Award Applications

Customer-focused innovation: what does this mean for insurance companies, and most importantly, what does it mean for the end customer?

At Spixii, it has been and will always be about the end customer. Since 2016, we have been passionate about helping insurance companies improve their digital customer experience with chatbot technology. Why? Insurance helps protect and empower people and businesses across the world.

We work with the leading insurance companies to help them build compelling customer experiences. The easier and more enjoyable insurance is, the more accessible it will become. Our vision is for a world that is 100% insured.

The challenge:
The challenge is two-fold. Insurance customers are frustrated by insurance. The current process of form-filling and waiting on hold to file a claim is often time-consuming and stressful. A lack of transparency in the buying process is leading to disappointment and low customer loyalty.

In turn, this is driving customer acquisition costs for insurers. Under increasing pressure to innovate and improve their digital customer journey, they must also reduce operational costs and drive efficiency with automation. Meanwhile, brokers face growing demand to improve efficiency through automated technology. When 40% of their day is spent answering queries from clients to check on policies, 40% on claims and 20% for distribution and admin, a customer-centric tool is invaluable to automate these day-to-day tasks.

The solution:
Spixii’s white-labelled chatbot solution returns the human to the conversation. For the frustrated insurance company, it aims to make every step - from quote-and-buy through customer care to claims - as quick and efficient as possible.

For the customer, it feels as personal as messaging. Depending on the use-case, it can be designed to help customers ask questions about their policy.

The technology has been designed to support insurance company’s regulatory and legal requirements, ensuring conversations demonstrate a clear understanding of the insurance product for the IDD and GDPR. Every conversation is fully auditable with the Spixii compliance tool.

For quote-and-buy and claims, the Spixii team are adept at integrating the chatbot into insurer’s back-end systems and front-end web-interfaces. This provides users with an instant accurate quote, with no need for the customer to leave the chatbot for another landing page or repeat information in a form.
However, more lies behind the chatbot than the user-friendly messaging interface. It is also a tool for rich customer insights, available to the insurer through an advanced analytics dashboard. Developed by data scientists, this means insurers can locate exactly where customers drop out, or how they prefer to engage in a visual representation of data. Machine learning algorithms and AI will use this to optimise the conversation based on different customer affinities.

For customers with busy daily lives, this allows them to engage with the insurer 24/7. This value was clearly illustrated by ‘Zara’, the chatbot co-designed by Spixii and Zurich Insurance. More than half of claims made via Zara are made outside of office hours.

Spixii in flight:

This year, Spixii helped Zurich Insurance launch their first claims notification bot, Zara, in just 5 weeks. In the first 6 weeks of being live, over 80% of customers provided positive feedback. Where it was not positive, it was reflective of the telephone journey rather than the chatbot itself (+70 NPS proxy).
In the healthcare space, we collaborated with Bupa to launch a quote and buy customer facing chatbot. This was fully integrated into their front-end website and rating engine to give customers a bindable quote. Meanwhile an Italian insurance agency is using a bot designed and powered by Spixii to automate its workflow, empowering its team to work more efficiently and grow the business.

Market:

The insurance market has put digital transformation onto the agenda and must innovate around the customer to survive, improving digital customer experience and reducing operational margins.

Revenue model:

Spixii is a software as a service (SAAS) subscription model, bespoke according to the use-case, including success driven commissions.

Where next:

Spixii continues to work with leading insurers in Europe on their digital customer journey. We are the first in the market to blend actuarial science and machine learning, architecture, design and UX, plus high-performance computing, in both our team and company DNA. For the past two and a half years, we have focused on testing and iterating hundreds of conversational experiences verticalized in the insurance context. Our current services include:

- In-house methodologies for designing conversational user interfaces for the insurance industry, and delivering them within 12 weeks
- White-labelled chatbot implementations, fully integrated into a company’s front-end and back-end systems to provide instant pricing and/or quote estimates
- Conversation eXperience designer (CXD): a dialogue management tool that enables robust design and iteration of chatbot conversations
- Analytics dashboard and AI development: this provides insurers with unprecedented customer insight and the ability to measure conversation performance over time
- Compliance tool: designed to support the compliance of the conversations with the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and the IDD (Insurance Distribution Directive)

For the future, conversational interfaces will become standard.

We are looking to integrate voice, text, gestures and video into our current services, and help transform insurance product development from static to development. It is key to ensure this development takes place with inclusivity, diversity, transparency and protection.