It’s not often that thought-leaders gather around a table, but that’s exactly what the University of Essex and insurance industry disrupters Hood Group set out to do. Just last month they pulled together industry leaders to talk about cyber security, how we analyse our data and waves in artificial intelligence.
And although top-name specialists from Microsoft, Filament, Profusion, and Signal Media attended, the real buzzword of the day was ‘chat-bot’ as they discussed the implications these handy automated new teams had on everything from marketing to the future of the insurance industry.
User experience
When considering the growth of Fintech and intriguingly the rise of chat-bots, Henrik Nordmark, Head of Data Science at Profusion, predicted that by 2020 over 85% of interactions from financial institutions will be via chat. Although slightly controversial, he believes that artificial intelligence is currently at its most child-like stage– and that’s a good thing.
Despite the capabilities to automate a lot of the customer interactions with financial companies (e.g. finding a quote, accessing details, reporting an error), he believed that we need to let our AI systems figure this out for themselves and not be so prescriptive. He said,
“With AI it’s easy to give it a recipe book and it will learn all the systems from the top-down, but with machine learning we need a bottom up approach. Don’t give it a lot of examples, instead let it learn. Exactly like a child.”
But for Filament, experts in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, the more prescriptive a user experience the easier for a team to achieve KPIs. Phil Westcott is the Managing Director, he believes that by 2020, all call-centres will have a front end chat-bot to answer around 25% of customer queries, growing up to 75% as they learn the main queries.
He said,
“Right now our clients are measuring the success of our KPIs and the impact our system has on an increasing 24/7 world. Whether we’re focussing on resolution efficacy or customer satisfaction our bots can work across a whole range of disciplines to aid productivity.
Chat-bots suit people, after all you can now do your banking while sitting on the train so why not SMS or Whatsapp a bot your query? Right now we’re dealing with everything from mortgage questions and how to get the best rate, to internal HR holiday queries and nightclub goers who prefer to chat in emoji’s. With 34 AI specialists drawn in from IBM, Capgemini & top academia we’re successfully managing to go ‘in-house’ with our clients to build their expertise in artificial intelligence.”
Retain customers, as well as attract them
Hood Group, a specialist in the use of technology and data to produce personalised quotes, is the driving force behind this meeting. Their Business Development Director Paul Firkins agrees. He said:
Fintech gives us an ability to retain customers, not just attract them. They can come to us with questions and it makes us better as we want to find solutions.
“Since working with the University of Essex, we’re also finding that these data developments have a positive impact on our company culture– AI and data developments help improve efficiency, such as automating pricing processes and reducing admin tasks. Our teams are trusting data and innovation experiments to make decisions and recommendations where they might have previously relied on the knowledge of a specific individual or process”.
But for CEO of Hood Group Simon Hood, he wanted to take it one step further. Speaking of the notion of what a "disrupter" is, he said:
“In our industry, the insurance industry, my company is known as a disrupter simply for using the data supplied by a customer themselves. We don’t believe this is disruption, we believe this is progress. And as long as we have the right methods in place to protect both ourselves and our customers, then the insurance industry can finally dig itself from out of the dark ages and start putting their users at the heart of it.
“They say that information is key, but without someone to light the torch and follow, we’d simply not know where to begin. So I have to thank the people here today for shining a light, and hopefully this will allow us to continue on our path to putting the customer first.”
Both Hood Group and the University of Essex expect to complete further sessions as funding allows.
