(Photo by Tara Winstead)
Insurance is hard to sell because you often start with someone that has no interest in your product and must transform them into someone that thinks they can’t live without it. The successful salesperson is strong and influences others in spite of the fact they don’t know enough about the prospect to create the targeted effort that will close the deal. High close rates are generally achieved by those who have a great deal of experience. Unfortunately, these folks aren’t interested in training others for fear of creating competition, and it pulls time from selling where the money is made. Finally, if you have a top salesperson, retaining them becomes increasingly difficult once others know of their prowess. And since great salespeople aren’t shy, co-workers are usually aware of that prowess.
Conversational AI has proved to be a great equalizer, both as a training medium to capture best practices and as a sales tool replacing the aging IVR (Interactive Voice Response) prospecting and selling programs with something that will not only not annoy prospects, which IVR generally does, but increases close rates by as much as 40 percent.
Let’s explore not only how conversational AI is changing insurance sales but how it is about to be replaced by human digital twins which might be even better at closing a sale.
IBM Watson Insurance Sales Test
The test I’m referring to was conducted by a large national insurance company (Humana) fielding a new health insurance offering it wanted to trial using IBM’s Watson performing as a conversational AI. Conversational AIs can present as human but generally have a great deal of information on the prospect and on the selling process, coupled with training on how to engage and close that prospect.
In the test, not only did close rates improve by 40 percent, but given the engagements were taped and reviewed, it turned out several men started to flirt with the AI thinking it was human. In this test, the AIs were provided with information about the prospects and then engaged with them on the call using methods developed from studying top salespeople who provided capable, consistent results.
The AI never got tired or short-tempered, represented the company it was working for well, and was highly accurate. This test was done well before the pandemic and conversational AIs have advanced significantly since then.
The Next Step
Recently, a new technology appeared on the horizon: human digital twins. This comes out of the metaverse concept which is the digitization of both real and imagined items into a realistic digital world that can be explored with VR. Through sensors, digital twins are connected to the real world and represent real objects in the metaverse. Human digital twins are trained by users to initially take over repetitive tasks to free up users to do things that the human digital twin can’t. Over time, these digital twins are expected to become ever more like clones of the user and, after years of training, should be able to do most of the user’s job without them.
We’ll also have created the ability to aggregate best practices captured during the training process and better train both humans and conversational computers. In turn, we’ll end up with more successful human and digital telesales reps. While this last isn’t likely before the end of the decade, it suggests that at some point, losing a top sales rep may not be the hit on the company that it now is because their human digital twin will then be able to take over for them. I expect working out how the user that created their twin will be compensated for that effort will have to be sorted out by those not wishing to lose sales income at some future point.
Wrapping Up:
Insurance sales can be more effective using conversational computers with similar capabilities to IBM Watson today. However, the emergence of digital twins from companies like Merlynn promises even more capability in the future on top of today’s benefits of freeing salespeople and others from the common, repetitive tasks their jobs entail. Initially, these efforts will supplement human salespeople so that humans can be more productive, but eventually, these AIs could also replace those humans. Assuring you are prepared for that outcome would be advised.
You have time, though, because human digital twins are in their infancy. For now, they are best at being valuable assistants focused on improving the user’s productivity. In the end, however, conversational AI is already being built to create a major telesales disruption. Just make sure you aren’t on the wrong side of it.
References:
ibm.com/watson/stories/humana
computerworld.com/article/3664048/merlynn-and-the-promise-of-human-digital-twins.html#:~:text=The%20promise%20of%20a%20digital,usually%20does%20(and%20hates)
