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If the year 2023 had a buzzword, that buzzword was definitely AI. Artificial intelligence took off in the mainstream like never before, leaving businesses either excited to be on the cutting edge of modern technology or scrambling to keep up with the rest of the pack. The insurance industry was no exception.
Here at EverQuote, we work closely with successful insurance agencies every day. We’ve seen our clients take advantage of the many applications for artificial intelligence in insurance and reap great rewards as a result.
To help you achieve those same rewards, we interviewed Whitney Green-Olson and Megan Murphy of Melon Local—an internet marketing firm designed specifically to help insurance agencies find new clients—and picked their brains on the best ways to use AI to improve daily life for insurance agents.
If you haven’t yet tuned your strategies to take advantage of AI, let the following be your guide to getting started.
EverQuote’s digital marketing and lead generation services make sure you get the most relevant, high-quality leads for your business. Give us a shout here and we’ll help you attract your top-tier clients.
What you need to know about artificial intelligence in the insurance industry
These are some of the best AI use cases in insurance agencies, according to our experts.
Responding To Reviews
“With ChatGPT, the possibilities are endless,” Megan says. One of her top recommendations for when to bring in a tool like ChatGPT is in situations where coming up with your own response is difficult.
Let’s say for example that your agency received an online review. Whether the review was positive or negative, it can be difficult to separate out your own emotions and respond in a professional manner.
Megan explains: “You could take that review, copy and paste it in ChatGPT, and say, ‘Please answer this with an energetic, positive tone.’ The more parameters you use, the more specific it will get.”
Responding To Angry Customers
Similarly, you can use AI to help you generate a professional response when you’re confronted by an unhappy customer. Instead of firing back a curt or defensive email without thinking it through, you can use ChatGPT to carefully state your response while hitting the particular tone you’re aiming for.
Here’s an example prompt you could use:
“Please respond to this email in a professional tone. Explain to the customer that we’re sorry they’re not satisfied with the experience, and let them know we’ll be happy to speak further about the issue and try to come to a mutually agreeable conclusion.”
Proofreading Emails And Social Media Posts
Did you know that proofreading tools like Grammarly, autocorrect, and word prediction count as AI applications? These tools learn from your tone, the context of your writing, and the words you commonly use and make suggestions to help you get your point across more clearly. Eliminating typos and misspelled words is critical when your professional reputation is on the line!
If you haven’t yet made a habit of running your emails and social media posts through an automated proofreader before hitting send or publish, this is an easy change to make—especially because Gmail already has a Grammarly plugin installed and ready to go.
Marketing And Lead Generation
While this is something you may not be handling in-house, you can choose to partner with third-party lead generation services like ours at EverQuote and marketing agencies like Melon Local that use AI to carefully target your desired audience and get you leads that are the best match for your services. This means you can breeze right past the usual info requests that lead nowhere and target your most interested potential customers directly. You’ll save time and effort, which translates straight into boosting your revenue.
Explaining Policies To Clients
Most customers sign up for insurance because they need it in order to drive a car, protect their home, or keep their valuables safe. Let’s face it: Shopping for insurance is hardly a hobby or a passion for most folks, and for some it’s even a difficult chore.
It helps your customers out a lot if you come prepared with simple explanations of your policies—AI can produce descriptions that are geared to an eighth-grade reading level. This takes some of the complexity out of explaining your policies to customers who are unfamiliar with buying insurance and gives people a level of comfort when they make their final decision.
What can’t AI do for your insurance agency?
At the end of the day, AI is just a tool. It can’t replicate or replace human experience and expertise, emotions, or personal connections.
“I would never want to fully automate [customer service],” Megan emphasizes, because “you do still want that personal touch.”
Though it might be tempting to use AI-generated emails or chatbots to handle all of your lower-priority customer interactions, letting yourself fall too far out of reach can turn away customers. Most people want to know they can always ask a question or have a conversation with their insurance agent—just ask anyone who has ever gotten stuck in endless automated phone menus.
How can you compete with agencies that are already immersed in AI?
Let’s say you run a home-grown agency and you feel like you’re not yet on par with the modern, digital insurance agencies that advertise AI solutions to help find customers lower rates, optimize policies, and solve numerous other problems.
The good news is that the tools that make the biggest difference in your results are typically easy to set up and begin using. Simple things like installing Grammarly plugins to proofread your emails or asking Chat GPT to tailor your policy descriptions to an eighth-grade reading level to make them easier for your customers to understand can go a long way toward boosting your image of professionalism and your customer relations.
If you’ve already taken care of those basics, you might be farther along in the process of adopting AI than you think. That’s because most of the time, those glossy, modernized agencies are using almost the same business practices you are; they just market their services differently. They put out ad campaigns highlighting the technology they use in an effort to draw in customers who value the high-tech approach.
“Just because [an agency] is saying they use AI does not mean they have this crazy hat trick and they can get better results. It’s just the way they’re explaining how they do their processes,” Whitney explains. So if a customer calls and says they’re switching to another agency that promises to get them better rates using AI, know that the competing agency is probably using the exact same tools you have access to. That agency is simply marketing their services in a different way.
Find customers who appreciate the way you do business with EverQuote.
Maybe you’ve been using emerging AI tools for over a decade and your agency is more tech-savvy than you realized. Or perhaps you’re closer to the “etched stone tablets” phase than you are to cutting-edge AI, and you plan to keep it that way because your small town thrives on personal connections with local business owners rather than fancy tech trends.
No matter your situation, you can boost your business and find the right customers for your agency by partnering with EverQuote. We’re the industry-leading provider of warm insurance leads and calls - delivered straight to your phone or inbox just seconds after the customer requests information.
Contact EverQuote to start finding new customers right away!
