nation-wide agent network. Agents travel to meet customers and help them evaluate and select an appropriate policy. While this high-touch interaction helps to vigorously develop business, it is an increasingly costly method as companies expand outside of big cities.
Furthermore, once an insurance policy is sold, the business must continue to service the customer. This typically occurs through a combination of agent interaction and call centre staff. However, phone-based interaction is riddled with insecurity, as it is difficult to validate the identity of the customer with high levels of certainty. Furthermore, huge investments are required to set up and maintain an effective contact centre. Therefore, for most insurers in India, handling customer interaction across the country remains both a security headache and a logistical nightmare.
Insurance companies need a robust and innovative mobility solution that smoothly and securely automates a large part of customer contact workflow. Uniphore’s solution, VoiceEnsure, harnesses Multilingual Speech Recognition, in order to cater to a diverse customer base. It also allows customers to easily communicate in a high security environment through Voice Biometric-based authentication. Deployed together, these technologies handle many routine customer interactions by turning a humble mobile phone into an enterprise class delivery platform. This greatly reduces the insurer’s dependence on costly, inefficient, and insecure agents and call centres.
A voice-based solution like VoiceEnsure will automate three components of Insurance operations:
- Customer onboarding
During the sales process, the agent gathers a voice sample of the customer using any basic mobile phone. This voiceprint is stored along with the rest of the customer details in the backed with the customer details. Once the employee at the office has registered the customer profile in the database, an outbound call immediately goes out to the customer. When the customer answers the call, they are asked to authenticate their identity by stating their passphrase, such as “My voice is my password.” If the system matches their voiceprint, then the customer has been authenticated. Once the call is complete, the solution updates the customer record on the database through speech-to-text conversion of the information captured in the course of the call. Administrators can the backend can immediately access and alter this information as appropriate.
2. Customer Servicing: Outbound Solutions
In addition to outbound dialing for profile registration, the solution must can automatically alert customers of important information throughout the life of their policy, such as payments dues, policy lapses, and forthcoming policy maturity. These personalized alerts increase customer satisfaction and keep them actively engaged with your business. Mandatory routine calls, such as Declaration of Good Health, are automatically conducted.
3. Customer Servicing: Inbound Solutions
Speech recognition technology easily handles a large proportion of routine calls from customers, such as changes to policy details, simple claims, statement requests, policy information, and bill payments. When the customer calls, rather than being routed straight to a call centre agent, he or she is first asked to authenticate their identity using voice biometrics. Once their identity has been verified, the customer simply speaks the service they would like to avail, like ‘make a payment’ or ‘review my policy.’ The system understands their requests, and either proceeds to automatically service the customer, or refers them to a human agent for more intimate handling.
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Leveraging the potential of the India’s vast mobile penetration, a speech-based mobility solution is the ideal answer to the perennial problems of customer interaction within India’s burgeoning insurance sector. The combination of biometric security with speech recognition in all the major languages of the subcontinent can effectively reduce costs, diminish fraud, and increase customer satisfaction. A voice-based system is therefore the perfect complement to current practices of using agents and call centres, augmenting their security and efficiency to enable continued growth.
To learn more about VoiceEnsure, click here to see a brief video on how the solution works.
About Uniphore: Uniphore Technologies Inc is the leader in Multi lingual speech-based software solutions. Uniphore’s solutions allow any machine to understand and respond to natural human speech, thus enabling humans to use the most natural of communication modes, speech, to engage and instruct machines. Uniphore operates from its corporate headquarters at IIT Madras Research Park, Chennai, India and has sales offices in Middle East (Dubai, UAE) as well as in Manila, Philippines.