ICICI Lombard drives digital experience across its services

Touchless and contactless are the new buzzwords and both consumers and organisations are leaning towards digital means of fulfilment. The insurance sector continues to evolve, some of it driven by changing customer behaviour, and some of it driven by the availability of new technological solutions. The prolific use of AI, ML, and cognitive services are accelerating the technology adoption in the insurance sector to address needs such as digital adoption, customer experience management, operational efficiency, underwriting profitability, claims optimisation, and much more.

“Evolving consumer needs during the pandemic have resulted in the need for new products and services such as outpatient cover, home-based care, cyber liability, and SME business interruption,” says Girish Nayak, chief – Services, Operations & Technology, ICICI Lombard. For an industry that thrived on physical interactions and physical infrastructure, the pandemic has redefined the customer journey, accelerated digital transformation, and redefined the concept of risk.”

Customers can purchase insurance across various channels such as bank tie-ups, motor dealers, agents, brokers, or directly through online and telephone channels. The need to become pervasive across the channels to tap customers has been pushing ICICI Lombard to focus its energy on enabling each of these channels to have a seamless digital experience for the customer, right from acquisition to policy issuance to servicing. For instance, an increased number of customers and garages are availing ‘Instaspect’ virtual motor survey solution in case of accidents. This solution continues to process around 1200 surveys daily and almost 15,000 digital photographs are uploaded every day through the digital survey process.

Similarly, in the field of health claims, AI/ML solutions help in processing cashless claims authorisation requests that are made by the hospital. In commercial property and casualty, it is doing virtual risk inspections that help in managing risks for our customers remotely. The tele-consult feature ‘Hello Doctor’, gives customers 24by7 access to a doctor and answers all customer’s queries.

“We have been at the forefront of adopting digital and emerging technologies to deliver business value for serving all our stakeholders. Some of our early investments in the development of technology solutions have helped us immensely during this time,” says Nayak. Another area for ICICI Lombard that is gaining prominence is voice search. Video and voice are starting to play a significant role in customer service. In a traditional industry like insurance where physical interactions were extremely important, the pandemic helped increase the adoption of video and voice-based tools.

“It is not unusual to see customers downloading policy documents or checking the status of a claim on our WhatsApp service. Improvements in cognitive services and natural language processing are helping improve the quality of the BOTs servicing customers,” says Nayak. “Multi-lingual BOTs are gaining prominence and the accuracy of these BOTs in understanding the needs of the customer continues to increase. We have been able to collect significant data over the years that have helped us in building such solutions.”

Source: Financial Express