Takeaways:
- AI can detect tone of a caller's voice and route the call accordingly
- AI agents can devote more time to each caller
- AI can support live agents with helpful information
When policyholders call in a claim, they have a story to tell. A human call-center employee likely does not have time to listen, but an AI voice assistant has all the time in the world.
AI can also pick out nuances that can give it an early sense of the extent of the loss, and the best way to follow up, based on the same interaction.
"AI can detect inflection and urgency, and therefore then route calls to different places," said Dean Sivley, president of Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection, who spoke at Insurtech Insights in New York about the use of AI agents to receive
Liberate, an insurtech using AI to support customer-service work for insurers and agents, can take 6,000 calls per second, according to Tom Freeland, president of the company. When a catastrophe happens, like a climate event, the number of claim calls could overwhelm the capacity of human agents, he said.
"Having somebody to answer the phone and be empathetic with somebody, even if it's an AI voice, is very advantageous for that carrier and for the consumer that's getting the experience," Freeland said. "When we're taking a cat loss for a hurricane, people want to tell us their story, and our AI voice, Nicole, listens to the story. She has empathy. She asks if everybody's okay. She doesn't care how long they want to tell us about the water coming through the top of the room. She is incredibly patient. She's not in a hurry to get to the next call."
What an AI voice agent can do for an insurer should be compared to call center agents' performance, according to Freeland. "Versus nobody, would the AI be better?" he said. "Or versus somebody that doesn't do it very well — not your best person? What about your worst person in your call center? And can't we do it a lot better than that?"
"This is getting them up to speed, and it's helping us make sure we're giving consistent answers. Our call-quality scores have gone up tremendously," he said. "Maybe somebody who was there for two or three years, who's our top call agent, maybe it hasn't made them much more productive, but it certainly has helped everybody else."
Branch Insurance now puts 85% of its FNOL communications through either a digital channel or a voice AI on first contact, according to
"I came into this as a skeptic, but it's surprisingly empathetic," Wendland said. "It's more toward what's going to be the better experience to get the information that we need into the hands of the people looking for it."
