Paul Carroll
From your perspective, how is the role of agents changing?
Chase Tarkenton
We're seeing a paradigm shift with the onset of AI. Automation has taken such a big leap forward that it’s freeing agents to focus on their clients and provide more thoughtful, more personalized interactions and focus on higher-value activities. The agent can provide a better experience, which is ultimately what the consumer is looking for.
For years, technology has been integral to supporting agents, but a lot of new use cases are coming up every month, where you can trust that the technology will execute and do so at scale and in a compliant fashion. It's really exciting to see.
Paul Carroll
If I'm an agent, how might my day look different now?
Chase Tarkenton
Automation is a big topic, so it can touch lots of different areas of the agent workflow.
With the onset of self-service, more and more customers are coming in already educated on different insurance policies. Now, when an agent is interacting with those clients, some of those conversations have already started, and maybe the agent has been provided a summary of how the customer has been interacting with the organization and what their situation is. By the time the agent speaks with someone, whether it's over the phone, over email, or through digital channels, the agent already has context, and they can pick up the discussion midstream.
At the end of the interactions, the paperwork that the agent has to fill out can be automated. Or a survey can be automatically sent to capture the client’s feedback.
Ultimately, customers can self-serve, and if they don't want to automate, there's that human in the loop. That human is the agent, who can have higher-quality interactions and more interactions on a daily basis than they could previously.
Paul Carroll
I’ve been an advocate for self-service for decades, but in my experience the handoffs to humans from the AI can sometimes be messy. How do you tackle those problems?
Chase Tarkenton
Obviously, the quality of the AI matters. So does the quality of the partner providing the AI to the agents and brokers. Unfortunately, there are a lot of technologies out there today that cannot deliver on some of the promises that are made.
Anyone considering a chatbot system should talk to reference customers and do a pilot to spot where problems might arise and to figure out in advance how to handle any issues.
Paul Carroll
I assume that this sort of technology, like most I've covered over the decades, has a progression to it. What are the sorts of interactions you started using AI with? And where are you now?
Chase Tarkenton
Twenty years or more ago, chat and voice virtual agents, as we call them, just handled basic FAQs [frequently asked questions]. What’s your phone number? How do I find a branch location? The agents were useful, but I wouldn’t say they were high value.
Fast forward from there, with the emergence of natural language understanding and the incorporation of machine learning and AI, many of these technologies can now handle more sophisticated use cases. Customers can fully resolve requests without having to call and speak to a human—though it’s an important design consideration to make sure they can reach a human if they want.
For example, look at first notice of loss. If your car breaks down on the side of the road, you could pick up your phone, call your insurance provider, and fully authenticate yourself through voice automation. They could leverage geo tracking to know where you are on the side of a busy highway and call a tow truck to come get you. They could capture information automatically and complete first notice of loss without any need to escalate or require a call center or an agent to support them.
That's a great use case that we're seeing come up again and again, and insurance organizations are executing on it. Their NPS [net promoter score] stays consistent with the NPS of a human interaction, which is what we want.
Paul Carroll
Where do you think you can get in two or three years?
Chase Tarkenton
Things are moving so fast that it’s hard to say what’s two or three years out in the AI space, but we’re clearly going to see generative capabilities produce some very exciting outcomes.
We're seeing models produced by some of the bigger generative providers that can reason and handle complex interactions. Open AI’s latest model does complex reasoning in a scientific setting. Those are breakthroughs that will allow for more intense use cases within insurance.
While we can all get excited about technology, though, what matters most is: What does the customer want, and are we doing everything we can to help them be successful? A close second is: How do we make the agent as successful as possible in their role? How do we make them efficient? How do we make them effective? How do we help them to scale?
I think using pre-trained models that are then trained on the data of the insurance organization, with generative capabilities blended in, can drive hyper personalization, which is what the industry is asking for.
Paul Carroll
Where do you see the breakdowns at this point? Where are people most likely to say, "Okay, I’m done with the chatbot. I want to speak to a human?"
Chase Tarkenton
In the design of an automated experience, there are a couple of things that are just a hard stop for consumers.
Number one, if the bot doesn't understand what you're saying, we have very low patience and will immediately drop out of those channels and want to speak to a human.
Number two: Sometimes a partial experience is not what consumers want. They're looking for full resolution. If I want to check what my premium is and can only do part of that before I’m escalated to a human, where I have to repeat myself, that's a non-starter, right?
Any time an interaction is being escalated to a human, it’s critical that the context and information already gathered is transferred to that agent in advance, so it's not being repeated.
Paul Carroll
Are there any issues that I should have gotten into that I didn't?
Chase Tarkenton
AI and automation are a huge topic. The only other areas that might be worth getting into are security and compliance.
Paul Carroll
Great question. Glad I thought of it. How do you handle security and compliance?
Chase Tarkenton
The good news is that the tools exist to mitigate hallucinations and to make sure that any AI-based agent will speak in a fully compliant fashion. If an agent or a customer asks the bot a question, it can quickly recognize whether responding would violate compliance.
Those tools are being used today. At Boost.ai, we’ve got hundreds of financial institutions, many in insurance, that are leveraging those tools to get the results they’re looking for: a better customer experience that they know is ironclad, protecting their reputation and their brand from a security standpoint.
Paul Carroll
Thanks, Chase.
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About Chase Tarkenton
 | Chase Tarkenton is the SVP and general manager of boost.ai, North America. He’s focused on partnership growth, helping insurance firms leverage AI technology in personalized customer experiences. |
