AI Texting for Insurance

The Rise of AI-Powered Sales Outreach and Automation in Insurance

It's safe to say AI isn't going anywhere. Top insurance companies already use AI in some, whether that's for risk modeling, data forecasting, contact center operations, or throughout the claims process.

KPMG's 2023 Insurance CEO Outlook further revealed how the industry is looking at AI solutions. For example, 60% of surveyed CEO's said they were making larger investments in new technologies — with 73% saying investing in automation and generative AI is the most important investment opportunity.

The biggest drivers for this investment include increased profitability (23%), fraud detection and cyber attack response (20%), increased innovation (14%), and new product and market growth opportunities (12%).

60% of business owners believe AI will improve customer relationships

60% of business owners believe AI will boost productivity

65% of consumers say they will continue to trust businesses using AI

What's clear: AI is here to stay and insurance companies looking to stay competitive will need to figure out the best way to implement it to avoid being left behind by early adopters in the industry.

You may be thinking — what's the best place to get started with AI? For insurance companies, sales automation is often the logical choice.

Not sure where to start? Don't worry, we'll cover the basics of AI texting, how effective it is, what it looks like in practice, and provide a step-by-step guide to getting your first AI texting campaign off the ground.

AI texting: Quick Stats You Need To Know

Consumers open 98% of text messages received

80% of customers report having a good experience solving a problem with conversational AI

Companies using conversational AI increased sales by 67% on average

90% of companies using conversational AI save up to 4 minutes per question

Conversational AI can lower the cost of an interaction to $0.70

7 AI Texting and Automation Insurance Use Cases

Stats are great and all, but you're here to see how other insurance companies are using AI texting and automation to eliminate tedious manual tasks and boost productivity.

We've put together a few insurance use cases that some of our insurance clients are already using in their workflows.

Automated Plan Renewals

The renewal process can be long and time consuming for insurance companies. This process includes notifying a customer about an upcoming renewal, collecting consent to start the process, updating important account information, and renewing an existing plan or helping them select a new one. Without AI, each of these touchpoints requires attention from your agents.

• Customers are sent a friendly reminder for their upcoming renewal
• Conversational AI engages them and asks for consent to start the renewal process
• Customers are provided with a link to update important policy information
• An existing plan is auto renewed if available, otherwise new comparable plans are recommended
• Customers can select the plan they want, completing the renewal

All of these essential renewal process steps become automated. Your teams only need to step in to handle more complex scenarios that require human intervention.

Collecting Consent and Updating Policy Information

Neither the renewal or quote processes can start without customer consent and having up to date account information. But collecting this info typically happens over a call.

With AI texting, you can collect consent and info through text messaging. Customers can provide consent with a simple yes/no answer and update account information using a secure link. This saves your agents even more time, so they can stay focused on higher priority tasks.

Instant Lead Engagement for New Quotes

Speed-to-lead is everything, especially in insurance where customers are typically shopping for quotes from multiple providers. Failing to respond to new quote requests often means they will turn to a competitor with faster response times.

AI texting solves this problem by instantly engaging new leads as soon as they opt-in. For example, new leads will be sent a text message asking to discuss their new quote request, providing fast service and increasing the likelihood that they will follow through to receive an official quote. Additionally, conversational AI will continue to follow up with leads, encouraging them to book a meeting to lock in their quote.

Automatically Booking Meetings

There are many steps in the insurance sales process. These include providing new leads with a quote, following up on quotes, and providing assistance wherever needed in the process.

And yet, finding the perfect timing for each of these interactions isn't always easy. After all, you don't always have insight into what your customers need at a specific time.

AI schedulers solve this problem for you through text messaging and direct integrations with your calendars. Customers can book, reschedule, and cancel appointments with a simple text message. Conversational AI will encourage them to book, find available agents for requested time slots, and send friendly reminders to customers for upcoming meetings. This works to increase total meetings booked while reducing no-shows.

Self-Service Plan Selections

Choosing the right plan can be complex for customers, especially with larger insurance companies with a diverse selection of plans.

While agents can provide plan information over the phone — creating a more visual and self-service experience makes your customers feel like they are in control and helps them better understand what's available to them.

AI-powered sales automation supports this process by providing a secure link for customers to select plans. They can review all available plans, pricing, and other plan-specific information in one place. And when they're ready, they can select the plan they want, too.

Document Collection

Document collection is an unavoidable part of the insurance policy process. Customers must provide specific documents to determine plan eligibility. However, this can quickly become a frustrating process for your agents when documents are hard to find.

AI texting simplifies this step by notifying a customer about any missing documents. From there, customers can send required documents by text message. This speeds up the document collection process by making it easy for customers to send them while also providing a centralized location for your internal teams to access these documents.

Responding to Customer Questions & Live Transfers

Sometimes customers require additional support. Maybe they have questions about an upcoming renewal. Other times they want to explore new plans. Or maybe they have questions that require an agent.

Either way, conversational AI supports your customers by providing answers to common questions. This saves your agent's valuable time by removing unnecessary back-and-forth communications from the lead engagement process.

And for more complex situations — AI will schedule a call, dial the customer, and transfer them to a human agent to ensure they receive the help they need.

How to Create Your First AI Texting Campaign

Next, let's break down the steps you need to take to get your first AI texting campaign off the ground.

Step 1: Brainstorm Your Next Campaign

The first step is to think about how you want to use AI texting to support sales and marketing. You can use these questions to help you narrow down on where to start:

• What KPIs are you trying to improve?
• What part of the sales process is slowing your sales teams down?
• Are you looking to market to new or existing leads?
• Do you have any specific workflows or processes that will need to be integrated with your AI texting platform?
• Do you have the internal resources needed to support an AI texting campaign?

The goal of any AI texting campaign is to reduce the amount of strain on your sales and marketing teams. For many companies, this means offloading sales outreach to a conversational AI so humans can be looped back in at the perfect time.

For example, you may use conversational AI to immediately contact new opt-in leads, increasing your speed-to-lead while ensuring high-intent leads are warmed up while they're most interested in your products and services.

Still not sure where to start? Meera customers automatically get paired with an AI expert who can help you find the best starting point for your first AI texting campaign.

Step 2: Register Your Campaign

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Step 3: Create the Conversational AI Scripts

After registration comes the fun part: creating the scripts for your AI texting campaign. This will require a thorough understanding of your business, its customers, and the goals of your AI texting campaign.

Some of the most important steps of this process include:

• Looking at past voice of the customer data like sales calls and other touchpoints to map out frequently asked questions for your conversational AI to answer
• Reviewing your website to identify additional insights that may be useful to train the conversational AI with
• Collecting lots of use cases and personalizing them to support your AI
• Ensuring the conversational AI uses a human-like tone that resonates with your customers
• Understanding what to say, when to say it, and how to support your customers to boost satisfaction and sales

Once you gain a deeper understanding of what's required, it's time to write the scripts. This is the most lengthy part of the process and you have two options:

You assign a technical member of your team to oversee and handle this process.

You offload this complex part of the buildout to your vendor's team of AI experts.

Meera handles the entire script writing and testing process as part of our campaign design service, ensuring your AI texting campaign is supported with highly personalized scripts.

Step 4: Train the Bot With the Script

Scripts written? Next comes sending your campaign live to test and see if everything is working correctly. This shouldn't be seen as a one-time process, but more of a manual, ongoing one.

You'll want to interact with the bot to see how it responds. This may include:

• Asking specific questions and gauging its responses
• Identifying areas where it struggles
• Finding areas to improve conversation flow
• Looking at the back-end to measure performance, deliverability, response rates, and other focus areas

This requires very intensive monitoring and continuous improvement, and shouldn't be seen as a set it and forget it step.

For several weeks, keep testing and monitoring as you want to be certain your conversational AI isn't going off the rails.

Step 5: Integrate Required Applications

Integrations play an important role in supporting your conversational AI. However, this technical step is a delicate one and will require developers if you plan to manually integrate using your vendor's API.

Looking for an easier way? You can take advantage of Zapier integrations to expedite this process. This will allow you to support popular apps, including CRMs, calendars, and other apps in your workflows.

With the right integrations in place, your AI texting platform will be able to view leads in your pipeline, send text messages to campaign-specific leads, see and book meetings to individual calendars, and more (depending on what apps you've integrated).

Step 6: Build the Campaign Out

Thought you were finished? You still need to buildout the campaign in the backend. This step includes a lot of smaller tasks that can make or break your AI texting campaign, including:

You'll want to interact with the bot to see how it responds. This may include:

• Making sure everything is configured properly
• Mapping out working hours for the conversational AI and available agents
• Performing call calibration
• Testing specific features like outbound calling, warm transfers, IVRs, and more
• Retesting the bot to measure performance
• Aligning and onboarding your teams on how to work with the conversational AI

All of these steps require a high level of awareness into the overall goals and objectives of the AI texting campaign. More importantly, be sure to spend additional time training your sales teams so they know what to expect from your conversational AI.

Step 7: Purchase Your Phone Numbers

You're almost there! You'll need to purchase phone numbers for the campaign before you can send it live to the public.

This process may be done through your desired phone number provider or through your AI texting platforms back-end.

Note: Meera customers can purchase numbers directly through Meera.

You will also want to consider whether you need localized numbers or not.

It's recommended to localize your numbers to make them more familiar to prospects receiving texts from your conversational AI. Once purchased, attach the numbers to your campaign.

Step 8: Complete Onboarding and Monitor Campaigns

The final step is an ongoing one. You'll need to think about how you want to train and onboard your teams. After all, what good is your investment in AI texting if your teams don't use it properly?

You may need to develop an internal training guide for your sales teams. Alternatively, ask your vendor what training and onboarding materials they have. It's likely they've invested in creating helpful materials.

• Hands-on training to show them how Meera works, how to answer the phone, and other key features
• A demo showing how reporting works, what it includes, and how to access the reporting dashboard
• A dedicated AI expert to provide ongoing support, training, and guidance over the lifecycle of a campaign
• Ongoing monitoring to measure campaign performance

The most important thing is to always monitor and improve your campaign. Look for new FAQs to train the conversational AI. Keep your eye on KPIs like deliverability and response rates to identify potential issues before they get worse. And more importantly, ensure there's always a human available to step in and fix a problem.

Start Your Next Insurance AI Texting Campaign with Meera

AI texting is already transforming the insurance industry. Don't risk being left behind by early adopters. Take your sales automation strategy to the next level with AI texting.

With AI texting, you can automate and offload the busywork in your sales processes, freeing up your agents to focus on high-intent opportunities and closing deals without compromising on lead qualifying, nurturing, and engagement. Plus, with automated renewals, plan selections, document collection, and more — the possibilities are endless.

Discover how AI texting can enable your sales automation strategy.

Book a consultation to speak with one of our AI texting experts today.