How ICICI Prudential Life Insurance is Scaling Customer Care and Leveraging AI to Personalize Experiences

Share this post:

Organisations are constantly challenged to meet dynamic customer requirements and rethink ways to engage with them on their terms and as per their convenience. With customers at the core of decision making and business success, organisations are tuning to digital capabilities that can support new-age services. When done well, after sales service boosts the overall customer experience by providing answers to common questions through the website, social media, chat bots, or with customer support agents.

Offering amazing customer service with personalization is important if you want to retain customers and grow your business. Doing it at scale and making information available to customers with minimal effort can be achieved using Artificial Intelligence (AI).

ICICI Prudential Life Insurance reached out to IBM in 2018 to help them scale up customer service using Watson Artificial Intelligence services.

Business challenge

With the number of customers increasing and the millennials accounting for 34% (at 440 million) of the country’s total population, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance needed to re-align its customer experience to meet their customers’ evolving and dynamic requirements. Managing it with the traditional approach would have required significant manual efforts and would prove to be expensive. Their need was clear, to provide on-demand answers to policyholders and address their queries. Another major reason for a chatbot was to improve digital adoption and self-help servicing experience for customers.

Transformation Story

ICICI Prudential Life Insurance uses IBM Watson AI services like Assistant, Natural Language Understanding and Watson Knowledge Catalog to deliver multiple virtual assistants and email automation solutions that help their customers get consistent and up-to-date information related to their policies, other products and general FAQs.

To scale the service to support thousands of users per day, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance has leveraged IBM Watson Assistant and developed LiGo, an AI-powered chatbot that can converse with customers. The solution returns answers quickly by applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Deep Learning techniques to recognize and extract the intent, context and meaning behind inquiries. This is supported via multiple User Interface (UI) channels including the popular WhatsApp application.

Above is the screenshot of LiGo on the web and below are screenshots of a conversation via WhatsApp

ICICI Prudential Life Insurance has also created an email automation solution using Watson to accurately classify the user requirement and accordingly map the appropriate response thus elevating the overall customer experience.

“In 2018, we realized the preference of millennials was to engage through conversational interfaces as against traditional channels such as web, call centers and branches. Our objective was to establish a state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence platform which can serve chat, voice interactions and conversations through avatars. IBM Watson offered Natural Language Processing (NLP) platforms for varied use cases. ICICI Prudential Life Insurance developed LiGo, a chatbot, with the help of IBM Watson to engage its customers in more meaningful ways. For instance, if a customer’s premium payment is due, LiGo will nudge and assist him/her to pay the premium. Intuitively, the amount and the due date are shown with a link to make an online payment. In case the customer faces any issues or needs support, LiGo patches a call with an agent,” explains Ganessan Soundiram, Chief Technology Officer, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance. “In the last financial year alone, we were able to assist more than 2.5 million customer interactions using LiGo with 95% success rate of positive responses,” he says.

Results

300,000 and rapidly growing  monthly customer interactions via LiGo web chat and WhatsApp

ICICI Prudential Life Insurance in collaboration with IBM Watson designed a Universal bot architecture, where we have defined a common workspace for orchestration of different types of bots (HR, Customer servicing, Humanoid etc.) Also, using the same workspace and defining separate source channels in IBM Watson, we have designed the Facebook and the Google Assistant bot.

ICICI Prudential Life Insurance has started their AI journey with chatbot LiGo powered by IBM Watson. The IBM AI platform has a 360 degree capability for advanced data analytics, which can be leveraged by ICICI Prudential Life Insurance going forward to enhance the overall customer experience and engagement.

Company Overview

ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company Limited is promoted by ICICI Bank Limited and Prudential Corporation Holdings Limited. ICICI Prudential Life Insurance began its operations in the fiscal year 2001. On a Retail Weighted Received Premium basis (RWRP), it has consistently been amongst the top companies in the Indian life insurance sector. ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, operates on the core philosophy of customer-centricity. The Company offers long-term savings and protection products to meet different life stage requirements of customers. The digital platform of the Company provides a paperless onboarding experience to customers, empowers them to conduct an assortment of self-service transactions and provides a convenient route to make digital payments for purchasing life insurance and making renewal premium payments. Besides, it also strives to make claims settlement a safe, secure and hassle-free experience.

Solution components

• IBM Watson Assistant
• IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding (NLU)
• IBM Watson Knowledge Studio
• IBM Public Cloud

Take the next step

With Watson, you can bring AI tools and apps to your data wherever it resides – whether it’s on IBM Cloud, AWS, Azure, Google, or your own private cloud platform. Learn how Watson Assistant improved customer experience and lowered costs in this Forrester TEI report.