When you have a query or need some details about a life insurance product on a Sunday, fret not, as help may be at hand.

TATA AIA Life Insurance Company Ltd (TALIC), a private life insurer, is looking to deploy humanoid robots as part of its efforts to simplify the customer interface process and solve simple queries of customers, a top official said.

“Besides ensuring consistency of service, deploying humanoids will address issues of time constrains and offer 24x7 customer services. We are also looking to ensure that humanoids will provide convenience of multiple languages,” Yusuf Pachmariwala, Senior Vice-President and Head-Operations and Customer Services, TALIC, told BusinessLine .

There will be a separate number for interaction with humanoids and the customer concerned will be informed that they are in conversation with a humanoid, said Pachmariwala. To begin with, this life insurer plans to use humanoids only for customer interface.

TALIC’s initial analysis showed that the benefits of investments in humanoids will outweigh the costs involved in employing people for customer services, he said.

Leveraging technology

Over the last two-and-a-half years, TALIC has been on a focussed drive on improving the use of technology in its operations – at present, 94 per cent of its business comes through tablets (via digital technology).

Technology has been intensively used not only for customer on-boarding and support, but also in the case of agency on-boarding, which has been entirely digitised, he said.

The life insurer is also working on AI-based Chatbots, which could be an improvement over the current menu-driven chatbots that are being used.

“You, as a customer, could talk to these chatbots in a language of your choice. These chatbots will use Natural Language Processing to discover and intelligently reply to your queries,” said Pachmariwala.

Plans are also afoot to deploy AI for responding to the electronic mails sent by customers.

“We are looking at AI to help create the response to an e-mail rather than the employee himself coming out with the entire response,” he said.

TALIC, which wants to emerge as a pre-eminent protection provider, is adopting a multi-channel distribution strategy for achieving its growth aspirations.

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