Assurance IQ slashes agent ramp up time from 6 months to 1 month with Alltius' sales excellence assistants

As millions of insurance buyers reach out with an intent to purchase a plan suited to their needs, Alltius' assistants coached on thousands of insurance plans each year, empower Assurance's sales agents to have personalized, well-informed and well pitched conversations with customers

Client

Assurance IQ
Seattle, Washington
Insurance

Products

  • CX End User Assist
  • CX Agent Assist

Metrics

  • 67% Reduction in agent onboarding time
  • 100% Tested accuracy of responses
  • 96%+ Agent questions answered

Agent ramp up time

  • 6 → 2 months

Insurance plans compared

  • 6000+

Knowledge

  • 6,000+ insurance plans across 100s of plan providers

Skills

  • Searching plans based on user needs and narrowing search, comparing 2-6 plans on specific dimensions, pitching a plan, building information grid across thousands of plans

Channels

  • Playground, APIs

About

Assurance IQ provides personalised guidance and makes finding and using medicare, health, life, motor and home insurances for millions of North Americans each year. It enjoys patronage of over 17 million customers and uses data science and machine learning to narrow down options for coverage.

Situation

Assurance IQ receives millions of website visitors monthly, generating hundreds of thousands of leads. These leads are directed to the sales contact centre, where thousands of licensed insurance agents assist them over a phone call in making decisions tailored to their individual needs.

However, this process has several challenges:

  1. With over 6,000 insurance plans to be familiar with, agents face uphill tasks in staying updated on plan details and specific terms and conditions that change every year in the insurance renewal season from September to December.
  2. The problem is more acute when the agents are relatively new or recently hired.  New agents typically take around six months to reach the same level of effectiveness as experienced agents.
  3. Next comes the shortage of time and the multitasking involved. Agents need to efficiently engage with callers in under 30 minutes, quickly understand their needs from a vast array of plans, explain why a particular plan is recommended, highlight its benefits that align with the customer's needs, and ultimately close the sale convincingly. Delaying a decision often results in lost sales opportunities.

CTO Nick Howard enlisted the help of Alltius to develop an AI tool for their agents - which would assist insurance agents in identifying plans with specific benefits as the customer conversation progresses, facilitate comparisons of these benefits across various plans, and ultimately provide valuable insights. Essentially, as agents engage with customers, the AI companion would offer talking points about the plans, highlighting not only how they cater to the customer's needs but also showcasing additional benefits that may not have been explicitly mentioned or recognized by the customer.

Solution

A cross-functional team, comprising software engineers, product managers, designers, and data scientists from both Alltius and Assurance, was formed. The setup of Alltius assistant on the web app platform was swift and straightforward, with hundreds of medicare plans from various sources ingested and coached within minutes. In parallel, Alltius cleared a stringent info-sec review of the platform by the auditing team at Assurance.

The team utilised Alltius' playground and APIs to assess the form and accuracy of the responses. The pilot project was divided into three phases that extended over a period of 10 weeks.

Phase 1: Customising skills (2-4 weeks)

  • Narrow the search: Distil top 5-10 relevant plans from thousands given the buyer is looking for addressing 3-5 specific needs and health issues.
  • Compare plans: Provide a comparison across benefits, inclusions, and exclusions across a narrowed choice of plans specific to the customer needs.
  • Pitch a plan: Help the agent give a 30-second comprehensive pitch highlighting how it addresses not only the stated needs but also the unstated needs of the caller.
  • Build the grid: Quickly generate a grid containing M pieces of information from N plans, which could then be validated for accuracy.

Alltius built these customised skills in a couple weeks and made it available for quality testing.

Phase 2: Quality testing (2 weeks)

The teams focused on evaluating the quality and accuracy of responses, crucial for addressing trust issues given the vast amount of information in 6,000 plans. Assurance's team achieved a precision rate of 100% and a recall rate of 96.2%.

Phase 3: Prototype validate and POC (2 weeks)

The task force validated the assistants with a varied mix of agent trainers, experienced agents, and new agents, receiving an overwhelming vote of trust on the utility of the assistants for the sales process and agent productivity.

Results

The assistants returned valuable time to the agents, allowing them to focus on their core strength of listening to customers with empathy and fully comprehending their needs.

  • Lift in conversion: 5-15% increase in call-to-sale conversion rates.
  • New agent ramp-up time: Reduced by 67%, reaching mid-level productivity three times faster.
  • Tech man-month savings: Build-the-grid tooling would save 2-4 engineer months annually.

Way forward

With promising results, the sponsors green-lit other projects to enhance the system further, including auto-detection of buyer needs and summarising buyer needs across conversations.

“One of the best [platforms] we have seen in the market. Also, they are one of the best teams we have worked with among our vendors after trying this ourselves for 2 years."

Nick Howard, CTO, Assurance IQ

Happy customers. Quickest time to value.