MUMBAI: ICICI Lombard General Insurance is working towards using Microsoft’s speech-to-text tools as a stepping stone to build up artificial intelligence (AI) capability in dealing with customers.
The company has now deployed Azure Speech Services and Natural Language Processing in its outward call centres to automate supervision of calls. The longer-term goal is to use these conversations to teach its artificial intelligence systems so that they have the capability of facing customers directly in future. The company has already tasted success in using image recognition under Microsoft’s Azure Cognitive Services in assessing claims. It now aims to make further use of the cloud-based platform.
According to ICICI Lombard chief of customer service, operations and technology Girish Nayak, the company does around 1,000 outbound calls a day. Earlier, it used to manually screen 20% of the calls to check compliance and quality of its tele-customer services. “For much of the technology that we have deployed, the true value has come out now because of the lockdown situation as it has helped in the last mile reach,” said Nayak.
Acknowledging that ICICI Lombard has been a frontrunner in deployment of the software giants cognitive services, Microsoft national technology officer Rohini Srivastha said that the insurer has shown ingenuity in adopting technology from a platform and customising it at two levels — first for the non-life industry where everyday words like ‘cover’ and ‘claim’ hold different meanings and then for Indian ‘Hinglish’ where two languages are used in the same sentence.
According to Srivastha, ICICI Lombard will have access to all the research and development (R&D) that is happening at Microsoft in developing its voice agent Cortana. “The core technologies as they advance, the advancement will go into any of the customers using the models. For Indian languages, there is a mixing of language, the structural difference of Indian language is also captured,” she said.
While banking finance insurance are ahead of game in the digitisation journey, the technology can be used by any industry that has high customer-facing or high customer interaction, said Srivastha.
“Around 2017-18 we started experimenting with the AI/ML piece on Azure. We used image recognition to identify damages on vehicles to come up with break-in solutions. We are running models where it can not just figure whether there is damage, but it can also assess the damage and ascertain whether it needs repair or replacement and virtual run the entire claim process. We have used the Microsoft tools for fraud detection, It is a natural progression from AI,” said Nayak.
Source: The Times of India
31-05-2021
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