AI to improve employee and customer convenience at IndiaFirst Life Insurance

IRIS will be used for customer queries and requests. The bots can also be used by both the distributors, and the sales force for solving service and product requests from customers. EC’s Abhishek Raval speaks with Mohit Rochlani Director – Operations and IT IndiaFirst Life Insurance  

IndiaFirst Life Insurance recently adopted a conversational AI platform to deploy an intelligent virtual assistant- IRIS, to streamline its sales operations and further its growth ambitions.

Announcing the launch of IRIS, RM Vishakha, MD & CEO, IndiaFirst Life Insurance said, “ IRIS, (IndiaFirst responds), a virtual assistant that is available 24*7 to our customers, distributors and employees is our viable adoption of technology to provide our stakeholders with a superior and consistent performance. We are growing at 137% Y-o-Y in retail new business APE and we innovate to provide a robust customer service process for our growing base of customers, in line with our philosophy of ‘customer first’.”

IndiaFirst Life Insurance has access to a network of 8000+ branches and more than 50 million customers across India.

IRIS – Application areas
The virtual assistant IRIS will strengthen the self-service options not just for customers but also for the sales team.

IRIS will be used for customer queries and requests. The bots can also be used by both the distributors, and the sales force for solving service and product requests from customers.
For the sales agent, the bot has been helpful for finding the product related details, when the potential customer asks. It’s also serving the sales agent in answering the current customers, with respect to their policy related queries.

The company is also working on other bots which will serve operations as a whole, including financial claims, etc. The bot also processes the quote for the customer. The backend calculation engine provides the right number in terms of the quote for the premium to be paid. If not for the bot, the customer usually interacts with the website, which has a premium calculator. “The benefit with a bot performing this function is, customers might feel it’s more comfortable to get the work done in a conversational way by using the bot rather than typing it out on the website, says Mohit Rochlani Director – Operations and IT, IndiaFirst Life Insurance.

“Today, customers are looking for instant solutions and IndiaFirst Life Chatbot enables to ask any question and get fast and real time response, through live chat experience. The real-time expense management adds a layer of improved functionality and simplifies the day-to-day functioning of our sales force. This will help them focus on what’s most important to us as team, which is offering the customer the best product and service”, added Rochlani.

Reason for using AI
The strategy for using chatbots was to use AI across processes to enhance employee productivity and improve customer service and experience. The idea was also to have bots as one more medium for the customers, distributors and sales force to interact with. With IVR, call and other facilities, chat is a the new gen interaction option that should be made available to the customers. It’s also becoming a preferred medium of communication. “The overall vision is also to make the bot do whatever the call centre can provide,” says Rochlani.

The conversational AI platform has been bought from Avaamo. The internal team at IndiaFirst Life and IT partner E&Y, teamed up in the evaluation process to explore 5-6 companies before choosing Avaamo’s AI platform. The evaluation process took about 2-3 weeks.

IndiaFirst Life has a change management team, which explores with the departments on the use cases for various digital tools be it chatbots, RPA etc. This team strength is 12-13. The chatbot platform is being used since the last one year.

Roadmap
IndiaFirst Life Insurance is looking forward to use AI in two areas. Apart from chatbots, sales management is another area, where AI can be potentially used. Based on the data churned out by the AI engine, it can provide the contextual intelligence to the sales agent on what and how to pitch to the customers. This will improve employee productivity and customer service efficiency. “This is a cloud based solution that we are exploring. The lead management part is being looked at, currently. The next phase will be about testing the AI based backend engine,” says Rochlani. The challenge this solution will help overcome is, at times, there are inconsistent sales management processes across the country. The chatbot and AI based solution can enable consistent processes, country wide. Secondly, there are sales agents, who have developed best practices, which can be replicated. The AI approach can empower sharing these practices with other agents by giving alerts.