I've spent considerable time recently at industry events talking with insurance contact center leaders, and one theme keeps coming up: while newer insurance companies are pushing hard toward total self-service, that approach is backfiring when customers face complex, high-stakes situations.
The reality is that customers still pick up the phone when they're dealing with something urgent, emotional, or genuinely important. Think about it—if your home floods and you’re actively dealing with water damage, you're probably not going to sit down and fill out a web form. You’re going to want to speak to someone who can listen, empathize, and help you navigate a difficult situation.
These high-urgency, high-emotion interactions are exactly why the voice channel remains so critical in insurance customer service. And the pressure is on for insurance contact centers to make these interactions as effortless as possible. Customer experience (CX) has become a critical differentiator at a time when inflation is leading to premium increases, businesses and consumers are becoming increasingly price-sensitive, and insurtech startups offering convenient omnichannel and AI-enhanced service are competing with more established players.
Customers want it to be as easy as possible to get quotes, purchase policies, file claims, and resolve issues. When you can't deliver that seamless omnichannel experience, customers will find someone who can.
Every insurance company needs self-service capabilities—that's table stakes at this point. But if you neglect the voice channel while optimizing for self-service, you risk providing your customers a negative experience during moments of high stress or vulnerability. Your agents need the right technology to handle complex calls successfully. This includes software that can analyze voice and text interactions at scale and provide insights that inform real-time agent guidance, which we refer to as intelligent guidance.
How intelligent guidance promotes better insurance customer interactions
Intelligent guidance brings together two types of contact center technology: conversation intelligence and real-time agent guidance.
Conversation intelligence software uses machine learning and advanced analytics to analyze contact center interactions at scale (after they occur) and identify key events, behaviors, and trends based on what agents and customers said.
Real-time guidance software (also sometimes called agent assist) uses AI and intent detection to help agents navigate customer interactions via dynamic checklists and workflows, coaching prompts, and information retrieval.
When integrated, conversation intelligence and real-time guidance help insurance contact centers improve call outcomes and claims processing by giving all agents access to the best practices and knowledge of top performers.
Let’s take a closer look at the value real-time guidance and conversation intelligence provide—and how they drive continuous improvement when combined.
Real-time guidance streamlines the claims and customer support experience
Insurance calls tend to be long and complex—one of our insurance clients has a 15-minute average handle time due to all the steps agents must complete. That's a significant amount of time for an agent to maintain focus, capture all necessary information, and guide the customer toward resolution. Before implementing our solutions, this insurance client found that 60-70% of their calls required follow-up conversations because agents had missed critical details during the initial interaction. Every callback not only frustrates the customer but also delays claim processing and increases operational costs.
Real-time guidance makes claims processing more efficient in several ways. First, it ensures agents capture all required information during the first call using dynamic workflows and checklists. This information can then be automatically written back to your CRM or policy administration system.
The impact is immediate: no more callback delays in claims processing. No more frustrated customers wondering why they have to repeat information they already provided. The claims process can begin immediately because agents have everything they need from day one.
Real-time guidance also helps agents find answers faster by bringing relevant information from different knowledge sources into a single interface. This not only streamlines those lengthy claims processing calls, but it also ensures prospective or renewing customers get what they need to make informed decisions about insurance products. In my experience, if you can't give renewing customers the information they need immediately, there's an increased risk they'll start reviewing other options and choose a competitor. Customer service industry research supports this: more than half of consumers say they will switch to a competitor after just one bad experience. With customer loyalty on the line in every interaction, real-time guidance becomes crucial.
Conversation intelligence uncovers your top opportunities for improvement
While real-time guidance helps agents perform better in the moment, conversation intelligence provides the strategic insights that drive long-term improvements. By analyzing every customer interaction, conversation intelligence helps you identify the root causes of long handle times, repeat contacts, and customer dissatisfaction. It can uncover the controllable factors with the biggest impact on customer experience, helping you prioritize improvement initiatives and get organizational buy-in for changes.
You can also track agent performance using custom QA scorecards and behavioral criteria, enabling you to identify what individual agents and teams are excelling at or struggling with. This helps managers tailor coaching sessions and training sprints to address specific challenges.
From a business intelligence perspective, conversation intelligence provides valuable marketing and competitive insights. You can track what your customers are saying about competitors and their pricing, giving your Marketing and Pricing teams data-driven insights to inform their strategies.
Intelligent guidance improves call outcomes
While conversation intelligence and real-time guidance are valuable on their own, they are even more impactful when combined. Here are three examples of ways we see insurance contact centers doing this successfully:
Handling price objections
You can use conversation intelligence to track common customer objections—like "Competitor X gave me a lower quote"—and identify the most successful agent responses. You can then build the most effective rebuttals into real-time coaching prompts, increasing the likelihood of a successful conversion.
You can also use conversation intelligence to identify opportunities to give agents more autonomy. For instance, if customers frequently mention that a competitor has quoted them 10% less, could you authorize your agents to offer competitive discounts in real-time rather than losing the customer to a callback process?
Supporting vulnerable customers
Identifying signs of customer vulnerability is incredibly important in the insurance industry, from both a compliance and a customer care perspective. While specific regulations vary by country, frontline agents must be able to recognize customer vulnerability and provide empathetic and understanding service. This may also include reading certain disclosures and explaining policies and procedures in plain language.
Conversation intelligence can help you identify language indicative of customer vulnerability—whether financial, medical, or otherwise—and build those into insights categories, or collections of keywords and phrases. You can then use those categories to trigger real-time alerts, helping agents navigate vulnerable customer calls successfully while staying compliant with industry regulations.
De-escalating customer frustration
You can use conversation intelligence software to identify common causes of customer frustration, effort, or anger. More importantly, you can use its sentiment analysis capabilities to track calls that started with negative emotion but ended positively—then analyze what agents did well in those successful interactions. You can use these proven approaches to inform real-time coaching prompts, so when agent assist software detects signs of customer frustration, it offers data-backed guidance and proven language to help de-escalate the call and improve the customer experience.
The business case for intelligent guidance
The insurance industry will continue to face pressure on multiple fronts—economic uncertainty, increased competition, and rising customer expectations. The organizations that thrive will be those that recognize voice interactions aren't going away and invest in the technology needed to make those interactions as effective as possible.
Intelligent guidance benefits both insurance firms and their customers by simplifying complex interactions. When you increase efficiency in claims processing, quotes, and general customer service, you reduce operational costs for the contact center. Greater efficiency also means faster resolution for customers, which improves satisfaction and retention. When customers can get their issues resolved quickly and completely on the first call, they're more likely to stay with your insurance company.
By combining conversation intelligence with real-time guidance, insurance contact centers can deliver the kind of experience that not only resolves customer issues but also builds lasting loyalty.
