Simplify the Insurance Claims Process with Awaken

Author: Simon Black | Date: 28/10/2022

While providing a high level of customer support is a challenge in any area of business, it is particularly difficult in the insurance industry. Not only do contact centre staff in insurance have to deal with the emotional, human side of customer support, they also have to navigate the complexities of insurance claims processes.

Given these inherent challenges, it’s unsurprising that insurers often struggle to meet their customers’ needs. In fact, only 29% of insurance customers say they are satisfied with their current providers.¹

In addition to delivering customer satisfaction, contact centre agents have to grapple with the complexities of regulatory compliance, while keeping an eye out for potentially fraudulent claims, which are becoming increasingly common. Just last year, insurance claims fraud rose by 13%, with home insurance fraud up by 45%. Insurance giant Aviva uncovered over 11,000 fraudulent claims in 2021, worth over £122 million.²

With the stakes so high, insurance companies must do everything they can to support their staff and simplify the claims process. This is where contact centre technology can help. With a platform like Awaken, you have the tools you need to make your agents’ jobs easier while providing a superior customer experience.

In this article, we’re going to take an in-depth look at how our technology can help insurers simplify claims processing and deliver an exceptional service. Let’s get started.

Suggest reading: You can read more about how Awaken can transform the efficiency of contact centres in our free eBook — ‘You Contact Centre Could Operate Better… A Lot Better’

Better understand your customers

The best contact centre technology doesn’t just help simplify and streamline processes, it also provides unparalleled insights into customer interactions, allowing you to analyse conversations using:

Speech analytics: A relatively simple process that transcribes spoken conversation into a readable text format, allowing you to identify key words and utterances for analysis and reporting.
Voice analytics: This process goes one step further, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to pinpoint specific words and determine the emotion and sentiment behind them.

Where speech analytics can be applied only to phone conversations, voice analytics can be applied to customer calls, emails, and instant messages, providing deep analysis over multiple channels.

Voice analytics is an incredibly powerful tool. It allows contact centres to understand how customers are feeling in real-time and uncover actionable insights that can be used to drive performance improvements. This is particularly important in insurance, where customers may be more impatient or emotional than normal.

In addition to understanding customers, voice analytics also sheds light on agent sentiment over time. This makes it possible to identify when agents might be suffering from stress, low confidence, or poor morale, allowing managers to take action to protect wellbeing. Ultimately, this leads to a happier team and a higher level of service.

Empower agents with real-time guidance

Customer support agents have a lot to think about — especially in an industry as complex as insurance. At any given moment, they have to juggle human skills with a deep understanding of the intricate details of insurance policies and claims — and all in real-time.

Without the right support, the risk of poor customer experience, lengthy waiting times, and the delivery of false or irrelevant information increases — all of which lead to customer dissatisfaction and the risk of churn.

Thankfully, technology can help. Agent guidance technology can provide real-time direction to agents that allows them to deliver a higher standard of service with better outcomes.

Many insurance companies use scripting due to the complex nature of their processes. In recent years scripting technology has come a long way. Essentially, contact centre scripting now guides agents through customer conversations via workflows and scripts that present the right information at the right time, allowing agents to:

Offer a better, more consistent standard of customer service
Reduce call handling times and cost-per-call rates
Increase first-call resolution rates
Relay accurate and timely information
Increase call throughput
Boost customer satisfaction and loyalty

Awaken’s guidance and scripting tool (Intelligent Agent) guides agents towards the next best action in real-time while they capture key details surrounding a claim without interrupting or commencing repetitive information cycles. The platform also provides reassurance that customers are receiving correct information regardless of how complex their query is, allowing agents to engage in empathetic conversations that simplify the claims process.

Our scripting capabilities also function as an excellent teacher. That’s because the tool helps guide agents through the process of delivering high-quality support and reduces the need for formal training. This represents a more efficient, cost-effective approach to delivering high performance, while making the agent experience more enjoyable and rewarding.

Remove bottlenecks

The goal of any contact centre should be to make operations and processes more effective while improving outcomes for customers. The right contact centre technology makes this possible.

For example, Awaken analyses data from customer conversations, phone systems, omnichannel (including email, social media, and chat), CRM, and web analytics to deliver actionable insights that allow contact centre managers to:

Understand how well their contact centre operations are performing
Understand and live up to their customers’ needs and expectations
Identify and resolve internal bottlenecks and process challenges
Ensure that their agents remain compliant at all times

Crucially, contact centre managers and team leaders can see where agents are struggling during customer interactions. As a result, follow-up training can be tailored to their specific needs, helping to ensure better conversations and improved first call resolution rates.

These insights also allow insurance contact centre managers to fine-tune operational processes to allow for better agent performance, improved customer support outcomes, and a more streamlined and cost-effective operation.

Choose the right provider

To get the best results, you need to pick the right contact centre technology provider. But with so many to choose from, how do you know where to start? First of all, it’s important to pick one that knows customer support and the insurance industry inside out.

At Awaken, we consider ourselves pioneers of intuitive contact centre technology. With decades of experience, our leadership team has seen first-hand the issues that contact centre staff — and customers — have to deal with. This experience has helped us build a flexible solution designed to improve and simplify the way businesses deliver customer support.

We also have a wealth of experience in the industry. We understand the unique challenges that contact centre staff face in insurance, including increasing consumer expectations, dealing with in-depth policies and the threat of compliance breaches, not to mention the risks associated with making mistakes.

That’s why we’ve built our platform to support the needs of contact centre teams in the insurance industry, helping you to deliver a seamless and consistent customer experience while staying on the right side of regulatory compliance.

Awaken helps insurance contact centres offer a next-level customer service experience that makes it possible to:

Listen: With advanced voice and speech analytics, as well as real-time multilingual translation, you can listen to your customers on a deeper level
Understand: Powerful insights give you a deep understanding of customer needs and sentiment, while analysing agent performance in real-time
Guide: AI-driven technology supports your agents through all customer interactions, guiding them to take the next best action, while providing the information they need when they need it

Transform your insurance contact centre

With powerful features such as dynamic scripting, speech and voice analytics, and intelligent agent guidance, Awaken has the tools your contact centre staff need to navigate the complicated world of insurance claims.

By deploying our platform, contact centre managers and team leaders can access the insights they need to drive positive operational changes that can ultimately deliver a competitive advantage in an ever-evolving landscape.

If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you revolutionise the way you deliver customer support in the insurance industry, get in touch with us today and book a demo.