The Insurance Industry’s AI Moment: Efficiency, Loyalty and Scalable Growth

Turning Your Insurance Contact Center into a Growth Engine

One major benefit of AI is that its promised ROI can extend to both value streams in insurance: risk management and customer experience. Managing risk (policy declinations, non-renewals, rate increases) and providing optimal experiences (consultation and lower customer effort) for policyholders have historically been on either end of how insurance companies prioritize customer experience (CX).

Now insurers can deploy tools like agentic AI, large language models (LLMs) and copilots for frontlines agents, underwriting teams and others. There’s no better time to assess how these tools will shape the future of insurance and drive growth and profitability.

Imagine being an insurance agent in a sales department. Your company recently highlighted the value of modernizing its underwriting models with generative AI to improve profitability. And your IT department has deployed a new quoting platform that uses AI and machine learning to streamline the quoting process and make it more customer-centric.

Unfortunately, these innovations don’t help you manage the many siloed systems on your desktop — or make you more proficient when consulting with your customers and selling new products. This disconnect can lead to frustration, employee burnout and increased attrition.

Fortunately, there are AI-powered tools that can help frontline employees overcome common challenges; and these capabilities can ultimately provide top-line growth. For example, insurers are already leveraging predictive routing and predictive engagement during the shopping and quoting process to enable a faster, more consultative experience.

The intelligent routing design of a modern contact center platform allows interactions to be programmatically directed to agents that are the most proficient in handling that specific interaction. So, customers receive an optimal experience in their channel of choice — in the most convenient way possible. And your agents are given the opportunities to handle interactions in which they’re most proficient at selling, which can translate into higher conversion rates, more revenue/premium and a more engaged sales staff.

In addition, your sales agents can also leverage auto-summarization capabilities within a copilot to reduce their after-call work. This allows them to get back on the phone faster to sell more insurance policies.

This can result in new incremental growth to the company’s book of business and reduced operating expenses as the sales department experiences a productivity boost that improves acquisition costs.

Making AI Part of an Omnichannel Approach in Customer Service and Claims

Two prioritized areas for AI in the industry are customer service and claims. The current methods of support — voice or email options — for customer queries with limited omnichannel and self-service capabilities aren’t scalable as insurers continue to grow their policies in force.

In its Top Trends for 2025, Capgemini highlights that the property and casualty insurance industry needs to transform CX with an omnichannel mindset, revamping current processes and solutions with greater agility, and leveraging modern solutions that deliver end-to-end digital experiences.

When thinking about transforming customer experience in the insurance industry, it’s critical to create the same dynamic as what exists in the agency channel: consultative, personalized experiences.

For example, when chatting with my insurance company about my policy, I’m looking for a different level of engagement — one that’s more than simply service but instead is seamless, personalized and empathetic. And this experience should be personalized according to my specific needs – whether I’m a new policyholder, have an open or recent claim, or have an upcoming renewal. 

One of South Africa’s fastest growing insurers, King Price Insurance optimized agent efficiency with AI in a true omnichannel environment. The company combines multiple capabilities like digital channels, chatbots and voicebots — as well as integrations into both inbound and outbound interactions — for maximum value. Additionally, Newcastle Greater Mutual Group is using AI copilots and has seen a 50% improvement in agent competency while reducing average handle time by 50 seconds.

Still, there are many simple transactions that I’m perfectly happy to leverage digital tools and self-service that don’t require agent assistance. From paying a bill to asking for proof of insurance, these are the types of interactions that insurers can easily automate and push to less expensive channels.

In these scenarios, AI can play a massive role in improving the experience and helping to build loyalty between the policyholder and the insurance company.

Amplifying the Business Benefits of AI

A missed opportunity of AI is not leveraging it to expand the usage and value proposition of other capabilities in a CCaaS solution. For the insurance industry, that includes integrations into policy administration and claims management systems.

These integrations allow agents to further reduce the number of systems they must navigate by embedding a contact center solution directly into the system of record. Having certified solutions that tap directly into the APIs for those systems of record, the idea of fast-tracking new self-service initiatives and pushing automation into digital channels can help the insurance company deflect those simple, high-volume interactions from reaching their frontline workforce.

In an industry where the profit margin is so small, being able to deflect 10% or more of inbound interactions is a lifeline to profitability. But without access to the data to automate these requests, it falls on the technology teams to build, enhance and maintain a growing repository of web service calls that can lead to long-term technical debt.

When thinking of amplifying the business benefits of AI, consider the true end-to-end customer journey. Reducing effort in the entire journey can also lead to greater flexibility within your workforce.

Let’s look back at the example of the sales agent who is struggling with burnout and dealing with siloed, outdated systems. Imagine the benefits that integrating outbound dialing with a lead management system and AI would do to top-line growth. One scenario is that agents could reach more leads and have more follow-up to spur engagement — all while an AI copilot could help guide the agent and summarize interactions.

Back-office teams have the same opportunities and challenges as frontlines teams. However, with limited tools to measure the impact of missed service level agreements (SLAs) or friction, insurers have limited visibility into interaction drivers and retention issues. Combining AI with work automation and task routing for back-office teams provides the same level of assistance as their frontline counterparts.

Additionally, teams that handle underwriting, policy processing and claims operations, for example, can leverage features like interaction summarization, knowledge management and next-best action consultation to remove manual work from employees while reducing their cognitive load. Even better, leadership could then see the true end-to-end customer value stream and prioritize initiatives with objective data that informs them of the footprint of opportunities and issues.

Putting AI on Your Insurance Growth Roadmap

To build a roadmap to continuous growth and profit, take the foundational elements and ROI of a customer experience solution, transform the solution by introducing AI for your frontline employees and customer base, and then innovate with new capabilities and integrations. This can help you to remove effort and friction from your policyholder and claimant journeys

Ultimately, this can allow your insurance company to grow policies in force, improve revenue/premiums, reduce retention rates, and cut expenses. Learn more about how Genesys Cloud AI can help your insurance company deliver connected, cross-channel experiences and create lasting client loyalty.