How ICICI Prudential Life Insurance is using AI to raise the bar for customer service

A pioneer in adopting emerging technologies, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, has over the years undertaken a series of technology initiatives that has helped it raise the bar for customer service excellence. AI is at the center of many such initiatives. Ashish Rao, Chief Customer Experience & Operations, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company, shares with us some of the company’s unique technology innovations such as an AI-powered humanoid bot or the real-time KYC authentication.

Some edited excerpts:

How has customer experience evolved in last 1.5 years? What are some of the significant changes you have observed?
With the ongoing pandemic, we have witnessed a visible shift in customer behaviour. With physical distancing and a new preference for self-service, customers demanded simpler and faster services. Safe, secure and straight-forward responses have now emerged as the “Must Have” in any service.

We were amongst the few that had built the required muscle for the new normal through a digital transformation process during 2012. Almost 100% of our processes are available online for customers. Our digital enablers such as WhatsApp, Chatbot LiGo, Website and Mobile App empower customers to conduct self-help transactions from the safety and comfort of their homes. Today, approximately 95% of new business is logged online and approximately 90% of service requests are self-help in nature. Besides, our robust collaboration platform has facilitated a seamless transition from phygital to digital.

What are some of the tech enabled initiatives taken by your organisation to raise the bar for customer experience?
We have always strived to live by our values of Customer First. During the pandemic, to ensure continuous safe and secure support to customers, we opted for a cloud-based technology solution enabling our employees to seamlessly carry out operations even during the lock down period. Our Work-From-Home model with interpersonal service, supported by our call center, was able to promptly assist customers. We opened up many avenues of service. We ramped up our IVR options with relevant voice prompts as well as digital options. Our Intuitive IVR (Voice prompt) and Visual IVR (digital) are now able to answer about 70% of our customer queries.

Further, our Humanoid Voice bot offers our customers a two-way interaction which provides them a personalised interaction with a human touch. Customers can fulfill service requests just by speaking to the bot. We deployed the AI-powered’ Humanoid’ for renewal premium reminder calling, which can call over 50,000 customers in an hour and converse in multiple languages. Approximately, 87% of customers contacted through the route agreed to pay their renewal premiums. Our renewal collections through the digital mode has gone up from 74% in FY2020 to 79.3% in FY2021.

Our Mobile App is handy, fast and easy to use. The validation once set through any of the various modes (Fingerprint, MPIN, Face ID and OTP), allows access to the user for multiple transactions through the app. We have also enabled chatbot LiGo on the Google Assistant platform allowing customers to access their policies through simple voice commands. An average of approx. 4500 users are catered by our LiGo chatbot on a daily basis. We were also the country’s first life insurer to officially offer WhatsApp as a customer service channel to our customers. Our chatbot LiGo, is now also available on WhatsApp.

Your thoughts on how emerging technologies like AI are playing a role in improving customer experience?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the business world and changing the customer service processes. It assists the company in improving customer’s experience in more than one way. AI has automated many processes which were once run manually resulting in enhanced efficiencies and higher productivity.

Life insurance companies are using AI-powered data analytics and advanced Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to process vast amounts of consumer data, providing insights into customer psyche which helps in designing sharper sales pitches, assist distributors in talking to customers more effectively and take the interaction through to its logical conclusion. This makes distributors more efficient, and enables them to reach out to a larger set of prospects.

Encouraged by AI’s potential, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, has embarked on a hyper-personalisation journey built on the pillars of 3 Vs i.e. Voice, Video and Vernacular. Similarly, voice bots, video-based medical underwriting, and multi-lingual communication are being used to provide convenience and deliver superior customer service.

The company’s AI-based virtual assistant platform, based on Natural Language Processing was launched in August 2018 and in the very first month of its launch customer queries were responded to with a 94% accuracy. Since the pandemic, the total number of transactions handled by chatbot LiGo has crossed 8 lakh. The chatbot LiGo has also been enabled on the Google Assistant platform, helping customers to access details about their policies through simple voice commands. For e.g., “Okay Google, I want to speak to ICICI Prudential Life LiGo” or “May I talk to ICICI Prudential Life LiGo”. This has enhanced customer’s self-service capabilities.

Roadmap with respect to customer experience in the next six months to one year in your organisation?
The technological advancement and adoption has been fruitful and promising. Implementation of technological solutions has enabled anytime and anywhere service architecture. Our Bulk issuance solution led to 65 lakh policies being issued in just 3 days, which if done manually, would have taken 130 days. We are now working towards further improving on it. Instant gratification had always been an unlisted, unfulfilled customer desire. But not anymore. We have developed the ability to underwrite and issue a cover note to customers in approximately 5 mins.
We have also developed the ability to leverage data and information available from past service interactions with customers and employ intelligence to bind this to create personalised solutions for them. The digital ecosystem has enabled us to offer real-time KYC authentication leading to a delightful, seamless and paperless onboarding experience. We look forward to cover most transactional and quick response queries by further leveraging technology and keep innovating for service excellence.

How do you see the future of personalized experiences and the role of Voice AI in taking customer experience to a new level (especially for a country such as India which speaks multiple languages)?
Conversational AI is introducing new and efficient methods of providing customer support. At ICICI Prudential Life we have been able to enhance customer experience by incorporating conversational systems into our interfaces. ICICI Prudential Life is one of the first life insurance companies in the country to launch a voice IVR.

Given that India has multiple languages, companies can interact with customers in local languages and cater to their requirements better by leveraging AI. For instance, our Voice Bot Humanoid enables us to reach out to customers in multiple languages including English, Hindi and Hinglish.