How ICICI Lombard is using AI-driven tech to boost efficiencies

ICICI Lombard General Insurance Company is betting on technology and artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools as it looks to improve efficiencies and speed up various processes.

According to company officials, till a year back, only 10% of the calls were going through the bots. Now, 70% of the calls are getting entertained through a bot or a WhatsApp Chatbot, on the inbound side. On the outbound side as well, renewal calls or calls based on the leads generated through their website, especially on the two-wheeler side, are now happening through their inhouse bots.

The use of bots has helped ICICI Lombard carry out a million inbound and outbound calls per month, officials pointed out.

ICICI Lombard's voice AI-driven customer enablement platform is an advanced conversational solution that supports customers through human-like voice interactions across the entire insurance journey - from policy queries and modifications to policy purchase and payment completion. The voice bot is also trained to act as a sales agent, completing the entire journey from proposal to payment for the customer on the call itself.

The use of such tech has helped cut down wait times significantly and also issues policies faster.

"Fundamentally, we are trying to ease a lot of pain points that have come as a part of the feedback from the customers. Each of this pain point is largely in the context of making available new product offerings, make available service offerings and more importantly, also to try and see how we can be far more quick to react. That's a thought process with each of these capabilities we have introduced," Gopal Balachandran, CFO, ICICI Lombard, said.

According to him, roughly around 1.5% of the company's annual topline gets invested in new tech or as Balachandran calls avenues for the future.

Even as it's technology usage increases, it will co-exist with humans, he said, stressing that compared with the normal activities, their call centre employees were used to, with technology, their output is far more qualitative with the solutions that the company has created.

The private sector general insurance major on Monday unveiled several new solutions across its various lines of business as a part of its Silver Jubilee celebrations.

For instance, a life stage-based modular health insurance product for women will offer four customised plans to support women across different life stages.

A time-assured roadside assistance service that provides battery charging support, vehicle towing and minor on-site repairs during breakdowns or accidents has been launched across 15 cities.

There will also be a premium service offering for private car customers, integrating emergency assistance, legal and procedural facilitation.

ICICI Lombard will also have specialised service desks for senior citizens.