The arrival of trailblazing AI technologies is revolutionizing industries of all kinds, and now life insurance is no different. Through the power of AI, this industry, which had been notorious for its frustrating, time-consuming, and sometimes even humiliating customer experience, can now offer the same fast, seamless onboarding process today’s consumers expect. Indeed, as Zendesk reports, the number one thing 73 percent of customers say they consider during the purchasing process is their customer experience.
“Life insurance is vital protection, but that still doesn’t justify making prospective policyholders endure an unnecessarily onerous process,” says Hari Srinivasan, founder and CEO of groundbreaking life insurance platform iCover. “That’s why we designed a CX that only takes five minutes.”
Life Insurance conventionally took weeks to obtain
“When my co-founder, Nicole Mwesigwa, obtained life insurance after the tragic death of her husband, she was forced to submit to all kinds of medical tests, as well as lengthy interviews that asked about minutia from 10 years prior,” Srinivasan says. “It took her 21 days to finally receive an offer. That’s unconscionable. People need prompt, competent assistance.”
Unfortunately, this kind of experience is not unusual even today. According to NerdWallet, conventional life insurance onboarding processes usually take between four and eight weeks.
However, with the arrival of iCover, everything has changed. Customers no longer need to suffer inconvenience and wait for a human bureaucracy to complete its work. Instead, they can protect their families by obtaining life insurance in the time it takes to brew a cup of tea.
Getting today’s life insurance in a flash
The first advance of iCover’s pioneering approach involves its novel process of gathering prospective customers’ disclosures about health problems or other relevant circumstances. Called QUI™ (pronounced “q-eee”), this intake system only asks a single question about any given condition.
“Most life insurance disclosure processes use reflexive questions to gauge risk,” Srinivasan says. “This means that when a consumer indicates the presence of a medical condition, a whole series of new questions is unleashed, slowing the process down. Many customers abandon the purchasing journey when they are bombarded with more and more questions like this.”
According to Srinivasan, the conventional use of reflexive questions also made life insurance applications less accurate. “Think about it,” he says. “If you know you are going to trigger a whole new series of questions if you tell the system that you have another condition, are you going to disclose it? Many people will think twice. Some will choose not to make the disclosure. The result is a less complete, less accurate application.”
That’s why iCover only asks a single question that’s designed to identify how severe a given issue is. Customers can make their disclosures as quickly and painlessly as possible. This incentivizes consumers’ honesty and gets the system the information it needs to conduct accurate underwriting.
“Basically, we used a sophisticated understanding of consumer behavior along with best practices in survey design to take a process that used to drag on for weeks and reduce it to only five minutes,” Srinivasan says. “That’s about the amount of time it takes to make a sandwich.”
Highly accurate instant offers with iCover
The second main advance of iCover is its AI-based algorithms, which automatically process and generate accurate offers for life insurance coverage in the blink of a proverbial eye. This enables a straight-through customer experience. As soon as prospective policyholders submit their disclosures, the system produces an “instant offer” that rewards them with a selection of possible products.
To ensure the accuracy of the disclosures, the system also compares the information from third-party data from industry-standard approved sources.
Next-generation CX for life insurance
The good news for consumers is that iCover’s next-generation technology means life insurance will never be the same. They can now enjoy the quick, competent, intuitive customer experience they deserve.
Why put yourself through anything else? If you need life insurance, consider visiting iCover today.