High insurance rates, a clunky and segmented shopping experience, lots of paperwork. These are common pain points for car insurance consumers. For a long time, many thought, "That's just the way it is." But since the advent of AI, I've seen insurance professionals around me reenergized about improving the many dated aspects of buying insurance. It made revisiting age-old challenges worthwhile.
With auto insurance, there are a lot of problems to solve for consumers, carriers, and brokers.
At Jerry, we looked at the insurance shopping experience to identify where consumers were likely to drop off. Two spots were providing proof of prior insurance and vehicle photo validation. Both steps require the shopper to bring something to the table. Even if they have proof of prior insurance on hand or they take the time to step outside and capture photos of all sides of their car, they then have to wait for approval and sometimes recapture photos later on. Speed bumps everywhere. Consumers have come to expect immediacy. This dated model doesn't fit that expectation.
We asked ourselves, how can we make document validation immediate to reduce customer dropoff? Enter AI, which enabled us to significantly decrease the need for human agent review and approval. We built an AI-powered solution that aimed to remove these two hurdles from the shopping experience.
Improving customer experience
We weren't surprised to learn that this tool had a positive impact on customer experience.
It brought a 47% reduction in customers skipping or declining to provide documents. We believe this is due to the real-time feedback the AI tool provides. It makes the experience less frustrating than when customers had to pause and revisit the shopping flow hours later. Then, they might have learned that their document was rejected and chose to move on, missing out on discount savings, just to avoid going through the same process again.
And the number of primary document uploads being rejected fell by 42%. It is important to note that this significant drop was thanks to a combination of launching the AI validator tool and simultaneously improving app design and copy for an overall better customer experience. AI can help you make improvements, but best results come when paired with improvements only humans can provide.
But would the AI validator technology be as reliable as human agents? Would it provide the same or a better customer experience?
In fact, yes. As long as we involved human agents when the case was too difficult for the AI validator tool to handle on its own. The tool was as effective and accurate as human agents. And it was much faster.
The AI validator tool cut median customer response time (the time between when a document is submitted and when it is approved) from around 47 minutes to around 1 minute, for photo and document submissions.
A win-win
For our human agents, this brought a 65% reduction in photos requiring manual review, enabling them to spend time helping other customers with more complex issues. This not only helped speed and simplify the shopping experience, it increased our ability to serve more customers too.
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At Jerry, we're in the business of simplifying car insurance shopping. When we improve our app and make that shopping experience easier for consumers, we're doing our job. And here's the kicker: we're winning too.
