Large Language Models (LLMs) are advanced AI systems trained on vast amounts of text to understand and generate human-like language. While their conversational capabilities, exemplified by tools like ChatGPT, have gained significant attention, their utility extends far beyond chat interactions, offering solutions to complex challenges across various industries. For health insurance providers, LLMs can enhance SMS opt-out processes, ensure compliance, and improve member communication.

The Challenge of SMS Opt-Outs in Healthcare

Imagine a policyholder named Sarah who has been receiving SMS notifications from her health insurance provider about plan updates, preventative care tips, and reminders for important policy deadlines. Now that she has settled into her coverage, Sarah decides she no longer wants to receive these reminders and replies with, "Please stop these messages." Unfortunately, traditional systems often miss such nuanced requests. Health insurance providers frequently use SMS to communicate with members, sending reminders for coverage deadlines, wellness programs, and other essential updates. While many members appreciate these messages, some prefer to opt out.

Typically, replying with "STOP" unsubscribes the recipient. However, members often use varied phrases like "Please stop," "Stop sending me these," or other expressions. Traditional automated systems, programmed to recognize only specific keywords, may fail to process these requests accurately, leading to continued messaging against the member's wishes. This can result in frustration for the member and potentially damage trust in the insurance provider, impacting satisfaction and loyalty.

Non-compliance with opt-out requests isn't just inconvenient; it carries legal consequences. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) mandates that organizations must honor opt-out requests promptly. Failure to comply can result in penalties of up to $1,500 per violation, underscoring the importance of adhering to these regulations. Maintaining compliance is crucial for avoiding fines and protecting the organization’s reputation.

Leveraging LLMs for Enhanced Opt-Out Detection

At Ushur, we address this challenge by employing LLMs to interpret the intent behind various opt-out phrases. Unlike rigid keyword-based systems, LLMs understand context and semantics, enabling them to recognize opt-out requests regardless of phrasing. Whether a member texts "Stop," "Please, stop this," or "Get me off this list," the LLM discerns the intent to unsubscribe and processes the request accordingly.

Ushur's pre-built LLM models are designed for seamless integration, requiring no extensive retraining or specialized adjustments. This adaptability allows healthcare insurance providers to maintain compliance with regulations like the TCPA while delivering a user-friendly experience for members.

Balancing Automation with Human Oversight

While LLMs significantly improve the accuracy of opt-out detection, they are not infallible. To mitigate potential errors, implementing a confirmation step is prudent. For example, a follow-up message like “We received your request to unsubscribe. Reply YES to confirm or NO if this was a mistake” can ensure clarity without causing frustration for the member. This approach balances automation with necessary human oversight, maintaining trust and compliance.

Broader Implications Across Industries

While this discussion focuses on health insurance, the application of LLMs in managing opt-out requests is relevant across various sectors, including finance and telecommunications. For instance, in the financial industry, customers who no longer want promotional messages about credit cards could use diverse phrases to express their opt-out requests. Any industry that relies on SMS communication can benefit from LLMs to ensure compliance, reduce legal risks, enhance customer satisfaction, increase efficiency, and reduce operational costs.

Conclusion

LLMs offer transformative potential beyond conversational AI. In health insurance, they play a crucial role in refining SMS opt-out processes, ensuring compliance with regulations, and fostering positive member relationships. Ushur's generative AI solutions are built to ensure member satisfaction and compliance seamlessly—allowing healthcare companies to focus on care while automation handles communication challenges intelligently.This versatility is at the core of Customer Experience Automation (CXA). By harnessing the capabilities of generative AI, CXA not only streamlines communication but also ensures that every interaction, whether a simple opt-out or a complex member request, is handled intelligently and empathetically. By understanding and processing diverse opt-out requests, LLMs help organizations mitigate risks and deliver a better experience for their audiences, exemplifying the versatility and impact of generative AI in solving real-world challenges.

The healthcare industry is witnessing rapid advancements in technology, with growing interest in innovations like large language models (LLMs), hyperautomation, and personalized health. But what do these buzzworthy technologies actually mean for healthcare companies? How can they be applied, and what should be considered for successful implementation? These are challenging questions, but a new report from Gartner, titled "Hype Cycle for US Healthcare Payers," offers some insightful answers.

Gartner's Hype Cycle framework is a well-known tool that helps break down emerging technologies based on their maturity and impact. It guides decision-makers through the journey from early innovation to technologies that are already proven and ready for widespread use. This particular report highlights the key technologies that are most relevant to US healthcare payer organizations.

Ushur, a leader in healthcare technology, is proud to be featured in two critical areas of this report: large language models (LLMs) and hyperautomation for healthcare payers. Both of these technologies are recognized as transformational with high-impact potential, and both are areas where Ushur is making significant contributions.

Understanding LLMs and Hyperautomation

Large language models (LLMs) are AI systems behind popular tools like ChatGPT. These models excel in understanding human language, generating text, summarizing information, and intelligently routing it to the appropriate channels. LLMs provide natural language processing capabilities that allow healthcare payers to improve customer engagement, offer personalized responses, and ultimately deliver better service.

Hyperautomation, on the other hand, is the orchestration of multiple technologies, tools, and platforms to automate business and IT processes as much as possible. It often incorporates AI technologies, including LLMs, to streamline workflows and make systems smarter and more adaptable. By integrating LLMs, hyperautomation becomes even more powerful, enabling automated processes to interact effectively with human users and perform complex tasks autonomously.

For example, LLMs can interpret customer service inquiries, classify them, and even generate responses, while hyperautomation handles the necessary backend processes to resolve these issues. This could involve anything from claims processing to prior authorizations or data updates. The combination of LLMs and hyperautomation reduces manual workloads, improves accuracy, and creates more seamless experiences for healthcare members and staff alike.

Ushur's Role in Healthcare Technology

Ushur is prominently highlighted as a vendor in both hyperautomation and LLMs, which speaks to the value we bring to healthcare payers. But our impact goes beyond these two areas—we are also working with customers on other key technologies identified in Gartner's Hype Cycle, such as:

• Personalized Health
• Health Navigation
• Provider and Partner Network Management
• Social Determinants of Health Resource Management
• Population Health Management

These technologies span the entire Hype Cycle curve, from cutting-edge innovations to more mature solutions. Whether a healthcare organization needs something that is still on the horizon or a technology that is already widely adopted, Ushur can help bring these solutions to life.

Access the Report: Gartner's Hype Cycle for U.S. Healthcare Payers

If you're interested in exploring the full potential of these technologies for your organization, the Gartner report is available for free. It offers a detailed overview of the healthcare technology landscape, helping you assess what solutions are the right fit for your needs. Whether your focus is on enhancing customer experience, streamlining operations, or reducing costs, Ushur has the expertise to support your journey.Access the report, and let’s continue the conversation about the future of healthcare technology. With the right tools and a strategic approach, we can make a real difference in how healthcare is delivered and experienced.

In the ever-evolving landscape of healthcare technology, a new player has emerged that promises to revolutionize the way healthcare payers operate: Large Language Models (LLMs). As highlighted in Gartner's latest Hype Cycle report for healthcare payers, LLMs are poised to become indispensable tools, driving better margins and enhancing patient experiences across the board.

The Rise of LLMs in Healthcare

LLMs, a subset of artificial intelligence focusing on natural language processing and generation, are rapidly gaining traction in the healthcare sector. Their versatility and power make them ideal for tackling many of the complex, data-intensive challenges faced by healthcare payers.

Gartner's report positions LLMs as an emerging technology with transformational potential, estimating full maturity and widespread adoption within the next 2-5 years. This timeline suggests that we're on the cusp of a significant shift in how healthcare payers operate.

Key Applications and Use Cases

The adoption of LLMs in healthcare is already underway, with several key applications emerging:

1. Content Generation and Summarization: LLMs excel at processing vast amounts of medical data, creating coherent summaries, and generating relevant content. This capability streamlines documentation processes and improves information accessibility.
2. Information Discovery: By sifting through extensive databases and unstructured data, LLMs can quickly surface relevant information, enhancing decision-making processes for healthcare professionals and administrators alike.
3. Member Engagement: AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants, driven by LLMs, are revolutionizing how payers interact with members. These tools provide more intuitive, personalized experiences for patients navigating complex healthcare systems.
4. Internal Team Empowerment: LLMs are proving invaluable in supporting healthcare staff, from assisting with prior authorizations to streamlining the plan enrollment process.

Specific use cases highlighted in the Gartner report include:

• Prior authorization assistance
• Streamlining plan enrollment
• Provider contract assessment
• Managing group RFP responses
• Claims documentation processing
• Legacy system code generation

Drivers of LLM Adoption

Three primary factors are accelerating the adoption of LLMs by healthcare payers:

1. Pressure to Improve Profit Margins: In an industry grappling with rising costs, LLMs offer a path to increased efficiency and cost reduction.
2. Need for Enhanced Workforce Efficiency: LLMs can automate routine tasks, allowing healthcare professionals to focus on more complex, high-value activities.
3. Proven Productivity Boost: Early adopters are already reporting significant productivity gains, creating a compelling case for wider implementation.

Challenges and Considerations

Despite the immense potential, the path to full-scale LLM adoption in healthcare is not without obstacles. Gartner identifies several key challenges:

• Privacy and Security Risks: The sensitive nature of healthcare data demands robust safeguards against potential breaches or misuse of information by AI systems.
• Output Accuracy Concerns: While LLMs are powerful, they can sometimes produce inaccurate or "hallucinated" information. In healthcare, where precision is paramount, this poses a significant risk.
• Explainability of Decision-Making: The "black box" nature of some LLM systems raises concerns about transparency and accountability in decision-making processes.
• Regulatory Uncertainty: The rapidly evolving regulatory landscape surrounding AI and data privacy adds an element of uncertainty to LLM implementation strategies.

Looking Ahead

As we stand on the brink of this technological revolution in healthcare, it's clear that LLMs will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of the industry. While challenges remain, the potential benefits in terms of improved efficiency, enhanced patient experiences, and better overall healthcare outcomes are too significant to ignore.

Healthcare payers who embrace this technology early and thoughtfully will likely find themselves at a competitive advantage, better equipped to navigate the complex healthcare landscape of the future. As we move forward, continued research, careful implementation, and ongoing dialogue between technologists, healthcare professionals, and policymakers will be crucial in realizing the full potential of LLMs in healthcare.

The LLM revolution in healthcare isn't just coming – it's already here. The question now is not if, but how quickly and effectively healthcare payers will adapt to this transformative technology.

The global generative AI (GenAI) market is surging, with major players like Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic driving rapid innovation in large language models (LLMs). Open-source LLM builders such as Meta (with Llama) and Mistral are democratizing access to this technology, making it more attainable for smaller companies and researchers.

This growth isn’t just hype. The capabilities of LLMs—whether used to generate content, automate tasks, or enhance customer experiences—are real and transformative. But the question remains:

Will your company be able to benefit from these advancements?

The Enterprise Adoption Gap

While the potential of GenAI is undeniable, actual enterprise adoption is lagging. A 2023 survey revealed that only 33% of organizations are using generative AI¹. This gap in adoption stems not from a lack of interest but from significant challenges.

• Technical Complexity: Setting up LLM-supporting services is especially difficult for companies that aren’t tech-first or digitally native. Deploying LLMs successfully requires specialized teams, including LLMOps engineers, prompt engineers, data scientists, and legal compliance experts. For many organizations, these technical and infrastructure demands create a daunting barrier to entry.
• Data Quality and Skills Gaps: LLMs thrive on high-quality, domain-specific data, but many enterprises struggle to gather and organize the data they need. Moreover, acquiring the right AI and machine learning talent is a significant hurdle.
• AI Safety and Bias: Concerns around AI safety, bias, and the risk of AI “hallucinations” (incorrect outputs) also slow enterprise adoption. Even when companies manage to integrate LLMs, ensuring they operate within ethical and responsible frameworks remains a complex challenge.

Strategic Implementation is Key

The good news is that these challenges aren’t insurmountable. Companies that succeed in adopting LLMs do so by focusing on strategic, thoughtful implementation rather than chasing the hype.

• Aligning LLMs with Business Objectives: For LLM integration to succeed, businesses need a clear use case. The power of LLMs lies not in the technology itself but in how well it aligns with workflows and delivers measurable business outcomes. Companies that take the time to figure out how LLMs can enhance their specific operations—whether by improving customer service, boosting operational efficiency, or automating routine tasks—will see the most benefit.
• Partnering with LLM-Powered Service Providers: A highly recommended approach is to partner with LLM-powered service providers, particularly in non-core business functions such as customer service, operations, finance and accounting, and customer experience. These partners offer specialized solutions tailored to streamline these functions, allowing your internal teams to focus on core activities. Whether it’s automating customer interactions, optimizing back-office operations, or enhancing customer experiences, partnering with these providers can deliver immediate ROI with minimal disruption to workflows. This approach also accelerates GenAI adoption, helps you learn about the technology faster, and frees up resources to focus on GenAI solutions unique to your core business.
• AI Governance and Ethical Considerations: Establishing a solid AI governance framework is essential. It ensures responsible use of AI technologies while mitigating risks related to bias, safety, and compliance.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: To unlock the full potential of LLMs, collaboration between IT, data science teams, and business units is crucial. Cross-functional teams can better identify the right data sources, build useful models, and ensure that LLMs drive value where it matters most.

Preparing for Future LLM Advancements

As LLMs continue to evolve, the gap between early adopters and laggards will widen. To stay ahead, companies must prepare for the next wave of technological advancements:

• Next-Generation Models: GPT-5 is expected to revolutionize reasoning and task performance, offering unprecedented advancements in natural language processing. These models are anticipated to feature longer context windows, enabling them to retain and process more information over extended interactions, which is crucial for complex, multi-step tasks. Additionally, they will possess deeper domain knowledge, making them more capable of understanding industry-specific nuances. With better reasoning capabilities, GPT-5 and similar models will significantly enhance decision-making processes, leading to more accurate and reliable outcomes.
• Multimodal Models: Future LLMs will process text, images, and audio simultaneously, unlocking new business applications—from enhanced customer experiences to innovative product development. These multimodal models will allow for richer interactions and more comprehensive data analysis, enabling businesses to leverage a wider range of inputs for tasks like content creation, customer support, and product design.
• Agentic Capabilities: Next-generation LLMs are expected to incorporate agentic capabilities, allowing them to act more autonomously within workflows. This means that LLMs will not only respond to prompts but also proactively execute entire processes and workflows based on predefined goals. These models will autonomously plan, execute, and adapt actions in real time, without requiring constant human input, significantly reducing operational overhead. For example, they could manage complex decision-making tasks such as optimizing resource allocation, performing advanced data analysis, or overseeing logistics and supply chain processes, streamlining operations and enhancing business efficiency.

Cost Reduction and Accessibility

In addition to technological advancements, costs are dropping rapidly, making it easier for companies to adopt LLMs. Cloud providers are reducing prices, with some models now available at up to 80% lower costs than a year ago. Additionally, more efficient, smaller LLMs are becoming available, allowing businesses to deploy these technologies without requiring massive computational power.

Open-source models and fine-tuning techniques also enable companies to customize LLMs at a fraction of the cost of building models from scratch. While these cost savings are significant, companies still need the right strategy to extract meaningful value from LLM integration.

Will Your Company Benefit?

The rise of GenAI and LLMs offers tremendous opportunities for businesses ready to harness their potential. However, only those who strategically invest in overcoming technical hurdles and aligning AI initiatives with business objectives will truly benefit.

The real question you need to ask is: Is your business prepared to capitalize on the coming wave of LLM advancements? As costs drop and capabilities increase, those who are ready will see gains in efficiency, productivity, and profitability. Those who aren’t may find themselves left behind.

Now is the time to act. To discover how you can work with Ushur to implement generative AI capabilities into your business for better customer experience, contact us at https://ushur.com/request-demo.

Citations:

1. https://aiindex.stanford.edu/report/

More effective short-term disability (STD) communications and engagement presents a complex challenge for carriers and benefits administrators. The process is fraught with inefficiencies, primarily due to reliance on manual processes such as live calls and outdated methods for the completion of forms and capture of supporting documentation. These outdated methods not only consume significant time and resources but also create frustrating experiences for both employees and employers. In a landscape where client satisfaction and retention are paramount, carriers are increasingly seeking solutions that streamline these cumbersome processes. Enter proven, domain-specific AI and automation — technologies that promise to reduce administrative burdens, lower costs, and enhance the overall experience for all constituents. This blog post explores how AI can transform absence engagement from a complex, resource-intensive process into a streamlined, efficient system that benefits everyone involved — from initiation of claim through return-to-work.

Understanding the Pain Points

Manual Processes and Their Limitations

The traditional approach to communications for STD claims relies heavily on manual processes — everything from filling out forms to gathering supporting documentation to making phone calls to chase down needed information. For instance, according to EY’s 2023 research, performing a single manual entry without self-service technology costs an estimated $4.78 per transaction. These costs accumulate quickly, particularly when you consider the multiple steps involved in the absence process, such as producing forms, double-checking data accuracy, and transferring information into HR systems. Furthermore, we have seen high outbound call volumes exacerbate the problem, with some carriers making as many as six calls per claim to track down necessary information that’s not in good order (NIGO). Further, according to Simply Insurance, approximately 40% of short-term disability applications are denied, often because the application was not in good order (NIGO).

The Impact on Employee Experience

These inefficiencies not only strain carrier resources but also degrade the absence experience for employees already facing uncertainty due to needing to file for a leave of absence. Long wait times for claim intake decisions, repetitive information requests, and lack of transparency cause frustration, leading to lower satisfaction and increased chances of customer churn. In today’s competitive market, where customer experience is a key differentiator, the need for a more efficient, customer-centric approach has never been greater.

How AI and Automation Transform the Absence Experience

Reducing Call Volumes and Operational Costs

By automating routine tasks such as data entry and information gathering, AI reduces the need for time-consuming manual follow-ups. This not only speeds up the absence process end-to-end but also enhances transparency, allowing claimants to easily track their claim status and receive proactive updates, and share important details such as their return-to-work date. The result is a more efficient absence journey  that reduces friction and improves the overall experience for all parties involved.

One of the most significant benefits of adopting AI is the dramatic reduction in call volumes. Carriers traditionally rely on outbound calls to gather information, answer frequently asked questions, and update claimants on their status. However, with AI-powered conversational tools and HIPAA-secure workflow experiences, much of this communication can be automated — and we have seen this in action with the Ushur CXA Platform enabling client organizations to reduce their outbound calls by 42%. AI can handle repetitive queries, provide instant responses, and even gather critical information from claimants without the need for live agents. This not only lowers operational costs but also frees up staff to focus on more complex cases, ultimately improving efficiency and policyholder satisfaction.

Enhancing Policyholder Support and Satisfaction

AI’s impact on the claims journey goes beyond just reducing call volumes. It also plays a crucial role in enhancing customer satisfaction. A smoother, more transparent process directly contributes to a better customer experience. By offering self-service options like simple document e-signatures and automated updates, carriers empower claimants to manage their claims with minimal hassle, significantly improving their experience. The solution also supports automation of case and care management outreach, to support employees in their recovery, and get them back to work as timely as possible.

Cost Efficiency and Scalability

In addition to improving satisfaction, AI offers substantial cost benefits and scalability. For large carriers managing high volumes of claims, the ability to scale support efforts quickly and efficiently is crucial. AI allows carriers to engage with policyholders and claimants instantaneously through automated systems, rather than relying on manual calls and paperwork. In fact, we’ve seen this in action with our own customers, some of which were able to scale their operations in just weeks, reducing costs and speeding up the entire claims process. Faster resolutions not only enhance customer satisfaction but also lead to better outcomes for the carriers themselves.

The Ushur CXA Platform in action for Absence Engagement

Many of our customers have faced significant challenges with manual processes in Absence Engagement, particularly in collecting crucial claimant information. These outdated methods often led to high operational costs, delays, and frustration among both customers and staff. For example, some claims required multiple phone call attempts over several weeks, significantly slowing down the process.

The Ushur Absence Management Automation solution has been transformative in addressing these issues. By seamlessly integrating with backend systems, Ushur automates the collection of essential data and documentation such as return-to-work dates and medical treatment information, through automated SMS interactions. This solution streamlines the entire process, enabling employees to confirm necessary details effortlessly and reducing the burden on live agents to chase that information down.

The results have been remarkable across our client base. Real-time analytics reveal engagement rates as high as 85%, with half of the claimants responding within just five minutes and 90% within an hour. This rapid engagement not only slashes call volumes but also reduces claim processing time from weeks to under an hour. Customers utilizing Ushur’s platform have also achieved substantial cost savings and operational efficiency, automating tens of thousands of messages monthly and engaging with large claimant bases in a scalable, efficient manner.

From Complexity to Efficiency

AI and automation are not just technological advancements — they are essential tools for carriers and brokers looking to streamline absence management and differentiate themselves in a competitive marketplace. By automating routine tasks, reducing call volumes, and enhancing the customer experience, Ushur’s AI-powered solutions turn a complex, time-consuming process into an efficient, transparent journey. As the insurance landscape continues to evolve, those who embrace AI will find themselves better positioned to meet the demands of today’s policyholders while reducing operational costs and improving overall outcomes. To learn more about how Ushur supports Absence Engagement, discover our solution at https://ushur.com/solutions/use-cases/absence-management/.

In the world of clinical trials, where breakthroughs and setbacks often hinge on human engagement, a startling trend looms large: trials struggle to attract, then retain enough patients, with dropout rates soaring in some cases. The culprit? Often, it's the very foundation of the clinical trial experience — communication. But a transformation is underway.

Clinical trials are embracing a compassionate revolution, powered by generative AI and automation. These technologies are reshaping the traditionally complex and impersonal trial journey into something more human and supportive — a goal across nearly all healthcare automation initiatives. Join us as we explore how AI-powered automation can deliver a more effective and efficient way for Biopharmaceutical and Life Sciences companies to communicate with prospective and current clinical trial participants for pre-screening, onboarding, and ongoing monitoring.

The Communication Challenge in Clinical Trials

Let's face it: communication in clinical trials has been a bit of a stumbling block. It's not for lack of trying, but rather the limitations of traditional methods.

Traditional Communication Methods and Their Limitations

Picture this: you're a clinical trial participant, eagerly awaiting updates on your progress or answers to your burning questions. But instead of instant responses, you're left waiting for phone calls or in-person visits. It's no wonder that "poor doctor-patient relationships and insufficient communication about the study protocol and expectations were associated with higher dropout rates," a study of severely affected oncological patients found, reported by BioMedCentral. The delayed responses, coupled with inconsistent messaging across trial stages, can leave participants feeling lost in a sea of medical jargon and uncertainty. For Biopharmaceutical and Life Sciences companies, these communication gaps translate to increased costs, delayed trials, and potential loss of valuable data.

Impact on Participants and Clinical Trial Outcomes

This communication gap doesn't just lead to frustrated participants; it can have serious ripple effects on the entire trial. Missed appointments, poor adherence to trial protocols, and increased dropout rates are just the tip of the iceberg. These issues not only affect the individuals involved but can also delay data collection and reporting, potentially setting back crucial medical advancements. For companies, this means extended trial durations, increased costs, and potentially compromised study results.

Enter AI and Automation: Transforming Pre-Trial Communication

But here's where the story takes an exciting turn. Enter AI and automation — the dynamic duo revolutionizing how we approach clinical trial communication.

Streamlined Recruitment and Pre-Screening

Gone are the days of lengthy, confusing recruitment and enrollment processes. AI-driven systems now offer automated eligibility screening and pre-qualification, trial enrollment and then onboarding, making the process of joining a trial smoother than ever.

The impact? Implementing these AI-driven communication systems has led to a 34% reduction in time spent on patient recruitment. Now, participants can submit information and documents at their convenience, without the hassle of travel or scheduling conflicts. This not only makes life easier for participants but also frees up valuable staff time previously spent on phone tag and coordination. And here's the cherry on top: by automating information intake into back-end systems, we're saying goodbye to mountains of paperwork and those pesky data-entry errors. It's a win-win that's making clinical trials more accessible and accurate than ever before.

Core Benefits in Automated Pre-Trial Communication

Imagine having a knowledgeable assistant available 24/7 to answer questions and provide support. That's what AI-powered chat agents bring to the table. They're not just efficient; they're potential game-changers. Automated chat agents used in clinical trials have the potential to increase prospective patient outreach and answer common questions they may have at scale. Automated workflows powered by AI Agents can deploy dynamic knock-out questionnaires across familiar channels, automatically upload data to backend systems to qualify candidates, and even schedule pre-screening meetings with clinical staff.

These AI systems don't just regurgitate information; they deliver consistent and accurate details tailored to each participant's profile. They handle routine inquiries with ease, freeing up human staff to focus on more complex issues and more nuanced questions. The results speak for themselves: AI-powered systems have shown to reduce patient screening time by 34% compared to manual methods, while improving patient enrollment by 11.1%, according to this study. For Biopharmaceutical and Life Sciences companies, this means faster recruitment, reduced staff workload, and more consistent information delivery.

Enhancing Participant Onboarding Experiences Through AI-Driven Communication

Now, let's dive into how AI is transforming the onboarding process, often one of the most crucial and challenging phases of a clinical trial.

Welcome participants with education and logistics details

With automation, participants can be onboarded with welcome messaging, education and logistics that sets the tone for a guided experience, while streamlining efforts for clinical staff. From educational materials to timely reminders, patients are equipped with the knowledge and tools to navigate their clinical trial journey with confidence. Interactive digital consent processes ensure that participants fully understand what they're signing up for, with AI-powered Q&A systems ready to address any concerns. 

Personalized Trial Journey Communication

Every participant's journey is unique, and AI recognizes this. From tailored messaging based on trial phase and individual preferences to automated appointment reminders and scheduling assistance, AI ensures that each participant feels seen and supported. Personalized check-ins and progress updates keep participants engaged and informed every step of the way. This personalized approach not only improves participant retention but also enhances data quality, providing companies with more reliable and comprehensive trial results.

Intelligent Support Throughout the Trial

AI chatbots stand ready to provide instant responses to common queries, but they're smart enough to know when human intervention is needed. Complex issues are automatically escalated to human staff, ensuring that participants always receive the level of support they need. Moreover, these systems can proactively communicate based on participant behavior patterns, anticipating needs before they even arise. For companies, this means more efficient use of human resources and potentially earlier identification of issues that could impact trial outcomes.

Streamlining Ongoing Monitoring of Trial Participants

Ongoing monitoring of trial participants  is crucial for gathering long-term data and ensuring participant well-being. AI and automation are improving this process, transforming it into a seamless, patient-friendly experience. With AI-powered solutions, participants can now easily provide vital information about adverse events, issues and overall health via SMS messages and secure, HIPAA-compliant interfaces. These systems offer tailored surveys that adapt based on previous responses, ensuring the most relevant data is collected for each participant.

The beauty of these AI-powered solutions lies in their ability to balance convenience with comprehensive care. They can flag concerning symptoms for immediate human review, integrate data seamlessly with back-end systems, and maintain long-term participant engagement through user-friendly interactions. Moreover, these systems are highly customizable, allowing research teams to align the clinical trial patient monitoring process with specific trial needs and organizational branding. By making the process more efficient for research teams and more convenient for participants, AI and automation are not just streamlining data collection — they're enhancing the overall trial experience and potentially leading to more comprehensive clinical trial patient insights, ultimately driving medical progress forward with more robust long-term data, improved pharmacovigilance, and potentially stronger evidence for regulatory submissions and market positioning.

Conclusion

As we've seen, AI and automation are not just revolutionizing clinical trial communication — they're humanizing it. By providing consistent, personalized, and timely support, these technologies are improving participant experiences and trial outcomes in ways we could only dream of a few years ago. For Biopharmaceutical and Life Sciences companies, the benefits are clear: faster trial completion, reduced costs, improved data quality, and potentially faster time-to-market for new treatments.

At Ushur, we're proud to be at the forefront of this revolution with our UshurX for Clinical Trials pre-built solution pack. This innovative solution addresses the challenges we've discussed, offering a seamless, participant-centric approach to clinical trial communication while delivering tangible benefits to the companies conducting these crucial studies.

Ready to transform your clinical trial communication and provide an unparalleled experience for your participants while optimizing your trial operations? Discover how AI can revolutionize your approach: Explore the UshurX for Clinical Trials pre-built solution pack today.

Introduction

Chronic conditions and co-morbidities like diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and cancer are among the most prevalent and costly health conditions, particularly when poorly managed. These conditions are often associated with ongoing medical attention, frequent hospitalizations, and extensive treatment, leading to significant healthcare expenditures — particularly when members don’t receive needed care, medications and additional support to help them manage these complex conditions. In fact, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 90% of the nation's $4.5 trillion in annual healthcare expenditures are for people with chronic and mental health conditions.

Members with chronic conditions are especially vulnerable to high rates of preventable hospital and emergency room utilization. These individuals often struggle to navigate the complex healthcare system, adhere to treatment plans, and manage their conditions effectively. As a result, they are more likely to experience complications, adverse events, and poor health outcomes, which translate into higher costs for health payers.

Given these challenges, health payers, and the healthcare companies that support them, have a strong financial incentive to implement effective care navigation solutions for chronic conditions to improve outcomes and reduce costs for these high-risk, high-cost members. Care navigation involves a range of strategies to help members and their support systems navigate the healthcare system throughout the year, access appropriate care and services — including care managers and providers of all types — and manage their conditions more effectively. By investing in data-driven, personalized HIPAA-secure care coordination programs powered by digital technologies, healthcare companies can significantly improve outcomes and quality of life for members with costly chronic conditions while also bending the healthcare cost curve and gaining a competitive advantage in the market.

The Digital Care Navigation Opportunity

Well-designed care navigation programs create strong ROI for payers by reducing hospital admissions, readmissions, and ER visits for members with chronic conditions. For example, a top 5 health insurer’s care engagement and coordination program uses predictive analytics to identify high-risk members and provide personalized care plans, while another's program focuses on coordinating care for those with chronic conditions through in-home care, transportation, and medication management.

In addition to financial benefits, effective care engagement enhances member experience and satisfaction by providing personalized support. However, typical programs guiding members to third party applications and portals often suffer from low engagement, limiting their impact. Healthcare needs new approaches to identify and engage high-risk members, such as leveraging data analytics and AI to stratify risk and target interventions — and offering interactive digital education, support and guidance to support members until they take needed critical actions.

Digital care management solutions, like remote monitoring and virtual care, can extend the reach and impact of care engagement by enabling ongoing support between traditional visits. Personalized engagements with omnichannel outreach through frictionless application-like experience  strategies can drive higher engagement rates by meeting members where they are. By connecting fragmented care teams and data across the healthcare ecosystem, single, integrated digital solutions facilitate more coordinated, efficient care delivery.

As payers face the growing chronic condition burden, investing in data-driven, digitally-enabled, frictionless healthcare navigation support will be a key strategic priority to improve outcomes and reduce costs. Check out this video featuring an example of welcoming new members to their diabetes care program and refilling their medication.

Key Elements of Successful Payer Healthcare Navigation Models

To effectively address the challenges posed by chronic conditions and rising healthcare costs, payers must adopt HIPAA-secure care navigation and communication models that incorporate several key elements:

1. Leverage Advanced Analytics

Stratify members by risk level and likelihood to benefit from interventions, using surveys such as digital Health Risk Assessments (HRAs) to capture valuable behavioral data on members' health conditions, health history, and needs and behaviors.

2. Employ Omnichannel Outreach

Tailor messaging to a member's status and channels of choice to drive higher engagement rates. This might include using a combination of phone calls, live and AI-powered chat, text messages, emails, carrier home pages, QR codes, and mobile app notifications personalized to each member's communication preferences and needs.

3. Address Social Determinants of Health

Recognize and address the significant impact of Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) at the members' moment of need in wellness, prevention, and chronic condition management through community partnerships that connect members with resources for housing, transportation, food security, and other social needs. Understanding member status across these factors is critical to providing needed support in innovative ways, or the knowledge gap becomes a barrier, blocking healthcare delivery and negatively affecting health (medical and behavioral) outcomes.

4. Provide Personalized Care Coordination 

Assist members with scheduling specialists and sourcing resources outside of their plan. Offer high-touch, personalized support from care managers who build trust and guide members to appropriate resources, serving as a single point of contact for members and helping them navigate the complex healthcare system. According to Forbes, 66% [of consumers] expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations across channels. 

5. Educate and Remind Members 

Proactively guide members to relevant and engaging educational material to deepen knowledge of chronic conditions and the importance of adhering to treatment plans, attending appointments with specialists and managing their conditions effectively.  Deliver resources throughout critical care journey touchpoints, and look to partners that enable rich media, customizable CTAs and accessible language to improve health literacy. 

6. Streamline Processes with Digital Solutions

Chronic conditions pose a costly challenge for health plans, requiring live outreach from care management teams as well as manual processes, outdated systems and strict regulations, making it even more difficult to achieve operational efficiency. Implementing digital solutions that connect the member, care team and health providers can facilitate easy access to care plans and other resources via secure messaging and information sharing. Solutions like Ushur’s, frictionless, responsive Customer Experience Automation^TM (CXA) platform enables health plans to proactively guide members to educational material, appointment setting, health needs assessments, care coordination, and data collection through convenient and preferred digital channels to vastly improve member engagement and lead to better health outcomes.

7. Identify Experience Issues to Prioritize Continuous Quality Improvement

Focus on continuous quality improvement and member feedback through proactive and periodic digital Net Promoter Score (NPS) and member experience survey outreach, assessing member perception of their care navigation and care delivery experience to identify areas for improvement.

By incorporating these key elements, payers can design and implement healthcare coordination models that effectively engage members, improve outcomes, and reduce costs for those with chronic conditions. As the healthcare landscape continues to evolve, investing in data-driven, digitally-enabled, and member-centric care coordination will be essential for payers to remain competitive and deliver value to all stakeholders.

Conclusion

As chronic condition prevalence and costs soar, healthcare companies must abandon fragmented traditional communication and care models and invest in data-driven, personalized care navigation programs to generate ROI and improve member quality of life. The most successful models will integrate advanced analytics, omnichannel engagement, and effective care coordination to deliver proactive, holistic member support. By leveraging digital tools to connect data and care teams, payers can address both medical and non-medical needs. Payers and other healthcare companies that master care navigation for high-risk members will gain a competitive edge in bending the cost curve while enhancing outcomes and member experience in the evolving healthcare landscape.

Ushur's healthcare automation solutions empower payers to deliver personalized, proactive care navigation at scale. By providing AI-powered digital experiences, omnichannel engagement, and seamless integration with existing systems, Ushur enables payers to identify and engage high-risk members and improve health outcomes while reducing costs. With a track record of delivering measurable results for leading health plans, Ushur has specially designed solutions for Care Navigation for Chronic Conditions.

The EU AI Act entered into force last week on August 1st, 2024 and it marks a substantial milestone of governmental bodies trying to maintain the safety of their citizens and businesses when both the private and public sector use artificial intelligence. This post details the scope and consequences of the act, especially for the regulated businesses for which Ushur provides automation applications. Ushur has an international presence and so has been considering its consequences and thinking of how best our customers can automate their CX in this context — where automation is more often driven by AI than not.

What is the AI Act and who does it apply to?

The EU AI Act (AI Act) deploys a risk-based approach in which it categorizes the use case in the application of AI into one of four groups: unacceptable risk, high risk, limited risk, and minimal risk.  

The application of technology systems like social scoring, and behavioral manipulation towards dangerous behavior represent an unacceptable risk. There is no appetite in the EU for having AI systems emotionally manipulate people or businesses.

The next group, high risk applications, includes examples like technological systems that support critical infrastructure or law enforcement systems. There are not specific examples provided in the act itself, but it’s not hard to intuit the kinds of system it intends to regulate closely.

A more common consideration, however, is how the AI Act affects applications like chatbots; categorized within the limited risk group. Chatbots look like many of the deployments Ushur clients are familiar with because the Ushur CXA Platform utilizes automation technologies, machine learning and generative AI to make customer experiences more fluid, flexible and powerful. So what does the EU AI Act say about them?

Chatbots are increasingly common as an interface between brands and their customers, and the EU AI Act says that those engagements need to make it clear and transparent when a customer is interacting with a machine. In other words, AI Agents deployed to engage with customers can’t hide the fact that they are not real humans! 

The implications of the EU AI Act are interesting as consumers, but significant as businesses consider which technology partners can or cannot help them navigate these varieties of novel regulation. At Ushur, we build our chat interfaces and AI features to comply and according to best practices so customers always understand with whom they’re engaging.

Other types of risk

Ushur has been thinking about the risks of AI services since the company’s inception, and we consider more than just the categories of risk included in the EU AI Act. 

There are also concerns to remember like reputational risk associated with misdirected AI solutions. What does your business stand to lose reputationally if its GenAI chatbot interface is convinced by a bad actor to speak in hateful language? Or to show up in the news as having been manipulated for commercial gain?

Consider also the dangers of operational risks like having long-building AI projects stall. Businesses spend months and millions of dollars to deploy responsive and flexible AI-first solutions, and the wrong partners, with insufficient understanding of how to deploy enterprise-grade applications, put their deployment in jeopardy. 

Ushur has spent a decade operationalizing enterprise-quality automated customer experiences. We have deployed document processing models to accelerate work that depends on document-bound data, and leveraged conversational automation to better understand the people engaging with its platform. The company was founded as an automation and AI platform from day 1 and has this built into our DNA, from the models we train and place guardrails around, to the security and compliance of our platform.

How should regulated enterprises think about risk and AI?

It’s exciting to think about customer experiences driven by AI-first capabilities, and troubling to business leaders who feel like they are missing out. 

When evaluating whether AI-driven projects are the right fit for your business, while it’s important to think about the risks that arise during and post implementation, don’t forget the danger associated with choosing not to use AI. Internal and external processes will eventually grow to be unwieldy without the support of automation, and AI-first automation solutions are more flexible than deterministic solutions alone. 

Compared to some technologies, like data storage, artificial intelligence-based projects are relatively new. The risks feel more substantial but they are largely understood. The quality of the outcome of the projects depends on the cleanliness and quality of the data associated with the project, and having advisors with expertise. Expertise and technology with proven success make implementation and utilization of AI technologies possible.

At Ushur, we believe AI built and implemented to improve the lives of everyone should always be implemented in safe, compliant ways — and we take the necessary steps to ensure all organizations can implement CXA solutions to provide their customers with frictionless, engaging, and fulfilling experiences.

Conclusion

The EU AI Act which has just gone into full force is an example of how the world is responding with caution to the newest and most exciting developments of artificial intelligence. Technology is advancing quickly, so legislators are developing frameworks to respond accordingly. 

Businesses around the world with an international presence must know how to respond to changes in the legal landscape, and at the least must have technology partners they’re close with who can help guide them through the evolving implications. If the risks associated with AI that drive your customer experiences are critical to strategize around, Ushur is here to support you. With a decade of experience building, designing, and automating customer experiences in regulated enterprises to be secure and compliant, Ushur can serve as your close technology and digital transformation partner. Get in touch with us at ushur.com/request-demo.

Between May 29th-May 31st, I attended a major tech conference in the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, California. The GenAI Summit SF ‘24 highlighted the modern era of generative artificial intelligence, or Gen AI. During the event, AI-first companies were given a chance to showcase both their products alongside their entrepreneurial journeys, and I was given the chance to attend and learn.

As a marketing intern, I felt fortunate to attend the summit. It was a very immersive experience. Almost everywhere I turned, attendees were excitedly talking about GenAI applications. In fairness, what better location than the Bay Area to host a tech conference? You could certainly feel the energy and excitement.

I spent the first day getting my bearings and planning which sessions to attend throughout the week, though I also got to speak with visitors at the Ushur booth. That meant I either was talking to people about Ushur's latest launch or attending seminars with knowledgeable experts in the field of artificial intelligence. 

It felt like I was thrown in the deep end, but I was excited for the chance to talk to AI builders, developers, professors, and executives.

Automated Solutions for Attorneys and Legal Clinics

While the summit program contained a series of speakers, one of the most notable to me was a company founder named Jake Heller. Jake explained the ideas behind his company, CaseText, which was recently acquired for a $650 million dollar deal with Thomas Reuters. 

CaseTexts’s product “Co-Counsel” is an AI legal assistant. It was trained in the skills of a legal assistant so that it could accomplish more menial and time-consuming tasks like summarizing legal documents, generating research based on prompt questions, and even reviewing evidence of fraud. 

Heller talked about the impact his product has already had acting with the same skill sets as a legal assistant as opposed to just another computer. In his eyes, typical practices regarding legal affairs were traditional and outdated. Technology wasn’t nearly being utilized as much in legal practice as opposed to other industries such as insurance or healthcare. As a result, he felt the need to find an innovative and modern solution that would cut down time for attorneys to handle the most important tasks. 

In the CaseText approach, Generative AI models were trained with a set of specific capabilities in mind but still used flexible large language models. That approach made sense and seems clever.

Similar to Heller, several other entrepreneurs at the conference told their own stories of how they grew their business, all of which were by different approaches. 

LLMs and Multi-Modal Models

Two topics in particular were repeatedly brought up: LLMs and Multi-Modal Models. Everyone at the GenAI Summit that I spoke with had some experience dealing with either digital automation and AI agents, but one session in particular caught my attention. 

One of the panel discussions at the conference covered how Large-Language Models (LLMs) have scaled heavily in the past 5-6 years, their use is in fact only on the rise. Two of the panelists, Dr. Devandra Chaplotand Sharan Narang (research engineer at Meta AI), spoke in depth about the relationships between pre-training, synthetic data, and fine-tuning for more efficient processes. 

Dr. Chaplot also discussed the scalability of multi-modal models given their current state. He explained that despite the cost of computing, multi-modal models were only at the beginning of their vast set of capabilities. As engineers work to improve the models over time, the gap between small and large models would eventually reduce as they became more powerful and cost-effective. 

Conclusion

This was the first year of the GenAI Summit in San Francisco, but it was also the first event I was able to attend as an Ushur marketing intern. It was a week full of interesting conversations and conference attendants, and I appreciated getting to hear feedback on Ushur’s point of view on Generative AI for regulated enterprises. I see overlap in how CaseText used AI Agents to replicate legal assistants’ work, and how Ushur uses AI Agents to enhance customer experience professionals’ work. I also believe adoption of Generative AI is only going up from here as excitement from events like this Summit continue to grow. I plan on attending next year's GenAI Summit, too.

Big news on the hiring front continues for Ushur this week, with the announcement that Tony Smolek has joined our leadership team as CFO. This fills me with excitement on so many levels, and I wanted to take some time to augment today’s press release with a more personal take on Tony’s appointment. 

For the past year, I’ve served as Ushur’s interim CFO. It’s a role I’ve enjoyed, and one that has helped me dive deeper into our cost and operating model to become a more efficient company. But, understandably, it also takes a great deal of time and strategic effort — time that is inevitably borrowed from other areas that require care and attention. One of my top priorities heading into this year was to fill that role with what it needs and deserves — a world-class, full-time leader. Our search was exhaustive, and illuminating. I came to learn quickly that the best candidates on paper did not necessarily make for the best fits at a scrappy but rapidly growing scaleup like ours. We needed someone who really embodied the entrepreneurial spirit we possess here at Ushur, someone who was not only an operational ace but someone who understood what the business requires in order to accomplish its goals in the longer term. 

When we met Tony, it was obvious that he possessed both the requisite operational expertise and founder’s mindset in spades. Unlike many CFOs, Tony’s path to finance leadership has been diverse and nonlinear. He began his career in M&A, before eventually co-founding his own startup where he focused on financial systems and FP&A. That founding experience allows him to look at our business not just through the lens of a classical corporate CFO, but as a strategic partner who enables healthy growth, nimble decision making and continued innovation. 

It’s that strategic ownership of a key function like finance that makes Tony such a valuable addition to the Ushur family. Critical business functions, like HR or finance or any operationally-focused charter, serve as a shared service and strategic partner to literally every piece of the business. Nothing happens in a company without partnership from finance, and when your finance leaders already possess a strategic disposition it helps solve problems across each department in ways that are in complete alignment with the goals of the business. 

This is what I see in Tony. Not only is he an expert in his domain, he is also a strategy-first thinker who will advocate for financial decisions that support those goals. He understands how to rationalize the higher level of investment required for expanding our market, selling into the enterprise or building a new solution. Good financial systems for a startup aren’t just about burn and runway, or black and red numbers on a balance sheet. In attitude and approach, Tony is as much a founder and builder as he is a CFO. 

Just as a product has a dedicated product architect, I see strategic CFOs as playing a similar role for the financial wellbeing of an organization. They are the financial architects that a CEO must partner with to define the arc of the company’s narrative and evolution. There are future rounds of financing and more institutional investment that will need to be raised. Being able to tell the financial story, to articulate the trajectory, is so essential to bringing in marquee new investors. 

We are incredibly lucky to welcome Tony to Ushur. He empathizes with founders in such a unique way, and inherently understands how to do right by a business both in the short and long term. I have every confidence that there is no better captain to steer the financial ship through our next phase of growth!  Welcome Tony!

In the startup world, company milestones come in all shapes and sizes. There are obvious ones, milestones that measure growth, finance and innovation. And then there are others that will never be reflected on a balance sheet, markers of progress that indicate positive growth around foundational aspects like culture, leadership and company building. These soft metrics are often harder to quantify, but are arguably as critical to the long-term viability of a company. They manifest as moments of unexpected success and joy. They serve as an indicator that a company has been architected the right way. Recently, we achieved one of these milestones, one that fills me with personal gratification — we had our first boomerang employee. Our brilliant head of HR, Sarah Stevens, has returned. 

Anyone who knows me well will tell you that I am a people person. I place a tremendous amount of value on relationships, and whether they are business relationships or personal, they are never transactional. I make it a point to stay in touch, to check in. Every time I’m in my car, you can bet I’ll have dialed an old friend to check in. If you’re in my digital rolodex, you can probably expect to hear from me once every couple of years — at the very least. It’s why I’ve remained in touch with so many former colleagues, teammates and employees over the years, and no small part of why Henry and I founded Ushur in the first place. 

Simply put, we enjoy people. We take tremendous pride and pleasure in making their lives better, whether it’s through the platform we’ve built or the connections maintained through an occasional phone call. The importance of maintaining strong, lasting and positive relationships with my employees — both present and former — is one aspect of what makes Sarah’s return so gratifying. I was over the moon to see a former Ushur teammate return, not simply because it validates the culture of innovation, ownership and inclusivity we’ve worked so hard to instill, but because Sarah herself embodies that culture. She was (and is again!) an active builder of that culture. She is the type of scrappy, creative talent that we hope our attitude and approach will continue to attract for decades to come. 

Founders often subscribe to this notion of growth as zero to one, one to two, two to five, five to ten, ten to 30, 30 to 100, 100 to 300, and so on. It’s like a series of switchbacks on a steep trail, incremental and distinct portions of the journey leading circuitously to an eventual summit. As a bootstrapped company that took very little startup capital at the beginning, zero to one was incredibly hard. We did it with very limited resources and a high product risk. We demonstrated patience in the face of uncertainty, and ultimately laid the foundation for the rapid growth we’re beginning to see today. 

Personally, that level of patience is difficult for me. I have a tendency to beat myself up when I don’t achieve the goals I’ve set for myself. As a runner, I’ve finished marathons and still been upset with my performance because I didn’t set a new personal best. For me, part of my growth as a leader requires being grateful for what I am able to accomplish, to remind myself that there are always things you can do to get incrementally better and that incremental progress is progress just the same. 

Over the years, I’ve tried to apply that same growth mindset to building Ushur by paying close attention to the little things. Every year, I’ve shaved a few seconds off my per-mile time, and just last month ran the fastest 10K of my life. In my opinion, there is such a clear analog between those individual goals and establishing systems and processes that grow our business. Healthy, successful startups change, they go through metamorphosis every year or two years, periods of transition that require you to re-think all of the previous stages, to reestablish new norms. Taking this approach helps me recalibrate my own role to be the CEO of the company for the next stage of our business.  

Every day we are actively laying the foundation that will ultimately allow us to take those strides to grow to 100 and from there to 300. (By the way, those numbers are millions of dollars of annualized revenues which is the primary measure of growth for an enterprise software company.) As with distance running, these are muscle memories that must be built over time. Some are quick fixes, but the vast majority are long poles in the tent. Leaders often think about building culture as a one-and-done exercise. It is anything but. Culture and values can’t be turned on or off on a whim. These are foundational elements that require clear guardrails, and a zero tolerance policy for deviations from those boundaries. 

Sarah initially joined Ushur as a consultant, a fractional HR hire who made her value so apparent and indispensable that within two months she was a full-time leader responsible for our holistic recruiting and people strategy. She started as a director and was promoted to VP of HR in under two years. Sarah is one of those incredibly unique individuals who brings a sophisticated blend of domain experience and business understanding. She doesn’t just get the Ushur philosophy, she embodies it. She internalizes everything about our mission and goals, then blends it into her work. She also has an uncanny ability to understand our technology. Sarah spent the final hours before her first maternity leave getting certified as a user on our platform! That's the level of commitment and scrappiness that she practices. When Sarah left us last August to take a role that would enable her to focus on some of her personal goals, she’d set the bar so incredibly high that we struggled to find someone capable of filling her shoes. For me personally, it was like losing a limb. 

A couple of months ago, I reached back out to Sarah for help at what she does best — recruiting. As a leader, so much of my time is spent focusing on the strategy around our talent, our people, our culture. I needed someone like Sarah to be my right hand, and needless to say I was absolutely thrilled when she expressed interest in coming back to do the job again herself. Her return has been such an incredible gift. I’ve talked often of serendipity, and I feel that life has really presented me with a chance to build my optimal leadership team. As we march from our current base camp to the next, we will bring in new, world-class leaders to create a cohesive team of people to enable this next phase of our journey. It’s a process that has already begun, and that we’re excited to tell you about in more detail - so stay tuned!

The week before last, Ushur attended the inaugural GenAI Summit at the Palace of the Fine Arts in San Francisco, CA. It was an incredible forum for speaking with and listening to the industry’s experts who are defining the future of Generative AI. At the summit, Ushur’s attendees also got the chance to ask questions about the latest release of the Ushur Customer Experience Automation (CXA) platform and its introduction of Ushur ExperienceOS (XOS) — an entirely new way to build customer experiences. XOS is the generative AI (GenAI) services backbone of the Ushur platform with a specific focus on using large language model capabilities to design engaging AI Agents for regulated industries, and to help Ushur users in the leading CXA platform.

ExperienceOS (XOS)

XOS is the Generative AI (GenAI) service for launching AI Agents that help customers across several core competencies. It’s the backbone to GenAI services in the Ushur platform designed to bring the power of large language models (LLMs) to enterprise customer experiences. XOS hosts Ushur LLMs, open-source LLMs, or models trained and deployed by customers. Business users can use XOS to launch AI Agents — digital counterparts to the customer service representatives that customers love. Ushur AI Agents are trained to help customers and users in conversations over chat or voice, document processing, data report generation, and decision assistance for employees.

If Ushur users don’t want to rely on XOS to deploy AI Agents, they can leverage the power of LLMs via XOS in Ushur Studio. GenAI services help users as well as customers with tasks like workflow creation, phrase suggestions, and tone improvements to meet CX best practices. XOS is the operating system for all customer experiences that demand the fluidity of Generative AI, created with the ease of drag-and-drop. And, it’s available today!

AI Agents

One of the most common questions asked at the Ushur booth at the GenAI Summit in SF was “What are AI Agents?” 

Artificial Intelligence Agents (AI Agents) by Ushur are digital customer service specialists that can be trained to adhere to a company’s industry or business use cases and automate processes for customer requests conversationally via chat, email, or voice, and securely gather and process documents for secure/PII customer experiences. These AI Agents are also able to help customer service agents make decisions via business rules and generate insights via data querying. Each of these capabilities are deployable out of the new Ushur GenAI service and accessible to customers via a conversational interface. AI Agents are the ultimate manifestation of GenAI in the Ushur CXA ecosystem. 

To better understand AI Agents, it’s useful to think of them by comparison to their predecessor the chatbot. AI Agents powered by genAI can be trained and skilled to deliver insights, make decisions, and dynamically communicate at a higher order of reasoning and intelligence.  Chatbots are generally pre-directed to respond with preset responses to specific FAQs that were accounted for. Reasoning and understanding are limited with traditional chatbots.

AI Agents have to complete end-to-end automation and drive towards straight through processing. They do of course also support agent escalation or diversion to a person if the customer needs (or prefers) it.

Skills

An AI Agent is as much defined by preconceived notions of related technologies as it is by anything else. They exist on a gradient of capabilities and are generally understood as the next iteration of intelligent assistants that have occupied the market for a decade. They’re more than rules-based chatbots in front of an FAQ set. Now, enterprises must decide what level of autonomy to give their AI Agents, and what skills their agents need in order to best deliver self-service to their customers.

AI Agent Chat Skill

Conversational capabilities are critically important for any agent that’s required to assist customers with self-service. Customers want to engage in the language or interface of their choice, and chatting has emerged as the de facto engagement style users prefer across all demographics. Chatting can be via text or web chat, but what’s clear is customers want to be able to speak to their service providers at their leisure and in their own verbiage.

Especially with the emergence of conversational capabilities of ChatGPT, the tolerance for poor chat interfaces has shrunk dramatically in the last two years. Fortunately, Ushur AI Agents skilled with chat use the power of LLM-based conversations to deliver a fluid and dynamic engagement but with the safety and compliance of Ushur’s industry-specific models and GenAI guardrails.

AI Agent Document Skill

Customer experiences often depend on information already locked into a document-based format, and customers don’t want to repeatedly provide their data to companies ad nauseam. That’s why document processing skills for AI Agents are a requisite for any customer experience in the enterprise. Customers demand they be able to engage friction-free, and waiting for a customer service member to extract data from documents introduces immense friction.

With the advent of large language models, Ushur’s AI Agents are now better suited than ever to understand and correct the information included in the documents that customers share with their service providers. Forms (like pdfs, faxes, surveys etc.) are a mainstay of enterprise processes, and Ushur’s LLMs can be used to review and confirm the data extracted for those processes is accurate. Ushur can also use the power of LLMs to reach back out to customers when data in a document looks incorrect and ask for an update.

Insights, Decisions, and Voice Skills

AI Agents are not just an improvement to existing SaaS platforms — like traditional machine learning projects have been – but are instead valuable in the ways adding another teammate to a customer service team would be. That’s why AI Agents that support self-service require skills like the ability to share data reports with other team members, to help other team members make decisions based on business practices, and to hold an initial dialogue with a customer over a channel like voice.

These skills are impactful because:

• Ushur’s LLMs and LLM-based services more naturally engage with customers over voice channels than ever before. Build a customer experience on Ushur once, and deploy it to a voice channel, or any other channel, without having to natively design dialogue flows. Ushur uses GenAI to add fluidity and save on time and complexity.
• Ushur’s LLMs will build data reports for employees (Ushur users) so that they can describe the segments of their population they want to see in plain English. Ushur uses GenAI so any authorized user of any skill level can inspect their own engagement data and derive insights.
• Ushur will preserve the business logic needed to make critical decisions about users based on their engagement data, and thereby assist employees in accelerating their decision-making processes.

Generative AI for Enterprises

The news and internet are awash in examples of GenAI deployed without the kinds of bumpers that keep enterprise experiences on target. It’s a technology stack that is proving to be exceptionally compelling, while also a concern if bad actors can prompt-engineer those services into dangerous behaviors. 

Ushur is specifically purpose-built to deliver secure, compliant, and closely guided experiences. Ushur services act as guardrails by validating all inbound prompts, and reviewing all generated answers to ensure they’re not off topic or serving up information via prompt attacks. 

The unique value in the design of Ushur customer experiences is how they are goal oriented. That makes it easy for Ushur XOS and its GenAI capabilities to know when engagements are off topic, and then to guide users back through the experiences they’re intended to complete.

Conclusion

Ushur XOS has fundamentally changed the way that consumers engage with Ushur customers, and reimagined the process Ushur users have to go through to build customer experiences. The GenAI Summit was the perfect opportunity to validate those viewpoints, and show excited attendees that Ushur is thinking about how GenAI can make their customer experiences more powerful while preserving safety and security.  If you want to see how AI Agents built via XOS are changing the way customers engage in the enterprise, come schedule time with us at ushur.com/xos.

Introduction:

Despite spending more per capita for maternity care than any other nation in the world, the U.S. has higher rates of adverse pregnancy outcomes than any other high-income country. According to the CDC, Maternal mortality has been rising, with nearly 84% of pregnancy-related deaths thought to be preventable. Serious diseases passed to babies during pregnancy, such as congenital syphilis, have also been on the rise. Studies show that timely testing and treatment in the early stages is 98% effective in preventing congenital syphilis in newborns which has been on the rise over the past decade. For example, The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) posits that comprehensive care navigation models have the potential to reduce maternal morbidity by up to 50% and maternal mortality by up to 20%. This underscores the importance of implementing innovative approaches, including digital care navigation, to support expectant mothers throughout their pregnancy journey.

The Role of Digital Care Management:

In a healthcare communication landscape facing challenges, members are increasingly preferring digital channels, with 65% favoring SMS text. The next generation of moms and families are more-frequently experiencing new tech-based approaches to improving one’s pregnancy or birthing journey. An effective communication approach for these moms necessitates an omnichannel integration, seamlessly blending various channels for member engagement. 

How can Healthcare Automation Technology Help?

Interactive, HIPAA compliant, PHI protected & HI-Trust certified, secure automation engagement can help mitigate the root causes of adverse pregnancy outcomes and advance maternity care quality, safety, and equity. Healthcare automation solutions like Ushur can create highly relevant and engaging digital self-service experiences for maternal and new baby health that:

• Empower Expectant Mothers: Digital self-service platforms offer expectant mothers unprecedented access to personalized care and support. Through intuitive interfaces and AI-driven functionalities, these platforms provide invaluable resources tailored to personalized needs. From educational materials to timely reminders and symptom monitoring tools, expectant mothers are equipped with the knowledge and tools to navigate their pregnancy journey with confidence.
• Enhance Care Coordination: Digital self-service solutions streamline care coordination among healthcare providers, ensuring seamless communication and collaboration throughout the maternity care continuum. This involves digital health needs assessments or HRA’s to surface data that can be leveraged to customize care plan creation and foster relationships with members at a personalized level to achieve healthy outcomes. The focus should be on providing care guidance when the member needs it most, regardless of their social determinants of health (SDOH).
• Harness Behavioral Data Insights: Data analytics play a pivotal role in driving informed decision-making and improving maternal health outcomes. By aggregating and analyzing vast amounts of health data, AI-powered platforms can identify trends, predict risk factors, and personalize care plans for expectant mothers. This data-driven approach enables healthcare providers to deliver more effective interventions and optimize resource allocation, ultimately leading to better maternal and neonatal health.

Improving Access to Care with HIPAA-secure Mobile Outreach and Conversational AI:

Conversational AI is revolutionizing maternal healthcare accessibility by maximizing mobile outreach and engagement. Through AI-powered chatbots and HIPAA-secure mobile engagement, expectant mothers can access personalized support and information anytime, anywhere. These conversational interfaces offer a user-friendly platform for mothers to ask questions, seek guidance, and receive real-time assistance, empowering them to make informed decisions about their health. 

Best Practices to Improve Maternal Access to Care:

1. Enable Early Detection and Intervention: Encourage regular prenatal check-ups and preventive care to reduce likelihood of chronic health conditions, such as heart disease, diabetes and depression. Leverage Health Risk Assessments to identify and address these potential health issues early on, reducing the need for costly medical interventions later in pregnancy.
2. Improve Benefit Literacy: Educate members on their healthcare benefits and improve understanding and access to the services available to them.
3. Improve Care Coordination: Enable members with complex medical needs to coordinate care, navigate treatment options, and optimize health outcomes while controlling costs.
4. Provide Health and Wellness Education: Empower pregnant mothers to take proactive steps to improve their health and reduce the risk of chronic conditions, thereby lowering healthcare costs in the long term. 
5. Identify Barriers to Care: Utilize Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to detect if a member mentions a barrier to receiving care
6. Offer Solutions to Barriers: In cases where an issue is identified, automatically respond with information about available resources. For example, offer low or no-cost transportation options if a lack of transportation is mentioned.

Improving Maternal Health Equity with Personalized Digital Solutions:

Maternal health disparities persist, disproportionately affecting marginalized communities. To address these inequities, we must prioritize culturally competent and personalized solutions that meet the diverse needs of expectant mothers. According to the CDC, Black mothers face a much higher risk of complications, with 69.9 deaths per 100,000 live births in the US. By understanding social determinants of health, cultural norms, beliefs, and practices, healthcare providers and health plans can tailor interventions and support services to resonate with different cultural backgrounds. By leveraging the ubiquity of mobile devices and the power of AI, we can break down barriers to access, reach underserved populations, and ensure that every mother receives the care she deserves.

Looking Ahead:

As we continue to navigate the digital frontier, the potential for AI and automation to revolutionize maternal healthcare is boundless. By simplifying the touchpoints between health plans, providers, and expectant mothers with intuitive self-service, digital automation solutions can dramatically improve access to personalized prenatal and postpartum care. By embracing innovation and collaboration, we can unlock new possibilities for improving maternal health outcomes and ensure that every mother receives the care and support she deserves. Together, we can forge a future where technology serves as a catalyst for healthier pregnancies, safer deliveries, and brighter futures for all.

AI Agents have been making a ton of headlines over the past few weeks, but what exactly are AI agents and how should we be thinking about them? It’s helpful to start by going back to AI Assistants, which were all the rage before AI agents took over. Let's explore the upgrades that transformed AI Assistants into the AI Agents we have today.

The Dawn of AI Assistants: ChatGPT Circa 2022

When ChatGPT launched in 2022, it took the world by storm. Its conversational style, ability to understand user intent, and creative outputs were revolutionary. However, there were clear limitations in this early AI assistant framework that have since been addressed, leading us to the development of AI agents.

Key Upgrades from AI Assistants to AI Agent

Prompt Engineering and Custom Instructions

One of the first improvements was incorporating better instructions and direction for AI assistants. This process, known as prompt engineering or custom instructions, involves being clear about what we expect from these AI assistants, including the personas they should assume and behaviors to avoid.

Reference Documents

Another significant breakthrough was enabling AI assistants to reference documents before responding to a user. Initially, AI assistants could confidently produce incorrect outputs and lacked domain-specific or company knowledge. Now, with access to source material, they can incorporate relevant information into their responses, reducing errors and increasing expertise in specific fields.

Search Integration

Originally, ChatGPT had a gap in its training dataset, meaning it couldn’t provide information on recent events. By integrating search capabilities, AI assistants can now look up and incorporate current information, ensuring they stay relevant and up-to-date.

Tool Integration

AI assistants have also gained access to tools like calculators and programming environments. Large language models are inherently text-based, so adding mathematical engines like Wolfram Alpha or dedicated compute environments allows them to handle complex tasks more effectively.

Improved Reasoning and Planning

Using advanced prompt engineering and orchestration techniques, AI assistants can now plan steps in advance to solve more complex problems. They also have enhanced troubleshooting capabilities, allowing them to manage more complicated projects seamlessly.

Action Capabilities

A major upgrade is the ability of AI assistants to interact with external systems. They can now pull data from business systems and push tasks to external systems for completion, significantly expanding their utility.

Multi-modal Interactions

Recent advancements have enabled AI assistants to interact with users beyond just text. Users can now upload images and, soon, leverage cameras and video, opening up a range of new use cases.

From AI Assistants to AI Agents

These advancements have culminated in the creation of AI agents, which are better equipped to handle complex problems. They can plan ahead, troubleshoot effectively, use advanced tools, and interact with users in innovative ways. AI agents also perform actions in the real world by integrating with other systems.

Challenges in Productionalizing AI Agents

Despite their promise, AI agents present a few challenges:

• Slower Performance: Due to the complexity of operations, AI agents can be slower.
• Higher Costs: Running AI agents is expensive, whether due to per-token charges from third-party providers or the need for powerful GPU clusters.
• Increased Risk of Errors: The added complexity introduces a higher likelihood of mistakes, requiring robust validation and monitoring.

The Future of AI Agents

The AI community is excited about AI agents, and major players like OpenAI and Google are launching their versions. Companies like Ushur are developing AI agents tailored for customer experience automation in sensitive industries such as healthcare, insurance, and financial services.

Thank you to Amanda Dall’Occhio, Healthcare Sr. Director Analyst at Gartner, for shedding light on the myriad of ways in which AI can enhance care management in: U.S. Payer and Provider CIOs: Apply AI in Care Management Programs. We agree that opportunities are prevalent throughout the value chain for both internal and external tasks. A thoughtful, intentional approach to AI is key, which was underscored insightfully with your guidance on weighing the value-add against potential risks. We appreciate your nod to Ushur as a sample vendor driving progress in this space.

At Ushur, our objective is to elevate member engagement and streamline care navigation through AI-powered digital experiences. This includes:

• Automating context-dependent member and patient outreach to increase engagement.
• Aiding with insurance checks, appointment scheduling, pre- and post-operative care.
• Recommending personalized next steps for effective service utilization.

Ushur’s platform supports enterprise-class security and compliance, ensuring a smooth Infosec process for data privacy and handling. Our No-Code Integrations connect critical systems and channels for end-to-end workflows. For greater precision and time-to-value, our Healthcare solution comes pre-trained with language and document intelligence for industry-specific skills.

Providing a convenient, empathetic and flexible experience makes all the difference during member and patient times of need. At Ushur, we strive to make all self-service proactive, personalized, and seamlessly integrated into the fabric of daily life.

For more information on how to leverage AI for Healthcare customer experiences, please visit: https://ushur.com/resources/healthcare-ebook.

Travel is a consistent part of any tech CEOs job, and while spending so many days each year on the road can certainly get tiresome, I always find myself energized by my visits to India. Not only is it my home country, and one in which Ushur holds a long-established presence, it is also a place of burgeoning entrepreneurial energy and aspirational progress. 

The India I knew as a child and young man has changed drastically. I grew up in Bangalore, an area that was, at the time, well behind the infrastructural curve of bustling metropolitan cities like Delhi, Bombay and Chennai. Today, once-developing areas like Bangalore have leapfrogged ahead, going from decades behind to leading a nationwide dash into the digital era. A number of key reforms opened the path for this upward trajectory, and chief among them was taking the entire banking industry digital with what is known as a Universal Payment Interface, or UPI. 

Nearly overnight, India transitioned from a heavily cash-based economy to a digital economy, a shift that has inarguably made India a more equitable and profitable place. Now, instead of transacting in cash, everyone has a digital endpoint to make and accept payments. This has lowered the barrier of entry for small business owners, and given ordinary citizens an additional layer of security around their money that protects them from the realities of life in a still developing nation, like theft or corrupt policing. Simultaneously, it has drastically cut down on a significant amount of black market money and tax evasion. This enabled the introduction of a uniform taxation, which has in turn led to vastly improved revenue streams for government agencies and a jump in the standard of living for much of the population. India has become a prime case study for the ways that digital progress can directly influence rapid social change.

...the buzz, the excitement, the inherent knowledge that incredible things are being created...

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These reforms, and others like them, have coincided with a technological revolution that has set India up to be a powerhouse global economy over the next decade. In my home city of Bangalore, where it once took my family five years on a waiting list just to get a landline connected, the startup scene is blossoming. Coffee shops and cafes are full of builders and founders, huddled around laptops or sharing their ideas excitedly over a latte. Seed investors and VCs are seemingly everywhere, eagerly awaiting their next opportunities. It reminds me so much of Silicon Valley in the late 90s and early 2000s — the buzz, the excitement, the inherent knowledge that incredible things are being created right here and now. In many ways, Bangalore embodies the sea change that India is experiencing as a whole. To see the place I grew up evolve so dramatically is a source of tremendous pride and inspiration. 

On this most recent trip, I spent six days spread across three cities. Two of those were spent with our incredible team members in Bangalore. Their youthful vibrancy and incredible intelligence never ceases to astound me. The roles we have in India are highly intellectual and demanding, from R&D and support to critical back office functions like legal. India has become an incredible buying center as well, which has demanded an increased sales presence in-country. We also have major investors in India, who joined our Series B round and doubled down on our Series C. India is not somewhere we simply have a token presence, it is a strategic hub, a core enabler of Ushur’s ability to deliver a differentiated and revolutionary experience for our customers. 

...it is a strategic hub, a core enabler of Ushur’s ability to deliver a differentiated and revolutionary experience for our customers. 

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At a macro level, India’s economic future looks brighter than it ever has before. On a personal level, I found myself refreshed and rejuvenated by the experience when by all logic I should have been shaking off jet lag. I spent some time focused solely on my own wellness and health, taking advantage of the advanced medical technologies available in Chennai. I visited Mumbai for the first time in my life, and experienced the awe-inspiring power of India’s financial capital up close. I even made a point to fly Air India, and was treated to my first ever non-stop flight between SFO and Bangalore. The service was incredible, and knocking out all my travel in a single day instead of a 25-hour, layover-ridden journey was no small pleasure. It was a trip of inspiration, of appreciation and rediscovery. 

I’d like to extend a heartfelt thank you to our entire team in India for your time and hospitality. Your hard work, brilliant ideas and welcoming attitudes make each trip a gift, and I await the next one with great anticipation.

When the new year arrives, it is inevitably accompanied by a deluge of predictions from across the board. Rather than adding to that crowded space of educated guesswork and high-level pontificating, I’d rather reflect on Ushur’s journey over the past 12 months, and the lessons learned for the years ahead as we welcome a new fiscal year that started on Feb 1.

It would be a gross understatement if I call 2023 a dramatic, climactic, humbling, and one heck of a roller coaster of a year. Truth be told, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Ushur kicked off 2023 with closing our $50M Series C funding round. We had ended 2022 on a very strong note, highlighted by 135% year-over-year growth, generating as much revenue in 2022 as we had in the previous four years combined. Simultaneously, I had found myself $15M short of our fundraising goal due to an investor pulling out at the 11th hour. So for me, Jan 2023 began with a mad scramble to find that money elsewhere. Thanks to Ushur’s phenomenal track record and our amazing investor network, we were able to raise the additional capital we needed in time to announce our $50M Series C round as planned. I breathed a sigh of relief, and looked forward to having a bit of time to stretch my legs and grow into this new, post-Series C leadership role. 

The universe, as it so often does, had other ideas. 

Just as we were getting ready to jump enthusiastically into planning for 2023 with QBRs, strategy sessions, sales kickoff and board meetings, news started trickling in about the troubles at the famed Silicon Valley Bank. Within 48 hours, the bank that had been the backbone of the startup world for decades, where thousands of businesses kept their daily operational funds - including Ushur - was no more.  All of the funds we’d worked so hard to raise were suddenly inaccessible, seemingly gone in the blink of an eye. 

Like many others, I was shell shocked. Pundits were talking about letting the bank fail, as if those of us who had our money there were investors who had made a bad bet rather than customers who had been let down. As a leader, it was incumbent on me to assuage those fears with near constant communication. I kept our employees and our board informed with clear and transparent messages multiple times a day to ensure we were on the same page and all in it together. It felt like ages, but then Monday arrived and thanks to a major step by the US government, we had access to all of our funds again. The entire event tested every facet of my leadership abilities, and taught me critical lessons I will take with me through the rest of my life. 

With the potential disaster firmly in our rear view mirror, we turned all efforts towards executing our mission. We continued our methodology of focusing on and proving the value of our AI-powered CX automation solutions in one vertical before entering another. In 2023, we added two new verticals - financial services and public sector - to our existing roster of healthcare and insurance, considerably increasing the reach of our CXA offerings as well as our overall TAM in the process. 

The proceeding months saw us deliver our best fiscal quarters in company history, once again. We secured our biggest ever deal, and then immediately topped that with an even bigger one. I’m especially proud of our growth in the public health sector as we added 5 of the largest California health plans to our roster, helping transform the lives of millions across the state and beyond. We also managed, very successfully, the situation of some of our customers becoming churn risks, turning them into our champions once again. 

2023 was an incredibly humbling year as unprecedented macroeconomic pressures continued to decimate the job market and especially in the tech sector, causing entire companies to disappear overnight. Our strategy and the dedication of our employees meant that Ushur continued its measured and efficient growth. We added specialist talent across the organization, significantly enhancing our ability to bring new products and solutions to market while continuing to provide the fanatical support to our customers that Ushur has come to be known for.

We made strategic investments in our platform. Vertical-focused Generative-AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to be the enabler for solving critical problems. We advanced our healthcare and insurance solutions powered by Gen-AI for differentiated value creation. Our continued bet on No-Code led us to launch the best-in-class Ushur Studio for orchestrating CX Automation. We made small and large model training  accessible to citizen developers with Ushur AI Studio. These investments led to Ushur’s customers tripling their usage from the previous year. 

The soul of a company - its culture - is the hardest piece to maintain as you scale. As a team, we’ve passed our first tests with flying colors, thanks to the culture of buy-in that everyone at Ushur works so hard to create, maintain and flourish. Our growing list of accolades and awards are the testament of this strong culture and our people-first approach to innovation. 

On January 24, 2024, Ushur turned 10 years old. For Henry, my co-founder, and I, it is indeed a surreal yet supremely proud moment. We begin 2024 with an absolute clarity in terms of who we are, who we are serving and where we are going. Ushur is  an AI-first company. We have long believed that AI will transform the world and invested in a platform that helps our customers realize tremendous value. Lately, we have been drinking our own champagne as well by leveraging AI to find new efficiencies across our entire organization, from HR and IT to marketing, product and sales. For Ushur, 2024 will be a year of continued focus on value creation and realization. We don’t want to sell a dime of our product to anyone unless they find true value in what we have to offer. 2023 was a tumultuous year like no other, but as all adversity does, it made us more tenacious, more efficient and laser focused on what matters the most as we embark on an exciting 2024.

In the last major release of the Ushur platform, Ushur included a key feature to make it easier for citizen developers to build, deploy, and connect customer experiences – the Ushur launch module. 

The Ushur Customer Experience Automation platform uses a no-code platform and pre-trained (and easily retrainable) machine learning models to shorten the time it takes to design customer experiences. The no-code components in the platform are called modules, and the newest module (the launch module) gives finer grain control of starting or linking workflows from, or in, the Ushur platform to each other.

In previous deployments, if an Ushur workflow matched the conditions in the logic routing, it would move onto the next step in the customer experience journey. In reality, there are some customer experiences with an element of time inherent to them that IT or customer experience/customer service (CX/CS) teams may want to tightly manage. 

For example, if a healthcare company sends a patient, or member, an invitation to fill out a survey on their current health status and in it they indicate they don’t feel confident about their current state of health with their current provider (PCP), their healthcare plan may want them to find a new provider. If after some amount of time, they don’t elect a new PCP, the next step in their customer experience could be to send them to a care advocate team, or it could be to send them educational content on their benefits. There are a litany of options, and time is a key consideration.

Another improvement the Ushur launch module affords citizen developers is the ability to discreetly decide what information to pass from one workflow to second when one launches another. When a workflow has collected data in flight, an optimized customer experience shouldn’t ask the customer to repeatedly input data. If the workflow hasn’t passed that information back to a core system, via one of the many integrations configured via the Ushur no-code configurator, a CXA workflow can pass data to the next one and keep the customer experience seamless to the end user.

Conclusion

The release introducing Ushur Studio has changed the way that the Ushur user-base works with the leading CXA platform. It’s easier than ever to build customer experiences, link them, and control their execution. To see a demo of the new and improved experience in Ushur Studio, sign up for a free trial or schedule time for a demo. 

Enterprise Content Management, Production Capture, and Document Transformation have been around for 35+ years. Their origins center around scanning, manually indexing and publishing documents to content management systems for archival and shared retention.

Over time, the industry has focused on reducing human touch points, associated labor cost, and increasing visibility into the content contained within documents. Production optical character recognition (OCR) became mainstream, as did forms recognition (classification), field level data extraction, text analytics, and natural language processing (NLP). The capture market has leveraged various forms of AI for 25+ years, long before AI was popular.

The emergence of Digital Transformation has caused the capture market to shift from an autonomous, batch oriented, back-office focus to an integrated, transactional, in-process service focus. This shift was the catalyst for the emergence of what we now know as the $5B+ Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) market.

Up until recently, the service to license ratio associated with deploying IDP solutions has been high… The cost associated with setting up, training, fine-tuning, and scripting document transformation-related support tasks has been daunting. Fast forward to today and recent advancements in AI are revolutionizing the IDP industry. The service dependencies associated with IDP deployments are being shattered by advancements in multi-modal transformation, key-value-pairing, machine learning, and generative AI.

IDP’s back-office, document-centric focus has influenced the legacy architectures for many of the dominant IDP providers. As a result, the shift from back-office automation to front-office, customer experience automation use cases requires a significant change in approach. New entrants to the market (post the back-office to front-office shift) do not suffer from these legacy IDP architecture constraints.

Enter Customer Experience Automation (CXA): The next generation of AI driven platforms solely focused on delivering exceptional customer experiences by automating customer engagements in all shapes and forms and through any and every channel of engagement. An interesting dynamic occurs as the shift from back-office process automation to front-office experience automation unfolds. The historic IDP focus on documents must expand to include a much broader variety of content. It’s not just about capturing business documents. It’s about capturing and understanding all engagement related content such as email, texts, spreadsheets, videos, and audio. It’s about having an interactive dialog with the customer and asking them questions to gather the information needed to complete the engagement.

IDP vendors have been so document focused (and to a large extent back-office centric) the transition to front-office, content centric, experience automation is likely going to require material retooling and a significant investment in time and money.

The next generation of Customer Experience Automation (CXA) vendors have built their platforms with this knowledge and foresight in mind. Leveraging AI to generate optimal and satisfying customer experiences along with the ability to capture and process any sort of experience related content.

Here’s just a few examples of how Intelligent Experience Automation differs from Intelligent Document Processing:

• Interactive: CXA platforms allow organizations to quickly and easily build interactive customer experiences to gather customer data or disseminate information. IDP platforms have been built to process documents. Very few IDP vendors have the ability to reach out to customers and engage them for content review or to gather additional information.
• Responsive: Being responsive to customers is paramount, especially for mobile engagements. CXA platforms are highly responsive and transactional. Most IDP platforms are batch oriented. Some of the more progressive vendors provide mobile capture capabilities but still struggle with latency issues.
• Visible: CXA platforms provide a unified view into engagement related content, allowing the organization to determine where specific information came from. The body of an email, a cell in a spreadsheet or a field contained in a traditional form. Most IDP platforms are limited to providing insight into document centric data.
• Multi-channel: CXA platforms allow customers to engage an organization through their preferred channel, and in many instances, across multiple channels within the same engagement. As an example, starting with a web portal experience, transitioning to SMS, and concluding through email. Some IDP vendors provide multi-channel capture capabilities, but the scope is typically narrow and limited.
• Long running: Customer engagements can be quick and simple but it’s not uncommon for an engagement to start and pause for hours or days, and then pick up again based on customer availability and access to information. CXA platforms provide support for long running engagements whereas most IDP platforms are batch oriented or short running temporal environments.
• AI driven: Many of the IDP incumbents suffer from legacy architectures, technical debt, and large install bases where they need to ensure 100% backward compatibility. New CXA vendors have entered the market and designed their architectures at a time where AI advancements were prevalent and the benefits of having an AI driven platform were obvious.

The emerging customer experience automation market segment requires a broader definition of IDP to satisfy its automation objectives. As a result, Intelligent Experience Automation is poised to surpass IDP and become the new bar for processing customer experience related content, enabling CXA platforms to automate customer engagements. Designing your customer experience automation strategy is essential to success in digital transformation. Making sure your engagement automation strategy is capable of supporting your CXA initiatives will be key to any future success.

The healthcare landscape is undergoing a profound shift as interactive digital channels take center stage in guiding individuals towards better well-being. With over 90% of the $4.1 trillion U.S. healthcare costs linked to chronic and mental health issues according to the CDC, there's an urgent need for transformative solutions. Payers are presented with a unique opportunity, leveraging advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technology to improve health outcomes and ensure health equity.

Challenges of Implementing Digital Solutions

While various digital communication channels such as SMS, member apps, and portals have emerged, there is a need for continued innovation to improve quality outcomes. Secure and encrypted channels, AI-powered healthcare automation solutions, and interactive communications can play a crucial role in reaching members effectively.

There are many technical difficulties to putting together a strategy to guide members to healthy outcomes that is completely HIPAA-compliant. As a way around this, many payers depend on telephone calls or traditional member apps or portals to communicate with members. The problem is that this requires members to be overly proactive, whereas having an appointment reminder “pushed” to them via a HIPAA-compliant digital message would engage them instantly.

In a healthcare communication landscape facing challenges, members are increasingly preferring digital channels, with 65% favoring SMS text. An effective communication approach necessitates an omnichannel integration, seamlessly blending various channels for member engagement.

The Role of Digital Solutions for Closing Care Gaps

Supporting health and wellness—including closing gaps in care—requires an omnichannel strategy, communicating through secure channels for everything from appointment reminders to preventive education to care management appointments. According to Ushur’s Guide to More Effective Healthcare Quality Communications, the emphasis should be on timely, personalized, and responsive interactions, providing a more coordinated and person-centered approach to helping people maximize their health and wellness.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is commonly cited as a potential solution to the aforementioned challenges facing healthcare quality today. For example, recent studies show that “explainable AI is seen as a powerful tool due to its increased transparency, and therefore, its ability to generate trust relationships.” Used correctly, AI-powered healthcare automation can be an effective solution for communicating with the right members at the right time, engaging through their preferred channels, simplifying communication, delivering clear calls to action, and personalizing interactions.

In Conclusion

Despite challenges, health plans are moving towards providing secure, interactive, and member-centric communications, heralding a future where individuals actively manage their well-being. Embracing these innovations promises to bridge gaps in care, enhance member engagement, and lead towards a healthcare landscape with improved outcomes for all.

Customer Experience (CX) is the collective impact of a customer's interactions with a brand. It's pivotal for businesses in the digital era, as 86% of buyers pay more for superior CX, (according to PwC), and CX leaders generate 5.7x more revenue. Customer Experience Transformation, which involves revamping the customer journey using data, technology, and feedback, is key to exceeding expectations and gaining an edge. Here I provide critical insights into understanding and implementing effective CX transformation strategies, overcoming challenges, and staying abreast of future trends.

Understanding Customer Expectations

Understanding customer expectations is the cornerstone of Customer Experience (CX) Transformation. These expectations, influenced by various factors like past experiences and market trends, serve as a benchmark for evaluating brand interactions. To grasp these dynamic standards, businesses should leverage feedback channels and analytical tools, spotting gaps for better customer experiences.

However, mere understanding isn't enough. For effective CX Transformation, the best companies utilize a systematic approach, encompassing a customer-centric culture across the entire organization, technology integration, and success measurement.

Key Components of Customer Experience Transformation

Foundational Building Blocks

This includes mapping customer journeys, creating personas, identifying pain points, and establishing a CX framework. Identifying pain points is crucial in eliminating the obstacles in a customer’s journey, facilitating easier and more pleasant interactions. The best customer-centric strategies are empathetic, and putting yourself in your customers’ shoes is the best way to foster this. 

Digital Technologies

Leveraging cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), chatbots, and data analytics can revolutionize customer experiences. AI-driven insights enable personalized interactions, while chatbots provide round-the-clock support. Data analytics refines strategies, enhancing customer engagement and loyalty. These tools collectively empower businesses to transform operations and drive sustainable growth. Many organizations are undergoing digital transformation initiatives, the process of using digital tools and methods to improve or innovate their products, services, processes, and customer interactions.

CX Culture

CX transcends mere departmental boundaries; it embodies an organizational ethos. This cultural shift necessitates resolute leadership, fervent employee involvement, and seamless inter-departmental collaboration—sometimes necessitating altering or creating business processes. It demands a collective commitment to placing the customer at the core of every decision and action, fostering an environment where exceptional experiences are not just a goal, but a way of doing business for the entire organization.

Personalization and Customization

Personalization, rooted in understanding individual customer behaviors and preferences, lets businesses offer tailored interactions, fostering a sense of appreciation and loyalty in customers. Customization, on the other hand, empowers customers to modify products or services as per their needs, adding unique value and elevating satisfaction levels. The burgeoning technology of Generative AI has the potential to truly revolutionize this personalization, not just in details, but the information and experiences delivered as a whole.

Omni-channel Engagement

Omni-channel engagement is a vital element of customer experience transformation. It refers to offering a seamless, unified experience across all channels — be it online platforms, physical stores, or customer service. By integrating multiple touchpoints, businesses can ensure consistency and continuity in customer interactions. By leveraging technologies that are built from the ground up with an omni-channel approach, enabling customers to pause an interaction in one channel, then pick back up when they are able in another channel, pushes the quality of customer experiences to a higher level, especially across digital channels.

Data-Driven Insights and Analytics

Data-driven insights and analytics are integral to customer experience initiatives. They provide in-depth understanding of customer behaviors, preferences, and trends in real-time. This valuable data can inform business strategies, drive personalization, enhance customer interactions, and predict future behaviors, ultimately leading to an elevated customer experience and increased business growth.

Implementing Customer Experience Transformation

Customer experience transformation is an ongoing process requiring continuous enhancement. To effectively execute this, businesses should adhere to certain best practices:

Customer experience (CX) is the aggregate sum of all the interactions between a person and a brand. Good customer experience implies that a brand has comfortably met or exceeded the needs of the people that engage with it, and bad customer experiences (the unfortunately more common outcome) leave a person grasping for direction and outcomes. 

Good customer experience (CX) is pivotal for business in the digital era, as 86% of buyers pay more for superior customer experiences (according to PwC), and CX leaders generate 5.7x more revenue. As a result, many organizations have to transform their customer experience programs and offerings to better serve their customers. Customer Experience Transformation is the process of revamping the interactions in that customer journey using data, technology, and individual feedback. Here I provide critical insights into customer expectations and how to implement effective CX transformation projects while planning for future trends.

Understanding Customer Expectations

Understanding customer expectations is the cornerstone of successful Customer Experience (CX) Transformations. These expectations, influenced by various factors like past experiences and market trends, serve as the barometer against which brand interactions are evaluated. To understand and respond to the expectations that define “good” customer experiences, businesses must leverage feedback channels and analytical tools, spotting gaps for better customer experiences.

the best companies utilize a systematic approach, build a customer-centric culture across the entire organization, integrate the right technology, and find the right success measures

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It’s not enough just to understand. For CX Transformation projects to be effective, the best companies utilize a systematic approach, build a customer-centric culture across the entire organization, integrate the right technology, and find the right success measures. 

Key Components of Customer Experience Transformation

An Accurate Customer Journey Map

Customer experience transformation efforts depend on mapping customer journeys, creating personas, identifying pain points, and establishing a CX framework. Identifying pain points for a set of well-researched personas is crucial for any business that wants to eliminate the obstacles in a customer’s journey and facilitate easier and more satisfactory interactions. The best customer-centric strategies are not only proactive, they’re empathetic. 

The Technology Ecosystem

Customer experiences for digital-first businesses are defined by the quality of their technological deployments like artificial intelligence (AI), process automation, and comprehensive data analytics. This combination can help businesses build better chatbots, personalize interactions, and offer round-the-clock support. Data analytics can also be useful when refining strategies, enhancing customer engagement and loyalty. Automation ties all the efforts together and accelerates customer-centric processes.

When these technologies are deployed strategically, they collectively empower businesses to transform operations and drive sustainable growth. Many organizations are undergoing digital transformation initiatives to improve or innovate their products, services, processes, and customer interactions with this consortium of digital tools and methods.

A Customer-Centric Culture

CX transcends mere departmental boundaries; it embodies an organizational ethos that businesses have to cultivate. The approach of customer-first culture necessitates resolute leadership, fervent employee involvement, and seamless inter-departmental collaboration. It demands a collective commitment to placing the customer at the core of every decision and action, fostering an environment where exceptional experiences are not just a goal, but a way of doing business for the entire organization.

Personalization and Customization

Personalization, rooted in understanding individual customer behaviors and preferences, lets businesses offer tailored interactions, fostering a sense of appreciation and loyalty in customers. Customization, on the other hand, empowers customers to modify products or services as per their needs, adding unique value and elevating satisfaction levels. The burgeoning technology of Generative AI has the potential to truly revolutionize this personalization, not just in details, but the information and experiences delivered as a whole.

Omni-channel Engagement

Omni-channel engagement is now a table-stakes standard of modern customer experience, and transformation projects often center around filling in gaps in existing engagement channels. It refers to offering a seamless, unified experience across all channels — be it online platforms or customer service. By integrating multiple touchpoints, businesses can ensure consistency and continuity in customer interactions. By leveraging technologies that are built from the ground up with an omni-channel approach–enabling customers to pause an interaction in one channel and then pick back up when they are able in another channel–businesses can drive the quality of customer experiences to the highest level, especially when switching contexts across channels.

Data-Driven Insights and Analytics

Data-driven insights and analytics are integral to customer experience initiatives. They provide in-depth understanding of current customer behaviors, preferences, and trends while also affording a retrospective view on CX failures and a view towards desired state in the future. This valuable data can inform business strategies, drive personalization, enhance customer interactions, and predict future behaviors, ultimately leading to an elevated customer experience and increased business growth.

Implementing Customer Experience Transformation

Despite conceptions to the contrary, customer experience transformation is an ongoing process and it requires continuous enhancement. To effectively implement customer experience transformation culture and practices, businesses should adhere to certain best practices:

1. Set Clear Goals: Define the objectives and outcomes of customer experience transformation, aligning them with the business strategy. Establish KPIs and metrics for monitoring progress.
2. Involve Employees: Empower employees in delivering top-notch customer experiences. Provide training, acknowledge their contributions, and learn from their feedback.
3. Make Data-Driven Decisions: Utilize data and analytics to understand customer behavior, optimize products, services, and processes, and identify improvement opportunities.
4. Iterate Continuously: Adopt an agile approach to customer experience transformation. Be adaptable to changing customer needs and incorporate their feedback into solutions.
5. Depend on Technological Solutions: Leverage technology to enhance customer experience, provide personalized experiences across multiple channels, and to adapt CX at the speed of changing customer demands. Use tech to collect the right data, talk to customers, and understand the complexities of common patterns.
6. Customer-Centric Culture: Create a culture that prioritizes customers' needs and expectations. Foster trust, accountability, diversity, and creativity within the organization.

Customer experience transformation projects that seem daunting often inspire companies to work with vendors that have decades of experience executing transformations. While consulting engagements can address some of the challenges with customer experience transformation, other components are cultural and must be owned internally. 

Overcoming Challenges in Customer Experience Transformation

There are implicit costs, complexities, and obstacles in the best practices for implementing CX transformation projects that can hinder successful outcomes. The biggest obstacles are often internal: organizational silos limit impact, data is too fragmented to support CX improvements, and companies may not be prepared with the right mindset. Transformation projects can also include limited investment funding, inadequate talent, and quickly changing technology landscapes.

companies should start with a leader-first approach to establishing a customer-centric culture

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To overcome these challenges, companies should start with a leader-first approach to establishing a customer-centric culture, and an obvious set of clear goals. Leadership should invest in the right talent, technology, and establish an environment that fosters collaboration and experimentation. After all, if every company knew the perfect recipe for success in CX, and didn’t need to experiment, they probably would have already tried those key projects. 

The final and most critical element of customer experience transformation is to centralize around a strategy that includes proactive customer experience. By most every measure of customer experiences, responsiveness and ease-of-use will make or break whether they are poor, adequate, or exceptional. The easiest way to seem attentive and easy to work with is answering questions before they’re asked.

Measuring Success in Customer Experience

Measuring success in CX is essential to demonstrate ROI and fine-tune strategies over time. Some common metrics for CX measurement include customer satisfaction, net promoter scores, customer effort scores, and customer lifetime value. However, companies should also consider business-specific metrics that align with their CX goals.

Moreover, customer feedback is valuable for identifying areas for improvement and making data-driven decisions. Customer satisfaction surveys, social media feedback, and customer reviews are great sources of feedback. Companies can also use analysis tools like sentiment analysis and text analytics to extract insights from unstructured data.

Transformation across Industries

Finally, it is worth exploring the impact of customer experience initiatives across different industries. Industries like retail, hospitality, F&B have been at the forefront of customer experience innovation as they have a high degree of customer interaction and have historically differentiated themselves with brand elements like their CX quality. However, other sectors like healthcare, financial services, and even government are now embarking on CX transformation journeys to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty because they understand that it can similarly grow their top and bottom line revenue. 

Insurance

In the insurance industry, customer experience transformation is crucial because customer experience is often a carrier's best differentiator. The industry is shifting its focus from product-centric to customer-centric strategies. By leveraging technology, insurers can personalize policies, simplify claim processes, and offer 24/7 customer service, leading to improved satisfaction, brand loyalty, retention, and ultimately, business growth.

Healthcare

In the healthcare industry, customer experience is pivotal for commercial success because it directly influences patient outcomes and satisfaction. A patient-centric approach, facilitated by technology, ensures personalized care, clear communication, and prompt service. Moreover, a positive customer experience in healthcare can enhance patient adherence to treatment plans and foster trust in healthcare providers. Therefore, efficient and effective customer experiences are essential for healthcare providers and payerspayors aiming to deliver high-quality, efficient, and patient-centered care and service.

Banking and Financial Services

In the financial sector, customer experience transformation is central to building a competitive advantage. Great customer experience in the consumer-focused financial sector leverages technology to streamline services, ensure seamless transactions, and offer personalized financial advice. Great customer experience in the commercial-facing segment of financial services deploys tech to be responsive, make critical decisions quickly, and generally be easiest to do business with.

 A customer-centric mindset in finance can boost client loyalty, enhance satisfaction and attract new customers. As such, prioritizing customer experience is pivotal for financial institutions striving to offer superior services, foster trust, and deliver value in today's highly competitive and digital financial landscape.

Final thoughts

Customer experiences today are a critical value driver for businesses thriving in a highly competitive enterprise landscape. The easiest, fastest, and most effective customer experience breeds today's digital winners, and it's difficult to build without substantial levels of automation. Ushur, an industry leader in customer engagement with its Customer Experience Automation™ (CXA) platform, blends conversational AI, document AI, and process automation to add customer experiences on top of existing platforms. Ushur elevates customer interactions and is uniquely engineered to help businesses in regulated industries deploy, improve, and update mission-critical customer experiences. 

Learn more at ushur.com.

Low Code No Code (LCNC) software platforms are designed to help individuals with limited or no prior coding experience create applications and experiences through intuitive drag-and-drop interfaces (often referred to as Graphical User Interfaces, or GUI’s). The two require differentiation. Low Code platforms require minimal coding but often support more complex or customizable features by being code-friendly. No Code software is similar, but is a type of software development tooling that allows users to build applications without writing any code. No Code platforms exclusively use visual tools, drag-and-drop interfaces, templates, and pre-built components.

Introduction to Low Code No Code software

Businesses often struggle to create and implement software applications that align with their specific needs and objectives, but staying competitive in today’s landscape necessitates a digital-first approach.

One of the main reasons for this struggle is the scarcity of IT resources and expertise. As per an Appian study, “82% of companies can’t attract and retain the software engineers” needed to build solutions in-house. Another study reveals that an estimated 377,500 IT jobs will remain unfilled annually from 2022 to 2032. In an era of rapid digital transformation, Low Code No Code software stands at the forefront as an innovative solution that empowers users to create applications without the need for extensive coding knowledge. These revolutionary platforms pave the way for non-technical individuals to devise and deploy applications tailored to various business needs, from workflow automation and customer experience enhancement to data-driven insight generation. In this blog post, I delve into the fundamental aspects of No Code Low Code software, exploring their key components, potential business impacts, implementation strategies and evaluation metrics to measure their success.

Key components of Low Code No Code software

Low Code No Code software uses a multifaceted approach for software development. There are three crucial components of Low Code No Code software I’ll delve into. Understanding these elements is essential before selecting and implementing LCNC software. The key components are:

• Differentiating Low Code No Code: I’ll explain the distinctions and parallels between Low Code No Code software to make it easier to determine which one aligns better with your project requirements.
• Workflow Integration: I will explain how to seamlessly incorporate Low Code No Code software into your existing business operations, systems, and data sources while ensuring compatibility and security.
• Choosing the Right Tools: I’ll offer criteria and guidelines to aid you in selecting the most suitable Low Code No Code platform or tool that aligns with your specific objectives. Moreover, I will guide you on how to compare and evaluate various options.

Each of these components plays a pivotal role in leveraging Low Code No Code software effectively for your business.

Differentiating Low Code & No Code

As alluded to above, Low Code No Code (LCNC) represents two distinct types of software development, both designed to facilitate application building with minimal or even zero coding. Low Code software necessitates some degree of coding, especially when it comes to intricate or tailored features and is particularly beneficial for developers or advanced users who desire greater control and flexibility over their applications.

On the other hand, No Code software completely eliminates the need for coding and serves as an ideal choice for non-technical users seeking a simpler, more expedient route to application creation. So how do they align and how do they compare?

Workflow integration

Not all Low Code No Code software can integrate smoothly with legacy systems and data sources. Some LCNC software may require users to replace or modify their existing systems, which can be costly,  time-consuming, or even leave a project stuck on the starting block. That’s why it’s important to choose LCNC software that can sit on top of existing tech infrastructure and interact with it through simple configuration or third-party connectors. 

For a new software application to serve as more than just a thought experiment, it almost certainly must leverage the data and functionality of legacy systems while also adding new features and capabilities. Integration serves that requirement and is a crucial aspect of any business that requires careful planning and evaluation to ensure that the new tools and platforms complement rather than conflict with existing operations.

Choosing the right tools

The Low Code No Code software space sits on a spectrum that encompasses various tools and platforms, each with its unique features, functions, and pricing structures. It's crucial to identify the tools that dovetail with your specific objectives and requirements.

Here are some criteria and guidelines for evaluating and comparing various Low Code No Code tools:

• User Experience: Assess the intuitiveness and simplicity of the user interface and the development environment. Consider the level of training and support needed to use the tool effectively.
• Capabilities: Understand the tool's potential and limitations. Determine what kind of applications you can build with it and evaluate how customizable and scalable these applications can be.
• Integration: Gauge the tool's ability to integrate seamlessly with your existing systems, data sources, and cloud services. Ensure the integration is both compatible and secure.
• Security: Check the tool’s security standards, compliance, and data protection features and avoid tools with risky code.
• Scalability: Check the tool’s performance, availability, and customization features and avoid tools with limited capabilities.

Impact of Low Code No Code Software on Your Business

Utilizing Low Code No Code software allows for quicker and simpler application creation, resource and cost optimization, and an improvement in customer satisfaction and loyalty. In this part, I will explore three primary impacts of LCNC software on your business:

• Efficiency in Time: LCNC software can curtail the time and effort needed for developing and deploying applications. This efficiency can enhance speed to market, agility, and innovation.
• Resource Optimization: LCNC software can optimize resource usage and allocation, thereby reducing operational costs, by freeing up IT resources for more strategic tasks; increasing return on investment (ROI).
• Boosted Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): LCNC software can elevate customer experience and satisfaction overall by helping projects move quickly and therefore affording teams a chance to address more of the deficiencies in their customer experience; leading to increased customer retention, loyalty, and advocacy.

Efficiency in time

Low Code No Code software drastically cuts down on the time and effort needed to develop and deploy applications. As per a study by Forrester, the use of LCNC software can expedite the delivery of applications by a factor of 10 or more, while using 70% fewer resources.

As per a study by Forrester, the use of LCNC software can expedite the delivery of applications by a factor of 10 or more, while using 70% fewer resources.

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The reason for this speed is that LCNC software either minimizes or omits the complex coding process altogether, relying instead on visual tools, drag-and-drop elements, templates, and pre-configured features. Code-based projects with IT often leaves development teams starting from scratch. Code-free software also facilitates quicker testing, debugging, and updating of applications through automation and cloud-based deployment.

Resource optimization

One significant benefit of Low Code No Code software is its unique ability to optimize resource utilization and distribution. By incorporating LCNC software into operations, any business can minimize reliance on overburdened internal IT departments or costly external IT services, which often consume considerable time and carry inherent risks.

LCNC software can free up your IT resources for strategic initiatives, such as innovation, security, and governance. It empowers even those lacking technical skills to develop applications autonomously, thereby decreasing dependence on IT personnel. This autonomy can enhance IT productivity and efficiency, circumventing IT bottlenecks and backlogs.

Boosted customer satisfaction (CSAT)

Another advantage of Low Code No Code software – is its potential to heighten customer satisfaction and build loyalty. The implementation of automation allows businesses to create applications that are highly responsive, personalized, and still engaging for its customers. LCNC helps businesses implement those automated processes even more quickly and effectively than ever before so they can give customers even more opportunities for automated self-service.

Evaluating Low Code No Code Tools

Business Compatibility

Choosing the right Low Code No Code tool for your enterprise hinges on its alignment with your business objectives, needs and challenges. The effectiveness of a LCNC tool can vary greatly across industries and use cases, making it vital to find a solution that is tailored to your specific business domain, requirements, and expectations.

To assess the business compatibility of a LCNC tool, consider the following key questions:

• Feature Alignment: Does the LCNC tool offer features and functionalities that align with your business goals and desired outcomes?
• Industry Standards: Does the LCNC tool adhere to industry standards and best practices pertinent to your business domain?
• Customization: Does the LCNC tool provide templates, components, and accelerators that are customized to your business use cases and scenarios?
• Integration: Does the LCNC tool seamlessly integrate with your existing systems, workflows, and data sources?
• Compliance: Does the LCNC tool meet the security, privacy, and regulatory policies and guidelines relevant to your business?

Implementation Timeline

The duration it takes to deploy and begin utilizing a Low Code No Code tool can hinge on several factors including the project's complexity and scope, the availability and proficiency of resources, integration and customization requirements and testing and deployment procedures. A LCNC tool with a swift implementation process can prove beneficial by saving time and costs, as well as delivering results more rapidly.

Consider these guiding questions when estimating the implementation timeline of a LCNC tool:

• Feature alignment: Does the LCNC tool offer features and functionalities that align with your business goals and desired outcomes?
• Industry standards: Does the LCNC tool adhere to industry standards and best practices pertinent to your business domain?
• Customization: Does the LCNC tool provide templates, components, and accelerators that are customized to your business use cases and scenarios?
• Integration: Does the LCNC tool seamlessly integrate with your existing systems, workflows, and data sources?
• Compliance: Does the LCNC tool meet the security, privacy, and regulatory policies and guidelines relevant to your business?

Platform Cost Analysis

The last crucial aspect to consider when selecting a Low Code No Code tool for your enterprise is its financial impact. Evaluating the cost of a LCNC platform involves juxtaposing the initial and recurring expenses against the anticipated benefits and savings. A tool that offers lower costs can aid in maximizing your ROI and minimizing your total cost of ownership (TCO).

In assessing the cost-effectiveness of a LCNC tool, consider these critical questions

• Subscription or license fee: What is the cost of subscribing to or licensing the LCNC tool?
• Additional expenses: What are the supplementary costs related to hosting, storage, bandwidth, security, among others?
• Maintenance and support costs: What are the expenses associated with maintaining and supporting the LCNC tool?
• Training and learning costs: What are the costs involved in training users and developers to use the LCNC tool effectively?
• Opportunity costs and risks: What are the potential opportunity costs and risks associated with employing or avoiding the LCNC tool?

The Ushur Low Code No Code (LCNC) platform for enhanced digital experiences

The Ushur Customer Experience Automation (CXA)™ platform is the leading Low Code No Code (LCNC) software that enables businesses to create automated and AI-powered customer experiences. With its intuitive interface and robust capabilities, users can easily develop intelligent chatbots, personalized notifications, proactive communication channels, and other digital solutions without any coding expertise. The platform also provides analytics and insights to improve customer engagement and satisfaction across various touchpoints. Ushur stands out among other LCNC platforms with its omnichannel, AI-centric, and seamless integration features.

One should leverage the past to help understand the present, and to help better predict and create that future.

Let’s rewind and go back to the origin of what we now call Digital Transformation (DX), when various legal proceedings resulted in the legitimization of digital signatures. Digital signatures became a viable option for transacting business and it was the pebble in the pond that kicked off the move for organizations to revisit how they conducted business. Up until that point, organizations required contracts and agreements to be printed out, physically signed and either faxed or scanned and emailed. When this limitation was lifted, organizations realized they could go completely digital.

During this same time-period, the evolution of mobility began to have a major impact on consumer expectations. Consumers quickly became used to things being quick, easy and on demand. They became accustomed to having control over when, how and where they engaged and they weren’t shy about complaining or switching away from businesses, especially in banking or insurance, that were difficult to work with.

As a result, organizations quickly realized customer experience was going to become the primary battle ground from a competitive standpoint. Customer retention and new customer acquisition in the future would be predicated on delighting and creating the best possible experience for those customers.

The next pebble in the pond was the emergence of low-code and no-code platforms built in response to the overall tech democratization macro trend. The days of long, lengthy, service-heavy deployments were running out. Buyers wanted accelerated time-to-value, lower total cost of ownership and lower overall risk. Nowhere were these dynamics more obvious than with the emergence of Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Automating simple back-office tasks was now something the average knowledge worker could do themselves with minimal dependency on IT (or at least that’s what the RPA providers promised; topic for another time). Businesses were empowered to automate simple, repetitive tasks that were often tedious and time consuming.

More recently, we’ve watched the emergence of Conversational AI platforms. This began initially with basic (limited) Q&A oriented chatbots, which usually had the effect of agitating and frustrating customers rather than helping them, or cheesy virtual assistants that provided minimal value. The emergence of generative AI has the potential to breathe new life into conversational AI as long as platform vendors can figure out how to monitor and control generative AI responses.

...organizations quickly realized customer experience was going to become the primary battle ground from a competitive standpoint.

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Over the past five decades, businesses, especially enterprises in highly regulated industries, have been on a quest to develop ever larger Systems of Record (SoR) that have now become essential to their day to day operations. These SoRs are robust, scalable and seemingly bullet proof enterprise-class platforms that act as the backbone of very large technology infrastructures delivering the ability to conduct commerce every day without interruption.

Combine these complex and sluggish enterprise infrastructures built around behemoth SoRs with the emergence of a global populace that is increasingly mobile and tech savvy and you end up with a gaping chasm in human expectation versus human experience.

In this series of articles, we will address this very question: how do enterprises enable their SoRs and tech infrastructures to provide exceptional, omni-channel, low latency, on-demand, interactive experiences?

The obvious answer is selecting a System of Engagement (SoE) that is designed and architected from the ground up to provide optimal customer experiences while front-ending any SoR. System of engagement is a broad category, and we’re now seeing the emergence of a new set of SoE developers focused on Customer Experience Automation (CXA) – the interdisciplinary intersection of artificial intelligence, process automation, and conversational interfaces blended to deliver optimized human experiences. These low-code and no-code platforms combine conversational AI, document transformation, workflow automation, system-to-system interoperability and recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (Large Language Models and Generative AI), all enabling organizations to quickly and easily build and deliver exceptional customer experiences with the highest possible efficiency. It is important to note that these vendors have deliberately focused on customer experiences as the outcome while engagement is a necessary component.

If delighting your customers is a priority, you need to figure out your Customer Experience Automation strategy. Stay tuned as we dive deeper into the art of the possible in the world of AI-powered experience automation. 

As the role of digital communications grows, true omnichannel capabilities become more crucial to provide a satisfying, unified customer experience. The goal of omnichannel sounds simple — maintain customer engagement across channels to meet customer expectations — but it's among the most complex challenges businesses face today. But does an omnichannel approach truly contribute to business drivers loyalty, improved customer experience and reduced operational costs? What is the difference between omnichannel and multichannel? This blog pulls apart and outlines some of the nuances of the terms to clarify the general principles of omnichannel in a practical setting, and is intended to educate readers on what they should look for when qualifying solutions and strategies.

Omnichannel of the Past

“Omnichannel” is a term that’s been touted by the software industry, but has been defined in the past in fields like retail or banking as the handoff between people who shopped or banked online, and then transitioned back to  in person or live call interactions; or vice versa. 

The information inherent to the handoff as people transitioned from live interaction to digital was key to identifying consumer behavior patterns, and so the advent of omnichannel marketing became a gold mine for customer data. It was because of “omnichannel” marketing’s inherent utility that it became an experience laden with value that other companies strove to achieve. The principle of easy handoff between channels of engagement is a key component that persists into the digital communications space as digital channels continue to expand.

Omnichannel in today’s digital world

What makes digital engagement solutions truly part of the omnichannel landscape is a design principle that guarantees a policy of open-door acceptance of customer traffic. Similar to the easy transition between live and digital experiences was the advent of “omnichannel” as a recognized term, omnichannel in digital communications requires that they support easy transitions from one digital channel to the next, across all relevant lines of communication - as well as seamless transitions to live and even offline channels.That means that whenever a customer wants to contact a company, the company can receive that contact whether it’s via text message, phone call, email, or any other digital channel. But where are the limitations?

Multi-channel is not Omnichannel

Many digital engagement companies have built solutions that let people text their contact center,  call into a support line, or even chat with a live agent, but the experiences are vastly different between them - and there aren’t smooth data transitions when customers hop between these channels. That’s a part of the reason why customers still leave channels intended to support call avoidance or deflection and call into contact centers, leaving companies still struggling to manage overstrained and under-staffed support lines. 

Simply offering multiple channels with differing experiences is not the same thing as building omnichannel solutions. While an omnichannel solution is multi-channel, a multi-channel offering is not necessarily omnichannel. This is an important distinction that will leave digital engagement customers disappointed with an omnichannel implementation if not met. The experience between calls, chats, text, and emails needs to be of comparable ease and value - and data collected in one channel needs to be transitioned to the next one to enable the customer to not have to repeat information they just shared. With true omnichannel communications, enabling customers to start their conversation in one channel like email, then move to another channel for digital self service is a smoother, easier and frictionless process.

Easy transition between digital and live channels

Besides the open-door policy of receiving any communication from any channel, omnichannel offerings are also those where businesses “maintain state” in communication with their customers as they transition between channels. The idea of maintaining state is not as complex as it sounds. It implies that when customers are interacting digitally, then call into a contact center, the customer support center they reach should both be able to pick up where they left off, and have access to any information they shared before they switched channels.

Ushur Supports True Omnichannel Experiences

Omnichannel capabilities in Customer Experience Automation™ (CXA) solutions are a key differentiator for a platform like Ushur where users can build a workflow to handle a specific Micro-Engagement™ once and then deploy it to other digital channels with a single click. For example, when users text their support line with “#applicationstatus”, they get the same walk-through for checking their application status as they would if they were to go through Ushur’s IVR-deflection to digital self service experience when they call into a support center (e.g. calling a support center and choosing option x to receive application status digitally). 

Ushur is also a seamless channel and data bridge between on and even off-line channels into digital channels, as well as a seamless bridge back to live channels as shown in the illustration below.

Ushur makes the deployment easy, but also the process for building flows and setting up data integrations. The Ushur no-code, drag-and-drop builder has pre-built modules to support interactive more effective digital communications with customers that alert, educate, influence, survey, push and pull information and even files and images in a convenient way. Ushur integrations and secure FTP file transfer capabilities make it easier to push and pull information to front and back-end systems. Pre-trained machine learning models also make interacting with AI easier

In addition to helping insurers, healthcare companies and financial service companies to route, classify, and answer any question their customers have - even those depending on data in core systems - Ushur also tracks the status of each Micro-Engagement across any channel. Customers can start their conversation on one channel and begin a new conversation on another, and Ushur connects the dots for the company, so customer service agents don’t have to. Once all the essential information is in one place, it’s much easier to resolve the query or even provide the relevant information proactively.

The Ushur Silent Listener allows companies to capture and respond to SMS text responses based on business rules or even via conversational AI rather than letting those responses result in a dead end of non responsiveness.

An example of an Ushur-optimized omnichannel experience is when an HR Benefits Administrator receives an Ushur automated email related to group benefits enrollment, and clicks through to an Ushur secure digital channel to answer a few questions in a micro engagement. They get interrupted by a meeting while they are on screen 2 of 4 of the engagement. When they come back to finish the engagement, they are able to pick up where they left off and none of the information they provided previously is lost.  

Finally, Ushur is dedicated to handling the responsibility to build capabilities for new digital channels as they arise and companies need them. Ushur’s modular and flexible architecture future-proofs a company’s investment in customer experience by relieving it from having to build a pathway for every channel as it becomes more popular. From Email and Web, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, to SMS, Ushur’s CXA platform delivers the scalability companies need to engage on those channels.

Conclusion

With a more specific definition of what goes into omnichannel solutions, we hope readers will feel empowered to dissect what each capability means and strive to get to true omnichannel status. We also hope that everyone now has the language to ask for the functionality they deserve to support their customer experience improvement goals, and future-proof their communication investments.

If you want to see what a true omnichannel digital engagement platform looks like, and how to build a roadmap for an immersive, modern customer experience journey, please reach out to ushur.com/request-demo.

Healthcare companies need to know their members’ and patients’ current status for social determinants of health (SDOH) or those factors will block healthcare delivery and negatively affect health (medical and behavioral) outcomes.

Social determinants of health (SDOH) are a widely recognized set of environmental factors that affect whether individual people are able to enjoy good health and a high quality of life. When people are lacking in basic needs such as housing, nutrition, income, transportation, community connectivity or similar areas, they need support in order to take care of themselves and to be able to then focus on higher level tasks like seeking medical care. Healthcare companies need to know their members’ and patients’ current status for social determinants of health and provide needed support in innovative ways, or the knowledge gap becomes a barrier, blocking healthcare delivery and negatively affecting health (medical and behavioral) outcomes.

Picture trying to support the health of a diabetic patient. If the healthcare company providing the support doesn’t know how much or what kind of food the patient has access to, there is a barrier to success. But imagine if that patient, who perhaps doesn’t feel comfortable talking to a live person, could respond to a HIPAA secure message and answer a short survey on their smartphone. And what if that survey could not only gather information the healthcare companies need, but also direct that person to resources they need quickly such as a nearby food shelf or transportation to a medical appointment. Ushur’s Invisible App™ enables just that (watch this video to see an illustration).

Better Data = Better Healthcare Delivery

What kind of data does a healthcare provider or payer need from members and patients to understand SDOH?

One extremely important set of data are environmental factors. Understanding the environment a person lives in, like possibly the lack of secure housing or external (or internal) environmental safety concerns, can provide useful clues about potential health outcomes. Learning more about food security, income security, social connectivity, and availability of transportation are also key.

Healthcare questions related to SDOH need to go beyond the basics, which is why automated surveys are such an effective tool. They can be delivered quickly and easily across a broad population, and because respondents may need to complete it on their own time, it’s important that surveys be offered via any device. When offered digitally, immediately after the survey respondents can also be served SDOH support resources near the patient or member real-time based on answers to survey questions. That’s much harder to do with static surveys or even live interactions.

What can healthcare do, using technology on a smartphone? With tools like Ushur’s Invisible App, they can reach patients and members with HIPAA-compliant surveys designed to gather important SDOH information, reduce the propensity for survey abandonment, and also direct members and patients to relevant help.

Four key benefits of the Invisible App for gathering patient data

Stay HIPAA compliant

With HIPAA requirements and privacy concerns, you need a tool that has built-in safety mechanisms, versus other communication tools like SMS messaging or print. Ushur’s HIPAA-Secure Invisible App is designed to meet those requirements, with encryption end-to-end, and no need to download or login to a portal or app.

Healthcare companies need to know their members’ and patients’ current status for social determinants of health and provide needed support in innovative ways, or the knowledge gap becomes a barrier, blocking healthcare delivery and negatively affecting health (medical and behavioral) outcomes.

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Be Patient comfort-centric

It’s common now for payers and providers to ask questions, either live or via a form, about SDOH like food availability, physical safety, and even housing. But that doesn’t mean members and patients feel comfortable answering those questions live with another individual they’ve never met. The barrier to participation due to unease increases further when attempting to ask these sensitive questions in person. Ushur Invisible App works on any device, including smartphones or computers, which means the patient can answer when they want to, where they want to. Healthcare companies can choose from any of 60 languages to be sure members and patients can use their preferred language. And as part of Ushur’s omnichannel self-service support, patients don’t have to start over again if they switch from their phone to their laptop, for example.

Remain brief but relevant

With static surveys that are mailed or delivered via a portal, all of the questions are presented at once without the ability to omit questions that aren’t relevant to a portion of the audience. For example, questions related to women’s health are included in surveys received by men. Healthcare companies also lose the ability to dig deeper into a topic based on the way a question is answered. Ushur’s Invisible App allows surveys to be tailored for audience relevance, and also allows additional questions to be served up based on prior survey answers. For example, if you’re wanting to know more about housing safety and security, and a member or patient answers that they are facing issues in this area with one survey answer, you can present additional questions to help you learn more about their situation to better understand which types of support they need.

Deploy with no coding

Because Ushur enables enterprises to deploy an app-like experience with a no-code app design, Citizen Developers can become the intelligent automation builders for healthcare companies. Healthcare firms don’t need to use their own IT specialists or engineers which saves them time and resources¬— and drastically increases speed to value. Ushur Invisible App integrates with existing front and back-end systems, passing data to and from core systems seamlessly in the background. That means it can link securely to patient data in the electronic health record systems (EHR) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems for more accurate information — and less data entry on the member or patient’s part. On the front end, healthcare companies can customize the survey to meet the needs of their specific patient segments. For example, they can design surveys that eliminate questions that aren’t relevant to a specific audience to reduce the number of overall questions.

Going Beyond Collecting Data to Offering Help and Support

Many of us are familiar with the apps that make recommendations based on what they already know about us and our shopping behavior. What if a healthcare survey could do something similar? For example, if a member indicates they don’t have food to feed their family right now, what if the app could provide a list of nearby food banks or meals delivery contact information to help them get immediate help? That’s a win-win: the healthcare company now knows a key SDOH and the member or patient gets immediate help. What if the tool could take it a step further by pushing an email to providers or clinical resources for follow-ups where there are medical or behavioral health concerns?

Because Ushur enables enterprises to deploy an app-like experience with a no-code app design, Citizen Developers can become the intelligent automation builders for healthcare companies.

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That’s exactly what Ushur’s Customer Experience Automation™ platform can do. The social determinant of health survey is an example of how Ushur helps health payers or providers get closer to their members. However, because Ushur workflows are completely customizable, each healthcare client decides how automation can best serve and improve the member experience. Ushur’s no-code workflow design makes the rest as easy as drag and drop. The possibilities are almost endless.

The Bottom Line: Information + Action = Better Care

From a business perspective, better understanding SDOH is common sense. A healthier population requires fewer costly services, which lowers overall healthcare costs in the long run.

Beyond business, healthcare is about health. The more healthcare companies can understand a 360-degree view of a person, the better they can deliver care and support services that are needed — to support longer, healthier lives.

Conclusion

Ushur is a Customer Experience Automation (CXA) platform that is already helping Fortune 500 and Global 1,000 companies redefine the very strategies they’re using to optimize their customer experience and get closer to their consumers. Social determinants of health are just one example of how Ushur is engaging business users to build state-of-the-art and AI-driven customer experiences. If you are curious about how you can improve your customer experience, contact us at ushur.com/request-demo.

Ever notice how some engagement processes just seem to be littered with friction? What if you could whip up a solution, as tailored as a custom-made suit, to tackle those issues head-on?

When friction is foe

Picture those little friction points along your customer and partner engagement journeys. They're like mischievous troublemakers, snatching away efficiency and turning satisfaction into a game of hide-and-seek.

This can really put a damper on the experience for your dear constituents. And no matter how important the task is, getting them to act can sometimes feel like trying to move a mountain. And even when they do, they're taking the scenic route – not the most straightaway path you had in mind. Your customers and partners end up resorting to old-school ways. Although it’s not the smoothest ride, it’s simply what they know best.

If these exchanges contain sensitive files or Personally Identifiable Information (PII), the chance of unexpected detours increases, with data wandering into places it has no business being in.

Communication doesn’t need to jigsaw through these confusing twists and turns. You're doing your best to smooth out the snags with the tech tools you've got. But either those tools can't shape-shift into the solutions you need, or getting them to do so requires serious magic from internal and external technical teams. And let's face it, we'd all rather spend less time pulling rabbits out of hats.

The salient sidekick

Imagine waving goodbye to fitting square pegs in round holes. Instead, say hello to a composable application that serves as your engagement sidekick – amplifying all investments and pushing productivity throughout.

Your apps, portals, websites, phone lines, chat channels – all your interaction channels – stay right where they belong. But now, they're turbocharged gateways to a secure digital world, finely tuned and purpose-built by you to bring every task to completion.
Whether reaching out or fielding requests, you meet everyone on their turf. Then, with an empathetic nudge, usher them through a series of dynamic prompts, straight lined towards resolution. It's like offering VIP self-service to your customers and partners for every touchpoint, from short micro-engagements to multi-phase journeys.

Better days ahead

Customer Experience Automation is like a gust of fresh tech air – it's the rapidly emerging category of solutions designed to light up real-time engagement. Imagine connecting those ever-changing digital front ends with super-smart automated backends, creating a seamless end-to-end approach that benefits all humans involved.

And here's the kicker: this shouldn’t be some complex code wizardry. It works best as a no-code zone, intended for your enterprise to swiftly adapt to shifting customer demands by avoiding long lead times and extra hands on deck.

All this jazz leads to one powerhouse goal: nailing operational excellence through the pure magic of transformative customer experiences.

The Insurance Claims Experience

Most of the time customers are going through the claim process after some kind of accident or emergency, whether it is personal, at their place of work, or affecting their entire community. Customers start the insurance claim process with anxiety and fear of the unknown. The insurance claims experience can add additional stress to a harrowing occurrence, or it can be something that eases a customer’s anxiety to better allow them to work through damage to their vehicle, property, or injury to themselves or an employee.

During significant weather events, ranging from heavy rain to hurricanes, call centers can be heavily impacted, and people end up spending what can feel like hours on hold. Customer frustration and phone system overloads create an insurance claims experience that begins negatively and builds upon the high emotional cost of a loss. If there are pauses downstream in assigning and acknowledging a new claim, the experience continues the downhill path which influences the entire experience.

After the first notice of loss (FNOL) or injury and the claim intake process, the claim assessment and management stages can add more stress as customers and claims adjusters must be in contact with each other and also coordinate obtaining documentation and information from multiple parties. The process is rarely smooth and often time consuming and confusing. The reality is that no one understands the claims process except a claims professional.

This process can, and often does, lead to customer dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction with the claims process then leads to customers moving to a different insurance company as they search for a better experience. In fact, according to a recent study, over 85% of people who felt frustrated during the claims process planned on switching carriers.^[1]

Improving the Insurance Claims Experience

In order to sustain customer loyalty and use their time and resources efficiently, insurers must improve the entire insurance claim journey. Currently, the FNOL step, when the claim journey begins, is the most developed within the claims process. However, when the customer proceeds to the next step, the experience degenerates and leaves the customer with a negative view of the overall process and their insurance company.

3 Steps to Improve the Insurance Claims Experience

In order to strengthen the process and improve the claims experience, insurance companies need to take three actions: communicate, personalize, and streamline. All three can be used to varying degrees throughout the claims process in conjunction with an effective and easy-to-develop Customer Experience Automation™ solution.

Open Clear Lines of Communication

Miscommunication and lack of information from a carrier result in disgruntled customers who are more likely to switch carriers when their policy expires. “As an insurer, it is vital to reassure your policyholders and let them know you are here for them,”^[2] particularly during an emergency. The ultimate goal for communicating with your customers is one that creates a dialogue between the customer and the carrier on the customer’s terms. It is a conversation that provides transparency to the full claim journey. And using AI anticipates a customer’s questions to provide the right answers.

• Be proactive. Beginning at the FNOL and moving forward, provide information to keep the customer engaged and aware. Be sure every interaction includes what happens next and when. Your company can automatically issue a notification at each step of the claim process informing the customer about their claim status or requesting missing documents, thereby eliminating the need for them to call. The best question is the one answered before it’s asked.
• Offer customers choices. Depending on how comfortable your customer is with technology, your company could offer them claim process automation, while also providing the option to interact with an employee; whether that is with a call center service representative to report a loss or with a claims adjuster to ask questions or share information. By giving the customer the choice of channel to interact, you grant them the ability to customize their insurance claims experience.
• Bring different members of the process together to collaborate. Automation opens the process so that every key stakeholder is able to add their particular, necessary content; whether it’s an appraiser, a body shop, a contractor, or a medical professional. Providing access to the claim process also gives customers transparency on the progress to either help retrieve needed information or answer questions without calls needing to be made.
• Allow claims adjusters to give more attention to larger loss claims processing. In times of crisis or emergency, different situations require different responses. By creating an automated claim process experience, the basics can be covered with predictable, straightforward processes, and employees can focus their hands-on attention on the more complex claims that can have a more emotional toll on customers and require individualized analysis and unique decisions.

Create a Personalized Customer Experience

Customers in the digital age of online shopping, free delivery, and customized marketing are used to highly personalized customer experiences. This expectation has carried over into the insurance arena where customers expect a user experience that prompts them for information, simplifies the delivery of documentation, and shows them the real-time status of their insurance claim.

Automating your insurance claims process creates a positive claims experience that increases responsiveness to customer inquiries, offers choices throughout the process, and delivers up-to-date access for document resources and claim status.

If a process is sufficiently automated, customers who seek information about their claim can simply look up the process status using their digital device. If documents or data are missing, they can either provide it or work with their claims adjuster to retrieve it. And with a digital solution like Ushur’s Invisible App™, the insurance claim process becomes something that your customers can contribute to and reference. InvisibleApp™ and Ushur’s use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) can offer instant answers to their queries, either through the use of a text message, or an email, or chat applications like WhatsApp.

Companies build their customers’ trust levels when they proffer information, and with an automated claims process, it’s possible to maximize trust and the quality of each customer’s experience by proactively delivering the relevant facts for their particular claim; from FNOL to claim closure. If they have further inquiries, they can choose to use the digital channel they prefer or go back to reach their claims adjuster. Companies who give their customers choices impart a feeling that the customer is part of the process, and their active involvement increases their satisfaction with their insurance claim experience.^[3]

Disparities in the amount of information available to participating parties erode trust in these high-touch experiences. Just as claims adjusters have data available to them, the customer should also have a level of information that they can review. This added level of transparency enables customers to ask questions using a responsive system rather than depending solely on the claims adjuster and decreases unnecessary calls that lower wait times for customer queries.

Build an Efficient Claims Process

The current insurance claims experience begins in a straightforward, streamlined fashion at the FNOL. But then the process degrades as it slips into the traditional way of gathering and transmitting information between the customer and the claims adjuster. The customer grows increasingly distanced from the process and unhappy because of the lack of insight while the claims adjuster manages multiple claims and attempts to maintain goodwill between all the parties involved.

Streamlining the process using automation simply removes the repetitive and predictable tasks and places them in an automated process that can either collect the critical data or retrieve important documents from the customer and other parties directly.

Eliminating redundancies in the process frees the claims adjuster to give their full attention to the customer. The claims process allows your employees to truly shine and be there for your customers and their employees.^[4] And customers respond with increased loyalty and satisfaction ratings.

Additionally, automation facilitates faster claim resolution by simplifying the retrieval of information and the collection of data. Automation eliminates the bottleneck when the claims adjuster is the only one who can collect and enter the data into the system. You can have each stakeholder upload their documentation individually. As an example, the body shop estimate would simply be scanned and uploaded directly without the need for intervention by the adjuster. As would the medical records or the rental car agency documentation.

Additionally, the machine learning (ML) that drives data processing reveals instances where the process could be improved or where the process is unclear or difficult to understand. Between the customer and the AI-powered Customer Experience Automation™ solution, the insurance claim process is constantly being refined to ensure increased satisfaction and a positive customer experience.

The Insurance Claims Experience Redefined

Customer experience research shows that a positive insurance claims experience directly affects a customer’s attitude about their insurance company. It has been proven that customers whose insurance claims experience exceeds their expectations are more likely to stay with their current insurance company even when taking product pricing into consideration. Opening lines of communication to your customers, creating a personalized customer experience, and building an efficient claims process are achievable goals using automation that incorporate machine learning and AI.

Ushur delivers the Most in Claims Service Automation

Ushur’s AI-powered Customer Experience Automation™ platform puts automation tools in the hands of the users that know your business best. The no-code FlowBuilder makes it easy for business analysts to easily build omnichannel flows to automate the repetitive work that burdens them on a routine basis. Even for users with no coding skills, Ushur can give you fine-grained control over how you engage with customers throughout the claims process.

Ushur enables flexible 2-way customer engagements where the customer is in control of their insurance claim experience from start to finish, regardless of the communication channel. The platform empowers customers with multiple ways to connect; from email, to text, to mobile apps, to chatbots that allow customers to engage directly with their insurance company at any time, from anywhere.

Ushur customers have created and deployed new, high-value automation in hours. They have seen significant inbound call volume reductions and elevated customer satisfaction scores, including proactive claim status updates that allow insurers to build great customer experiences when their customers need them the most.

Let Ushur automate your insurance claims processes to improve customer satisfaction. Let smart technology take your insurance organization to the next level.

Last month, my wife and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary. I had planned a few special activities throughout the day – a massage for her, dinner at our favorite restaurant – when nature decided we should celebrate a bit differently. The day before our anniversary, a raging storm knocked out our power and kept us off the grid for nearly 48 hours. Our reservations were all canceled. What was supposed to be a day of rest and relaxation for my hard working wife instead turned into an involuntary two-day shut in with her husband, father-in-law and teenage son. 

It was a stark reminder of just how much we rely on electricity for our daily lives. School was shut down. Cooking was impossible. Even our gas heat turned off, because the thermostat that controls it is electric! The four of us bundled together in our 52-degree living room, contemplating the merits of our local hotels. 

But rather than lament the loss of a traditional celebration, we took the opportunity to hit the road with our son, who is in the midst of his own major milestone – selecting a college. We drove up to UC Davis for the day, explored the campus and shared a family meal. We enjoyed the type of simple moments that one often takes for granted, but that will soon be so much less frequent when he goes off to school. Ultimately, time spent together carries infinitely more meaning than fancy dinners or expensive gifts. 

Our experience led me to ponder the paradoxical relationship we humans have with the concepts of contentment and ambition. I was reminded of one of the first dates my wife and I ever went on. We were 18 and 19, with barely any money between us. We had enough for two movie tickets and one banana, which we had to share. Not exactly a banana split, at least not in the traditional sense. But we were happy then and we are happy now, content simply to be together regardless of any outside forces at work. 

That bare bones upbringing for both of us, however, sometimes puts us at a disadvantage when trying to help our son navigate the rigors of college acceptance. Neither of us attended college in the US, so before he started applying to schools we hired a college counselor for guidance. Instead, the experience only seemed to add stress to an already stressful situation. I could see my son beginning to worry, beginning to doubt that he should or even could apply to schools that his counselor considered a stretch goal. We changed course again, and simply encouraged him to apply to as many colleges as he wanted to. He ended up applying to 22 in all, and got into nearly all of them. Suddenly, he had a new problem – the problem of plenty. 

Choice paralysis is a common phenomenon. I remember my first experience walking into an American supermarket and wandering down the bread aisle. Where I grew up, we had two types of bread – sweet, and savory. In front of me at the store were now literally dozens of different brands, types, shapes and variants of bread. There were so many to choose from, that it actually created a sense of worry and inability to make a decision. And that was just bread. Picking a college and a city to live in for four years carries considerably higher stakes. 

But whether my son goes to public school, private school or community college will not determine the final trajectory of who or what he becomes. What determines whether we succeed or not is our ability to maintain an internal hunger, an unquenchable ambition for excellence, to never feel as though we’ve arrived or that we’re entitled to anything. On the surface, that may seem at odds with the idea of being content with life’s simple joys. But ambition and contentment are not opposing forces, they are two sides of the same coin. One is short term, the ability to make each day the best possible day, irrespective of the circumstances dealt. The other is long term, the desire to make tomorrow even better, to impact those circumstances before they even unfold. 

As we drove back from Davis, I thought about the opportunity a cold, dark house had provided my family that day. I thought about my son, and the future ahead of him. I thought about my wife, and how fitting it was that we would celebrate 25 years of marriage by making the best out of an unexpected situation. It was simultaneously low key and eventful, content and spontaneous. Just the way I like it.

Customer Experience Automation™ (CXA) is the application of an AI-powered platform that is purpose-built to automate, scale, and remove the friction from the interactions between a company and its customers; from the beginning of a conversation through its resolution. CXA brings together knowledge work automation and conversation automation, to not only intelligently interact with customers, but also interface with backend systems to complete all necessary tasks.

Often the application of automation technology is focused either on handling only front-end customer service inquiries or managing back-office processes. CXA, by comparison, is able to provide the digital consumer self-service options that customers want both wherever the customer reaches in seeking service, and whenever a company reaches out to share or request information.

For insurance carriers, Customer Experience Automation™ offers opportunities to simplify conversations and automate repetitive tasks. Tasks like data collection, and multi-step business processes are faster, easier, and more accurate using CXA. It injects agility and versatility into historically sluggish processes; everything from quotes and onboarding to benefits enrollment, billing, and claims.

Examples of Customer Experience Automation™ for Insurance

Customer Experience Automation™ speeds communication between the carrier and the customer and decreases wait times for real-time service delivery and information requests.

It used to be that consumers would have to wait for an item they ordered with only the original estimate of how many days it would take to receive it. Likewise, they’d have to call their insurer and wait to speak with a representative to ask if their preferred care provider was covered in the insurer's network, or when their next payment was due. In contrast, if you as a consumer today have ever received proactive tracking updates letting you know the number of stops your purchase is from your home, or if you’ve ever texted your insurance company to find the nearest in-network auto repair shop and received the answer immediately, then you’ve experienced the kind of ease-of-experience that CXA and its effort-saving capabilities afford. True CXA for insurance is only a possibility thanks to the capabilities of Ushur’s platform, that includes InvisibleApp™.

Customer Experience Automation™ (CXA) is the application of an AI-powered platform that is purpose-built to automate, scale, and remove the friction from the interactions between a company and its customers; from the beginning of a conversation through its resolution.

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Customer Experience Automation™ is essential to modernizing your service delivery and operations because it allows customers to skip the long wait to talk to a person when they would prefer self-service, bypassing unpopular IVR systems, and solve inquiries or complete tasks, through robust Conversational AI. It also affords customers choice and empowers them in their interactions with your brand. Customers who are concerned that their urgent questions will slip through the cracks without immediate attention, will often forgo their preferred digital messaging channel and introduce another point of friction. By offering an artificial intelligence (AI) powered digital channel of their choice as soon as they call in, a company provides service without forcing an employee conversation that the customer does not prefer. This both elevates the customer’s experience and offers the carrier operational efficiency gains.

Ushur’s Invisible App™ is a 1-to-1, secure communication channel for automating customer interactions. It delivers an app-like experience, without the friction of having to download an app, or the cost to the carrier to build, maintain, and support. It also offers customers an easy alternative to logging into a portal and streamlines complex conversations. Invisible App™ enables carriers to provide their customers with an intuitive and consistent brand experience, regardless of the service request involving their policy, bill, or claim. And because Invisible App™ is omnichannel, this consistent experience is offered regardless of where the customer interaction begins, including phone, text, email, web, or popular messaging apps.

In other words, Invisible App™ is what lets an insurer build an automation flow for the reporting of a new claim and meet the customer where they are to begin that conversation, when they begin with a phone call, text, email, website, or chatbot. Invisible App™ affords carriers both flexibility and scalability, eliminating the need to create and maintain channel-specific solutions. Invisible App™ future-proofs your investments in your communication and automation solutions.

CXA Drives Easy, Timely Gathering of Missing Documentation or Data from Customers

If you experienced any part of processing a claim for a car accident, from a minor fender bender to a total wreck, you know that the task of gathering information, data, and documentation from multiple parties is difficult, time-consuming, and fraught with tension. Customers want to know where the process stands, what happens next, and when. And delays that result from missing data are frustrating while also easily remedied by automation.

With Customer Experience Automation™, any missing information can be requested or shared between the many participants in the claim journey. CXA facilitates data gathering and sharing between parties including the customer, service providers, the auto repair shop or a medical facility, agent, and the insurance carrier. Automated outreach via SMS or email eliminates the back and forth of phone calls and voicemail tag, and creates vital carrier capacity for their people to focus on the interactions and complex decisions where human involvement is key. Customers are offered easier ways to respond to information requests, from a quick SMS reply, to photo uploads of an ID or document instead of the time-consuming task of manual data entry after logging into portals.

Customers are offered easier ways to respond to information requests, from a quick SMS reply, to photo uploads of an ID or document instead of the time-consuming task of manual data entry after logging into portals."

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Customer Experience Automation™ provides customers their expected modern digital consumer experience.

Technological familiarity, proficiency, and preference is increasing steadily across all generations. The “digital only” world during the pandemic lockdown created a larger, wider audience that expects the ability of omnichannel self-service. Customer expectations for speed and transparency are already high and continue to increase.

What’s more, consumers expect real time information, and Customer Experience Automation™ allows carriers to ensure their sales distribution channels have the most current product information at their fingertips; including service and pricing information. It introduces speed into the quote and RFP intake process by automatically recognizing incomplete submissions and by reaching back to the sender instantly. Finally, CXA also allows customers to review their benefits, confirm their next premium payment, understand the status of a claim, inquire about updating their policy, and more.

Ushur’s Conversational AI and Machine Learning (ML) combine to provide automation solutions that interact with customers easily, quickly, and on their channel of choice. When a customer initiates a transaction or request for service, whether that is filing a claim or a request for information about their policy, Ushur’s Conversational AI is able to automatically detect relevant information from the inquiry and take the appropriate next step.

Benefits of Customer Experience Automation™

Improved Net Promoter Score

NPS is directly related to customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty. And whether it’s measured within your company or outside of it, NPS reflects customer experience which “correlates with increased revenue growth, retention growth, and referral rates.”

With Customer Experience Automation™ introducing the ease of sending and receiving information, insurance carriers offer a modern solution brand experience that is inviting and at the same time, reassuring to both new and current customers. And that positive customer experience translates to customer confidence and loyalty that is then reflected in higher NPS.

Ushur's Customer Experience Automation™: Where Automation Works for Everyone

Ushur’s Customer Experience Automation™ is a robust platform that focuses on the automation of one high-value customer interaction (what we call a Microengagement™) at a time. Ushur increases a carrier’s agility to realize their digital transformation vision, enabling business employees to create new automated 2-way conversations in hours, or less, without adding to the demands on their IT partners.  Ushur CXA platform is a system of intelligence that complements the wide array of internally facing core and CRM systems carriers use today, along with their contact center solutions. Ushur makes it possible for carriers to offer their customers, agents, and brokers a consistent brand experience regardless of where across the full insurance lifecycle they are interacting, and what technologies support those functions. Purpose-built with best-in-class insurance pre-trained AI with ML, Computer Vision and Intelligent Document Automation (IDA), it doesn’t simply sit at the front end of customer reaching processes. It works within every part of a carrier’s customer experience, optimized for knowledge work and customer engagement automation with a zero-code approach.

Ushur brings frictionless customer experience to the enterprise. Talk to a specialist today.

In a dazzling display of innovation and excellence, the 5th IMPACT CAB event unfolded on August 9th, marking a day of inspiration, recognition, and celebration. The event was a resounding success, bringing together outstanding individuals and visionary companies that are rewriting the rules of innovation. With unwavering dedication and ingenious contributions, these award winners have left an indelible mark on their industries and beyond.

A Resounding Applause for Lincare: A Beacon of Vision and Execution

The "Visionary Innovation Company of the Year Award'' was bestowed upon Lincare, a company that has epitomized change through a fusion of vision and focused execution. Under the guidance of Noah Chitwood and Steven Boylston, Lincare's partnership with Ushur showcased the remarkable speed with which change can be brought about when vision meets determination. In just under a year, Lincare deployed millions of micro-engagements powered by Ushur to help serve members. Their outstanding contribution to the industry serves as a beacon of inspiration for all of us to embrace innovation and create a positive impact.

As we reflect on this remarkable event, we're reminded that true impact is driven by collaboration, innovation, and unwavering determination. Lincare has illuminated the path forward, inspiring us all to dream bigger, aim higher, and make a lasting difference in the world.

First Notice of Loss (FNOL) is the first step of collecting information in an initial report from policyholders who have experienced a loss, and is an important element of an insurance carrier’s relationship with their policyholders. But when an insurance company resorts to manual data collection, they spend valuable time on non-value-added tasks while increasing the opportunity for human error, leading to delays in claims processing and extra costs.

So, how can insurance businesses tackle this issue of unnecessary delays, minimize risk, and still be responsive to their policyholders? Here’s where FNOL automation comes into play, and it is one of the tailwinds that will help carriers (McKinsey) stymie costs and fastrack growth. In this post, we discuss how to automate FNOL, how it helps reduce manual data entry, how FNOL automation boosts overall staff efficiency and agent productivity, and offer a point of view on it being just the first step in claim automation.

How and why to automate FNOL

In today's digital-first world, customers expect quick and efficient service from insurers. At internet scale, manual processes can no longer meet these expectations and are expensive to launch and support. Luckily, since most FNOL conversations follow a similar path, there is an opportunity for insurance companies to automate and improve much of this process for their customers. Here’s how introducing automation can help you deliver an exceptional experience for insurance policyholders using automation and AI.

Digitizing claims and working with unstructured data

Digitizing claims lets insurance carriers handle large numbers of interactions efficiently and provides them with valuable process insights; as well as vast troves of data. By analyzing data patterns and trends, companies can:

• Spot areas for improvement in the FNOL process
• Reduce the likelihood of errors
• Enhance customer satisfaction

While an insurance carrier generates a large amount of data during claims handling, one of the primary challenges for a carrier is ensuring their data is available in a usable format. This includes unstructured data such as customer-submitted files. Unfortunately, most analytics tools can only process structured data, leaving out crucial sources like emails, PDFs, videos, and images.

Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance the customer experience (CX)

There are plenty of ways AI improves the overall quality of customers’ interactions with your agents. 

Firstly, your team can use AI to extract and then input data into core systems like your CRM. Since your team doesn't have to input data manually, they can dedicate more time to processing your customers’ claim. 

To further minimize the volume of inquiries a claims handling team has to handle, your team can utilize a chatbot to handle common topics and FAQs. Conversational agents today can even provide real-time updates to customers asking about their case status–and other WISMO (Where is my order?) scenarios. All this shortens the time needed from teams to manually handle an insurance claim from start to finish.

There are some portions of these customer experiences that Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has automated, but the introduction of AI in concert with RPA brings new functionality and  offers several unique benefits. CXA allows for unique customer experiences that are:

• Omnichannel: In short, your customers have the freedom to communicate in the way that best suits them. More importantly, they get the same quality of CX, regardless of how they reach out. AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants provide customers with various communication options, including self-service portals, call centers, email, and chatbots. For example, they can begin the FNOL process via phone, and ask for follow-ups through chat.
• Responsive: Conversational AI and generative AI allow for more responsive, dynamic interactions than were possible or available before. These new experiences allow claimants to access dynamic services and accomplish more complex, nuanced tasks without having to call in or contact their insurer.
• Frictionless: AI can help to make the overall process as frictionless as possible for the customer. For example, if a claimant uploads documents via text or portal, those documents can be scanned and preprocessed for errors, notify the customer of those errors, and allow for corrected document resubmission all without the need for human interaction from an insurer representative.
• Personalized: By using data analytics and machine learning, AI can help to personalize the FNOL process for customers. Namely, it can pre-fill fields with relevant data and provide tailored recommendations for the rest of the form. This can help to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

shur's automated FNOL insurance is an effective solution for insurance enterprises, as it significantly cuts down processing times and operating costs. Customers can experience 24/7 availability and an 8x decrease in FNOL handling times. This can lead to up to a 90% reduction in costs.

Process all data in a single platform

To ensure that no essential information falls through the cracks, it's worth processing data in a single platform, which is especially important when dealing with non-text-based data like images and videos. By combining all data into one platform, insurers can easily manage and access all customer interactions, regardless of the communication channel. 

In doing so, they eliminate the need for manual data entry, saving valuable time for their staff. Automating the data entry process ensures that customer information is always up-to-date and accurate, which streamlines FNOL and claims processing. Insurers can provide a more responsive and personalized customer experience, ultimately leading to higher satisfaction and retention rates.

The End of Manual FNOL?

Automating FNOL is the future of efficient and effective customer service, improving client experience and operational efficiency.

Ushur replaces static forms (online or paper) and lengthy phone interviews with a personalized and secure conversation, where the answer to each question identifies the next best one to ask. Input is streamlined by extracting data from photos and documents. And customers can be immediately connected to provider networks to expedite their repairs.Fortunately, Intelligent Document Automation (IDA) from Ushur can tackle the document interactions in this issue. These solutions help insurers transform unstructured data into a machine-readable format using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning techniques.

Ushur is able to handle many types of unstructured data that insurers deal with during the FNOL stage. For example, it can process information included in customer-submitted documents like:

• Police reports
• Medical records
• Repair estimates

It can also analyze images and videos from customers, which provides useful context for claims adjusters. With Ushur, insurers can recognize critical information related to the loss incident by extracting data from text-based conversations such as emails and chat logs.

After FNOL: Automating Claims

The first notice of loss is just the first  piece of the customer experience journey, and yet it receives the lion’s share of attention for insurance claims. There are myriad reasons FNOL gets so much attention, but that focus leaves room for customer experiences to improve in the steps that follow it (steps 2-n). 

In fact McKinsey believes that automation can reduce the cost of a claims journey by as much as 30%. Those steps that stand to benefit may follow the complex process after a first notice of loss, but they also often require manual intervention, and yet are equally as important. 

The steps in the customer experience that follow include helping customers understand what information is needed to resolve a claim, know what the status of their claim is, and paying out claims with the correct and up to date information of the insured. Consumer expectations for digital-first self-service and technological capabilities shift quickly and McKinsey believes the winners in the insurance market will “be those that move decisively.” 

If an insurance company takes 6 months for their release cycle, the window for insurance companies to understand, build, and deploy automation can be too distant and feel vanishingly small. It is difficult to move decisively and be one of the winners forecasted by McKinsey when the demands, development timelines, and capabilities don’t align.

Conclusion

The first step in the insurance claims journey, FNOL, is a highly involved and yet very repeatable order of operations. It requires gathering information or documents, communicating expectations, setting timelines, and then building a relationship where insureds feel confident they are being serviced with professionalism and care.

The quality of customer experience in that engagement, and its composite micro-engagements, can dramatically change the opinions of carriers held by insureds. It also sets the tone for the rest of their relationship and expectations of service. 

It is difficult to automate the many different journeys, conversations, or experiences that an insured and their carrier may have during a FNOL process, but customer experience automation (CXA) specifically focuses on making those processes easy to build and support. Conversations require the flexibility of conversational AI and standardized forms benefit from the power of document processing. Conversational automation, process automation, and document processing combine to make the FNOL process and other insurance processes deployable quickly enough for carriers to move decisively.

Learn more about our insurance automation solutions and elevate your customer service today.

When an employee leaves a company, it triggers a long list of administrative duties for both the employee leaving and the company. Many of these duties are related to managing what happens to that employee’s financial benefits such as pensions, trusts, and other financial assets. And it generally involves a third-party financial services or pensions organization that has responsibility for investing and managing all the assets on behalf of that company and its employees.

In particular, when an employee leaves, they need to “make a claim” to direct what happens to their assets. This is a cumbersome and time-intensive process – not just for the employee and employer, but for the financial services firm overseeing the assets in question.

Irish Life Assurance plc, a $1 billion life assurance and pensions company based in Dublin, realized that its customers – Irish businesses, both large and small, that utilized its investment services – were not getting the excellent customer service it aspired to give them when processing what it called these “pre-claim” requests.

Ushur came to the rescue. Its Intelligent Document Automation (IDA) solutions are being used to reduce the time it takes for Irish Life to complete an employee benefits “claim” from several weeks to just a few days. Even better, errors and miscommunications that cause delays are expected to be dramatically reduced, and Irish Life customers will get notified of the status of claims every step of the way. Previously, all communications fell into a black hole from the time a claim was filed until it was resolved.

"Approx 50 percent of retirement claims submissions are missing requirements,” says Ken Lynch, director of IT for corporate business, at Irish Life. “This leads to increased cycle times and poor customer experiences.”

Hands-on, manual work all the way

Until last year, Irish Life did everything connected with departing employee benefits manually.

If the employee’s claim is complete and all documents and data are in order, a claim can be paid within five working days. At that point, a confirmation letter is issued and money is released.. But if the claim is missing anything, many back-and-forth emails are required to get things in order, and days of manual processing can result in a lapse of three weeks or even more.

Everything from processing the initial email from a customer that an employee was leaving to actually dispersing or transferring money, was done with hands-on dedication by a group of experienced benefits knowledge workers at Irish Life. But they knew they weren’t providing the stellar customer experience that they aspired to.

Challenges abounded

Irish Life identified the numerous things that were wrong with its existing way of processing benefits claims:

• Too many contacts: Because of all the people required to process claims – HR and finance professions from the customer and their financial brokers and advisers as well as Irish Life benefits claims professionals – there were missed connections, poor handoffs of tasks, and no ownership over the end-to-end process.
• Too many documents: Document requirements for processing claims were heavy, and most of the documents needed didn’t (yet) exist in digital formats. Forms for employees to fill out were confusing.
• Too slow: It took three to five weeks to process a claim. Only a small percentage were completed with the first notification of employee leaving the company. A significant amount of time was spent chasing information – and, often, trustees and independent financial advisors – to get the required authorizations.
• No visibility into claims status: Because the process was a “black box,” no one knew at any point the status of a particular claim. There was no case summary to look up quickly, and no automated alerts to tell the customers if more documents or information were needed, or where in the process lifecycle a particular claim happened to be.

The benefits of a brand-new automated world

Today, with Ushur’s IDA in pilot, the new way of working looks very promising indeed. Emails are automatically routed to the right person the first time, and if any required information or documents are missing, Ushur automatically generates an email containing a personalized form to be filled in by the customer. This is eliminating the problem of too many emails and too much back and forth, and has driven:

• Improved customer experience:  Because the new digital forms made it easy for employees to understand their role in the process, and because those forms were automatically sent to the right customer service expert within Irish Life, Irish Life representatives could provide speedy responses, and close the loop on missing requirements much easier – thus delivering the excellent customer experience they had always desired to provide.
• Reduced cycle times: Claims were processed much more swiftly due to the automated process. Now instead of weeks, employees get their assets within days of submitting a claim.
• Fewer follow-up requests: Because everything about the claims process is now transparent, employees and employers both know the status of claims at any time, eliminating the back-and-forth emails requesting updates.

Although one of Irish Life’s goal is to reduce the headcount needed to process claims through every stage in the lifecycle, it has no intention of letting any of its valuable workers go. Instead, they will be deployed to higher-value work, and to help the company manage its projected business growth in the coming months and years.

Irish Life is somewhat unique in that it hadn’t employed lower-level workers dedicated to doing the manual “grunt work” of processing claims. The employees who work on claims are valued knowledge workers with a tremendous amount of accrued knowledge and experience assessing claims. They are rotated out of the various roles so no one is stuck doing the repetitive, boring tasks all the time. With the Ushur solution, the low-level manual jobs are eliminated, so the workers are much more satisfied, and turnover is reduced.

“Irish Life has deployed Ushur’s Intelligent Document Automation to free up highly skilled employees, who were focused on data transformation, to higher-value work,” says Lynch. “We’re also transforming customer experience, moving to one-and-done interactions which reduce customer workload and allow us to serve them faster.”

A long and productive relationship

Irish Life started its journey with Ushur in 2018 with SmartMail, and continued to add Ushur solutions to its various business units over the years, including Invisible App, Ushur Hub, IPA, and Data Extraction, all deployed to improve the firm’s customer experience. This latest initiative looks as though it will deliver the same stellar results.

“The pilot has surpassed our expectations regarding the member engagement rates, says Sean Johnston, senior business analyst at Irish Life. “The vast majority of customers have uploaded documents and have done so within a few hours, thus reducing the cycle time, and ensuring only valid claims are presented to the claim agent for assessment.”

Irish Life Assurance plc, commonly known as Irish Life, is an Irish life assurance and pensions

Company that has been part of the Great-West Lifeco group of companies since 2013. Irish Life provides group retirement and risk products to employer and affinity groups. Corporate Business is the biggest provider of employee benefit solutions in Ireland. CB alone has approximately 672,000 customers (both public and private sector), spread over 6,780 group arrangements, for whom they administer pensions, life assurance and income protection. Irish Life has annual revenue of more than $1 billion.

A few weeks back I was speaking with a colleague who had just bought a new laptop. Unsurprisingly, a lot had changed about laptops since his last purchase. They’re slimmer and faster, the screens brighter, the battery life longer. They hold more data, can connect to your wireless headphones with ease, and built-in disc drives are long gone. Most everything about a laptop purchased today is better than one purchased in 2016. 

But my colleague did have one complaint that felt fairly unexpected — the machine’s built-in spell check function was markedly worse. Not only was it missing mistakes, it was actively recommending spelling, punctuation and tenses that would have rendered the content grammatically incorrect. 

Now, spell check may very well be the first automation software most people over the age of 30 ever interacted with. We were seeing the industry’s first consumer-focused foray into Artificial Intelligence, the simple recognition of repeating patterns based on historical data. It’s incredibly useful and difficult to improve upon, so it has remained part of our personal computers ever since and continues to today. But we’re used to a reality in which ubiquitous and long-lasting technologies get better as time goes on. The camera continues to get better and better with each iPhone generation. Gas mileage continues to improve in cars. Home security systems have become more accessible and user-friendly. Even most basic toaster ovens now have air fryers built-in. Consumers expect the technologies they use to improve over time. So why then would a technology as basic and foundational as spell check take steps backward, particularly at a time when technological innovation is advancing significantly across the board? 

The answer is simple —Data, data, and more data. 

If we can’t develop the intelligence to glean the right insights and act on them effectively, then the data itself is meaningless.

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On its surface, this assertion might not make a whole ton of sense. We live in the most data-rich era in human history. Shouldn’t more data mean more insight? Shouldn’t it mean smarter decisions, and better outcomes? Sure, in theory. But not if it’s the wrong data – or worse, bad data. Artificial Intelligence is only as good as the data on which it was trained. 

Which brings us back to spellcheck. The earliest iterations were trained on a wide array of published texts that had passed through a stringent set of editorial standards simply to be published in the first place. Today, nearly every human being in the world has their own personal publishing platform — the Internet. Even publications with strict editorial standards have had to let them relax in the name of the 24-hour news cycle and consumer demand for information delivered quickly. In short, there is infinitely more written text available in the world today than there was 30 years ago and the editorial quality of that text is objectively lower. The result?  Legacy software that comes standard with every personal computer in the world no longer performs like it once did. 

Why is data integrity important?

When people think of data integrity, they’re typically envisioning one of two things. The first is privacy — everything it entails to ensure that customer information is safe and secure. No bad actors getting access or using that data for illegitimate purposes. This has become table stakes across the industry, and anyone who aspires to be a provider of modern software has built enough internal controls both in terms of the product and practices to ensure that data is governed in accordance with industry best practices. 

The second is about the visualization of data, what are most often referred to as insights. This is where both the challenge and the opportunity lie. We need to know how and why a customer is consuming a product or service in order to deliver a continually improving experience. Again, these insights are only as good as the data being analyzed. Accuracy of that insight is paramount to building legitimacy and trust with the user. 

As a runner, I’ve always found it helpful to have a Garmin watch with me that can track my vitals. I’ve invested in six or seven over the years, upgrading to new models as they’ve become available. I find the insights the watch provides about my health to be invaluable; long distance running is hard on the body, and monitoring one’s own health is critical. Recently, I bought the latest and greatest watch. But on my next run, I was both surprised and concerned to find that my heart rate was unusually high. This continued for several more runs, and I had long business travel on the horizon. It made me worry enough that I drove myself to urgent care to get checked out before I got on a plane and flew thousands of miles away from home. The doctor gave me a clean bill of health, and I later came to find that my new watch simply had a software glitch. Inaccurate insights erode trust and confidence in the technology. At least for me, it was enough to make me consider abandoning a brand I’d been loyal to for nearly 20 years. 

What has changed, and why does that matter? 

In the early days of data analysis the incoming data was very structured. It was a simple matter of math and computation that would spit out a chart or insight. As the world has evolved to produce more unstructured data, the statistical modeling around that data can sometimes lead to anomalies in the interpretation of that data. For example, I was driving with my co-founder Henry in his Tesla recently and he expressed concern that a few of the new software updates seemed to have regressed the Full Self-Driving (FSD) experience in his car. It was enough to make him worry about using the feature entirely. A lot of engineering goes into improving the algorithms and models, but if the accuracy of the data on which they’re built gets compromised then instead of being helpful, automation simply creates new pain points. 

There is no such thing as too much data in today’s world – if we can harness it in a meaningful way. Otherwise, it can have an adverse impact on our ability to analyze and act on that data in the right way. Every connected device in use spits out tons of data. There are millions of sensors, industrial and IoT devices generating more data than we can possibly care about. If we can’t develop the intelligence to glean the right insights and act on them effectively, then the data itself is meaningless. 

The world of statistical models and machine learning is rife with experimentation and innovation that is consistently improving algorithms and outcomes. I’m optimistic that over time, they will continue to get better. The challenge is ingesting new information. Oftentimes it’s those incoming data sets that are outside the boundaries of what the model is trained for that lead to erroneous behavior. It feels regressive, and customers become upset. Trust erodes. 

At Ushur, we get a firsthand look at the importance of maintaining trust every day. Customers in the finance, healthcare and insurance spaces are incredibly risk averse. For the vast majority of professionals working in these industries, it is better not to take any action than to take an action that might lead to business risk. It’s one of the most commonly referenced barriers against the adoption of new technology within these highly regulated industries. Attention to detail, taking great care and providing accurate results are a must. If a hospital is applying AI to read a CT scan that will determine someone’s health diagnosis, that result simply cannot be anything less than 100 percent accurate. 

But fascinating and life-altering advancements have been made in the way machines are being trained to detect diseases or conditions that the human eye cannot. As long as the training models are incorporated correctly, the outcomes we can drive for real people will be both predictable and transformative. But 80% accuracy won’t do the trick. 95% accuracy won’t even cut it. Nobody wants to be the victim of that 5%. 

The way we leverage data, how we analyze and present it to others, and the actions we take on those insights represent a massive opportunity for the world. But it also poses a huge risk if done incorrectly, sloppily or thoughtlessly. These are powerful tools and applications being put into the hands of the general public. If the data on which our assumptions are based lacks integrity, the results will be ineffectual at best and catastrophic at worst. Which is why the next frontier of innovation in AI revolves around eliminating bias, hallucinations and defining guard rails for LLMs, along with considerations for data privacy and data security. It’s all about data!

If you think that deep learning (DL) and machine learning (ML) have a lot in common, you’re right. But if you hear someone using deep learning as a synonym for machine learning, it’s not quite as accurate.

Machine learning uses past data and statistical algorithms to create systems that recognize patterns and predict future observations. Deep learning is a machine learning technique that draws its inspiration from the human brain and how it thinks and extracts information.

In other words,  deep learning is a subset of machine learning, but not vice versa. Both are types of artificial intelligence.

Deep Learning vs Machine Learning

Machine learning solutions can automatically adapt over time based on the new and natural patterns within the data, rather than having to programmatically account for every possibility with logic and routing. There are 4 types of machine learning:

• Supervised learning
• Unsupervised learning
• Semi-supervised learning
• Reinforcement learning

The most common form, supervised learning, refers to algorithms that learn from data labeled by humans. The most common supervised machine learning techniques include linear regression, decision trees‌ or random forests. 

For ML algorithms to make decisions, predict something‌ or recognize a pattern, data scientists have to train them with properly collected, cleaned, engineered‌ and labeled data. Based on a data team’s data pipeline, model accessibility‌ and the model’s additional exposure to more data, the effectiveness of the algorithm can continue to improve.

Ultimately, a trained machine learning model is composed of the parameters that inform how much each variable affects the predicted value (for example, when predicting home prices, how much does the number of baths sway a home price).
In other words, the higher-quality the data the ML algorithm gets, and the more useful the features engineered within the dataset, the better, and more accurate the output will be.

How does Machine Learning work?

Machine learning is the parent category for artificial intelligence methodologies that include deep learning, so the principles by which machine learning works give some understanding as to how all forms of artificial intelligence products work. 

Machine learning relies on examples of past experiences in the form of data to offer predictions with varying levels of confidence in the future. If an experience in the future very closely resembles an example seen by a ML model in the past, it can likely predict an outcome (also referred to as a target) with fair confidence. That space in ML with an object to predict is called supervised learning.

Machine learning and deep learning derives results on cleaned data sets. In some more detail, now, supervised machine learning works by finding a function (just a combination of inputs and tuning parameters) to fit a dataset where the experiences (data) have a label. 

The right parameters for the function are the ones that minimize the function’s error rate against that particular set of data; you can think of the error as the distance between a prediction and the actual value. The process of creating that function with minimized errors is also called training.

As an example, if a data scientist is trying to train a model to predict home prices, they may use a linear regression model whose parameters like the number of baths, the square footage of the house, and the proximity to a mass transit center affect the label: the home price. 

By comparison, when machine learning isn't deployed to help predict an outcome, it’s usually used for identification or segmentation. Those approaches that lack a variable, or a target to predict, are a part of the sphere of unsupervised learning. That brand of machine learning works by grouping similar data points together during training and then determining which group a new and previously unseen sample should fall into. 

As an example of unsupervised ML, if a data scientist is trying to train a model for anomaly detection, they may use a clustering model (like K-Means) to see which data points make sense to be clumped together. If there are data points that don’t fit into a cluster, those are the anomalies.

How does Deep Learning work?

Deep learning works to recognize patterns and relationships in data and is often used for processing data formats like documents, photos, videos‌ or audio. 

“ Deep” is to indicate that learning happens in several layers. Say, the first layer learns to identify an “orange” and its basic features in an image. By going through the next layers, the model may add information about more features that make an orange an orange (texture, color, shape, etc). Each new layer has more information about the features of the orange based on the previous layer's knowledge so it can better detect the fruit and differentiate it, for example, from an orange ball. 

How accurate it is at categorizing each item it sees (the orange), and therefore how quickly it’s learning is determined by comparing the predicted value to the correct value. Comparing the two values and then feeding the results back into the training process gives the neural network the chance to experiment with another set of weights and biases.

For another scenario, say you’d like to build an ML algorithm that can distinguish between an image of a cookie and an image of a dog. To do this, you’d need a lot of training data, in this case, images that present either a dog or a cookie and are labeled appropriately. 

By training the ML algorithm on what features have dogs and what features belong to cookies, the algorithm learns to recognize whether it’s a dog or a cookie and uses this information to predict the correct label for the new image.

So, what’s better: Deep Learning or Machine Learning?

The truth is, your use cases should dictate whether you’ll use deep learning or simpler machine learning models. More traditional machine learning models are comparatively cheap and easy to train and deploy, while deep learning models help automate use cases for data types like images.

Say you have well-structured, clean numerical data and you’d like to predict customer churn in your insurance company or classify your customers and their lifetime value. In this case, building and training a simpler machine learning model like a logistic regression is a better choice.

But if you’re dealing with unstructured data types and need to do image recognition, deep learning will do the job here. Say you’re giving a DL algorithm an image of a dog but you’re not telling the model what the picture presents. Here, the neural network will recognize, step-by-step, features of a dog, until it classifies the image as a dog image.

Ushur’s AI: the Best of Both Worlds

Ushur’s Customer Experience Automation (CXA) Platform is designed to support the operations of complex businesses in the insurance, healthcare‌ and financial industries. Ushur and Ushur AI Labs have already thought through the decisions an enterprise business needs to consider when evaluating AI projects in highly regulated industries. Using proprietary language and document services, Ushur’s AI solutions help businesses understand user intent, evaluate document content‌ and drive seamless customer experiences so that customer support functions and business owners can focus on the highest-value projects in their queues.

If you want more information on the machine learning and deep learning capabilities in the Ushur platform, and to see how Ushur blends AI with customer experience technologies, visit ushur.com/platform.

Frequently Asked Questions

• What is machine learning
• Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) that enables systems to learn from data and make predictions or decisions without being explicitly programmed. It involves using algorithms to analyze large datasets and identify patterns, which the system can then use to predict new data.
• What are the main types of machine learning?
• There are four main types of machine learning: supervised learning, unsupervised learning, semi-supervised learning, and reinforcement learning.
• What is the difference between supervised and unsupervised learning?
• Supervised learning involves training a model on labeled data, where the correct output is provided. The model learns to make predictions based on this labeled data. Unsupervised learning, on the other hand, involves training a model on unlabeled data and allowing it to find patterns or structures in the data on its own.
• What is the difference between machine learning and deep learning?
• Machine learning is a broader category that includes various techniques for training models to make predictions or decisions based on data. Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that involves using deep neural networks with multiple layers to learn complex patterns in data, particularly useful for tasks like image and speech recognition.

Though the year has only just started, it has already been a busy one for me personally. A few long international flights to kick off the calendar year provided moments of insight and inspiration, and a lot of time to ponder them. Over the past few years, we’ve experienced an uptick in extreme conditions. We’ve lived through a global pandemic, forest fires, floods, ice storms and the threat of international conflict. And while it would be nice to discount these last few years as a blip on the radar, an outlier before a regression to the mean, the data tells a different story. In many ways, we are adjusting to extremes as a new reality.

When Mother Nature is responsible, we often refer to these extremes as “100 year events.” But how many of those 100 year events have happened within months of each other? It has become a misnomer. The fact is that much of the world’s population has been impacted by these growing extremes, and that impact will continue to grow. The businesses and industries that support us in these times of need have to rethink the way they are built, and the way they engage, to account for a “new normal” that is increasingly abnormal. 

Last week, I was in Australia speaking with customers. We talked at length about the catastrophic fires that tore through the country two years ago, followed by immense flooding the year after. For the segments that we serve, like insurance companies, these 100 year events have become increasingly disruptive to their businesses. It’s changing the rules of how policies are underwritten, and impacting the most fundamental aspects of what they do. People aren’t going to stop buying insurance, and the companies that provide the policies have obligations to fulfill when disaster strikes. As the underwriting of policies becomes more expensive, insurance companies will need to find other ways to drive down costs without negatively impacting their customers. It’s a daunting task, to say the least.

...companies will need to find other ways to drive down costs without negatively impacting their customers.

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This is a clear cut opportunity for Ushur to help the human beings on both sides of the equation. For customers, the claims process is full of friction. That friction is compounded by high-anxiety, high-stress events like the loss of a home or car. Some people may have lost loved ones. This is not a time that people want to jump through hoops, or run into roadblocks. The situation is stressful enough, the operational aspects of an emotional situation should run smoothly. They should be built with empathy as a core component. 

For the companies that serve these customers, there is a chance to not only create tremendous value for customers but to reduce the cost of engagement as well. At Ushur, our mission is to enable these companies with a frictionless experience that they can deliver on their own. It takes an enormous amount of time, energy and resources to build the right kind of digital experiences for this customer base, and we’ve spent the last seven years assembling a team that is focused exclusively on delivering those experiences. 

Another key vertical we serve is healthcare. For many of the same reasons, it’s an industry experiencing many of the same dilemmas. The experience of receiving healthcare in the United States is so incredibly full of friction that it risks being upended entirely. A few weeks ago I was scrolling through Twitter and noticed that a respected journalist I follow was in an online battle with a major insurance provider that was failing to even respond to her calls. This particular reporter has been in multiple war zones, has won four Emmys and has nearly half a million followers. The world is evolving so quickly that moments like these can irrecoverably impact a brand.

The more friction-full and difficult it is to get something done, the more change we will see in the industry eventually.

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I see this as an existential crisis that healthcare companies must solve for. The instant experiences we’ve become accustomed to as consumers will continue to drive expectations of near real-time feedback. That appetite will only increase. The more friction-full and difficult it is to get something done, the more change we will see in the industry eventually. Whether that’s voluntary change by the incumbents or an outside disruption remains to be seen. Many are still running on a false notion that their incumbency is undisputed, but in my lifetime I have seen many established giants upended by innovation overnight. Our kids won’t remember Blockbuster, or Circuit City, or Border’s Books — businesses that not long ago occupied massive storefronts in just about every city.

As I left Sydney, I noticed another relic from the recent past — an old payphone from Telstra. To my surprise, it was still functional. Above it, a sign read “Free Phone Calls.” Free phone calls, from a payphone. It struck me both as ironic, and foreboding. Disruption happens quickly, but never without warning. For all the would-be entrepreneurs, it is finding these signals and amplifying them that creates magic for startups.

Conversational AI is revolutionizing the insurance industry. Chatbots can now handle a wide range of customer interactions, from answering simple questions to processing claims. This is helping insurance companies improve customer satisfaction, reduce costs, and free up agents to focus on more complex issues.

In this guide, we will explore the value of chatbots for insurance. We will discuss where chatbots are best positioned to offer strategic value, how to incorporate chatbots into a carrier's overall customer experience strategy, and the challenges of implementing chatbots.

We believe that chatbots have the potential to transform the insurance industry. By providing 24/7 customer service, chatbots can help insurance companies to meet the needs of today's customers.

What Is an Insurance Chatbot?

Chatbots are software programs that simulate conversations with people using unstructured dialogue. They are often used in the insurance industry to streamline customer interactions and provide 24/7 support.

There are two main types of insurance chatbots: rule-based chatbots and AI-powered chatbots.

• Rule-based chatbots: These chatbots are designed to follow a specific set of rules. They can answer simple questions, but they are not able to learn or adapt.
• AI-powered chatbots: These chatbots use machine learning to understand and respond to customer queries. They are more flexible and can handle more complex requests.

AI-powered chatbots can be used to do everything from learning more about insurance policies to submitting claims. They can also be used to provide customer support in real time.

Here are some examples of how insurance chatbots are being used:

• Answering customer questions: Chatbots can be used to answer customer questions about insurance policies, coverage, and claims. This can free up customer service representatives to focus on more complex issues.
• Providing quotes: Chatbots can be used to provide quotes for different types of insurance policies. This is a convenient way for customers to get quotes without having to call a customer service representative.
• Submitting claims: Chatbots can be used to submit claims for insurance. This can be a convenient way for customers to file claims without having to mail or fax paperwork.
• Providing customer support: Chatbots can be used to provide customer support in real time. This can be helpful for customers who have questions or problems with their insurance policies.

Chatbots are a valuable tool for the insurance industry. They help to improve customer satisfaction, reduce costs, and free up customer service representatives to focus on more complex issues.

5 Insurance Chatbot Benefits

An insurance chatbot offers considerable benefits to both a carrier and its customers by combining the flexibility of conversational AI and the scalability of automation. A chatbot is one of multiple channels a company can utilize when speaking with their customers in the manner and method they desire.

By using chatbots to streamline insurance conversations, your company can elevate and optimize processes across the entire insurance business.

1. 24/7 Support

Chatbots help insurance companies meet the demands of a 24/7 world. These digital agents answer questions, provide quotes, and even initiate claims at any time of day. This is a major improvement over traditional call centers, which are usually only available during business hours.

Chatbots also help customers compare plans and find the best coverage for their needs. This can be a complex process, but chatbots can simplify it by asking the right questions and providing personalized recommendations.

2. More Meaningful Interactions

Chatbots can handle customer questions and routine requests, freeing up agents to focus on more complex issues, in some cases, leading to a 70% reduction in phone calls, emails, and person-to-person chats. This reduction allows agents more time to focus on meaningful, high-value engagements that better customer interactions. Further, offering self-service channels that can handle more complex or dynamic interaction types can greatly improve customer experiences.

Chatbots can also help streamline insurance processes and improve efficiency. This is especially important for smaller companies that may not be able to afford to hire and train a large number of employees.

3. Lower Operating Costs

When chatbots can quickly handle customer questions and routine requests, they produce significant operating expense reductions. In the insurance industry that’s especially important because carriers are under increased pressure to reduce expenses wherever possible in a volatile economic climate.

Throughout the insurance journey, a chatbot can reduce the need for prospects and customers to reach into a costly enterprise service center, making a carrier’s personnel more readily accessible for inquiries that are more complex, or when a person-to-person interaction is what the caller prefers. This helps to streamline insurance processes for greater efficiency and, in turn, savings.

For smaller companies not quite ready to ramp up their operations, a chatbot can save the time and cost of having to hire and train employees.

4. Lead Generation

Chatbots can automatically generate leads for insurance companies. By engaging visitors to a carrier's website, social media, and other online touchpoints, chatbots can collect information about their needs and answer their questions. This data can then be used to further the conversation and relationship, or to generate leads for sales teams.

Chatbots are a valuable tool for insurance companies that are looking to increase customer acquisition. They can help to speed up the lead generation process and gather more relevant information from prospects.

5. Internal System Integration

An AI-powered chatbot can integrate with an insurance company’s core systems, CRM, and workflow management tools to further improve customer experience and operational efficiency. Robust integrations provide tremendous value because they turn a virtual assistant into a comprehensive solution that’s continuously updated with the most current customer, product, and service details for a tailored experience, after they have been authenticated, of course.

3 Insurance Chatbot Use Cases

Conversational AI can be used throughout the insurance customer journey, from marketing to claims. It can improve customer satisfaction, reduce costs, and free up agents. However, it's important to start small and scale up as the chatbot becomes more accurate.

1. Answer FAQs and Provide Policy Information

Chatbots use natural language processing to understand customer queries, even if they are phrased in a casual way. This results in a more satisfying and frictionless customer experience. Additionally, chatbots can be easily integrated with a company's knowledge base, making it easy to provide customers with accurate information on products or services.

2. Onboard Customers and Manage Policies

Virtual assistants can help new customers get the most out of their insurance by providing guided onboarding and answering common questions. Chatbots can also support omnichannel customer service, making it easy for customers to switch between channels without having to repeat themselves. This streamlines the policyholder journey and makes it easier for customers to get the help they need.

3. File and Process Claims

AI-enabled chatbots can streamline the insurance claim filing process by collecting the relevant information from multiple channels and providing assistance 24/7. This eliminates the need for multiple phone calls and waiting on hold, and it can also help to prevent claims from being delayed due to missing information. Additionally, chatbots can be used to proactively reach out to policyholders before, during, or after a catastrophic event to provide information and assistance. This can help to reduce the frequency and severity of losses, and it can also alleviate demand on the call center during peak times.

Ushur’s Customer Experience Automation™ (CXA) provides digital customer self-service and intelligent automation through its no-code, API-driven platform. Ushur’s CXA platform makes it easy to train and deploy a chatbot. Insurers can also use Ushur within citizen developer teams to open voice, email, text, and other messenger channels for customers, members, claimants, agents, brokers, and providers to converse with them and build an overarching comprehensive and differentiating customer experience. Insurance brands can use Ushur to send information proactively using the channels customers prefer, like their mobile phones, but also receive critical customer data to update core systems. Insurers don’t have to replace core systems–they can integrate Ushur.

If your organization needs help in designing an end-to-end customer engagement strategy that includes a consistent brand experience across the full insurance lifecycle, and is considering implementing chatbot platforms or other insurance automation processes for insurance, contact us today for a consultation on insurance automation best practices.

Columnar data files are the dominant form used for exchanging information across industries like FMCG, Shipping, Finance, Insurance and others. The row-column format creates an  understandable and recognized mechanism for sharing information  which also happens to be easy-to-digest for digital processing. A lot of financial decisions and estimations are made off of information stored in rows and columns and colloquially the files are referred to as CSV’s (comma separated values). However, Microsoft Excel has quickly become the industry standard for visually processing CSV’s and it provides added user functionality like embedded tables, and the concept of “Sheets” where information can be logically partitioned. 

There are many business conversations where data is exchanged via Excel/CSV files, and a classic example in the insurance industry is the dialogue between insurance brokers and insurance carriers. Here, CSV files are used to exchange information during the RFP (Request for Proposal) phase. The US has many insurance brokers. Brokers vary from individuals doing part-time work to small companies that employ a few people all the way to large brokers that employ hundreds of brokers.

When brokers meet prospective companies and need to quote them for their insurance needs, each broker communicates in their own styles and lexicon to represent the information they’ve gathered. For example, a simple column to represent “Date of Birth” can appear as “DOB”, “Birth date”, “Employee dob” and so on. Now, multiply that variability with about 100 columns of data for each customer and you understand why automating the process is so complex. 

Adding Efficiency in Insurance

Automation and Efficiency are the primary goals of many carriers in the insurance industry in 2023. As more and more carriers automate portions of their backend and quote processes, discontinuity in data format and structure are exceedingly difficult to manage and thus need a lot of manual back-and-forth. It is estimated that in many cases, it may take anywhere from 1 to 5 days to clean and structure all information in formats necessary to correctly persist information in their System of Records (SOR’s).

This is where the Ushur Data Transformation Engine comes in and makes an immediate impact – adding automation to an intractable problem which was dominated by manual operations, and providing a high degree of efficiency by dramatically reducing the time taken to process the entire workflow.

Key features of the Ushur solution

• Recognizes hundreds of variances in incoming file data spread across numerous rows and columns
• Intelligently classifies each data column to an appropriate category
• Transforms variations of incoming Excel/CSV files into a normalized format
• Presents the data in a manner that the customers’ Systems of Record can easily ingest automatically

Key implications of the Ushur solution

• 100s of variant documents converted to simple, single format
• Easy to integrate to customer database (DB)/systems
• Significantly reduces time for manual processing. Currently, this process takes around 1-5 days manually. With automation we are processing 200+ cases per day with an average execution time of 3 mins.
• Easy to add more automation steps as the customer begins to see the value in such transformation

RFP Automation in Action

In the RFP process,  an insurance carrier typically receives hundreds of RFP requests per day. These RFP requests usually arrive in the form of emails being sent by the brokers to the sales executives. Among the numerous attachments, there is an excel file containing census information. This information generally includes: names of employees, birth dates, classes of employment, products required, premiums, specific clauses such as Cobra, eligibility for each member and so on. 

This extraordinarily manual process invites automation to save on time and expense, and prevent overworked employees from introducing errors in data. Automating it, however, requires intimate knowledge of the process, a data standardization and cleaning routine, and user-friendly tools.

As Ushur went about solving this problem, we overcame many engineering challenges, some of which are listed below: 

• Noise in excel files: Incoming excel files contain a lot of noisy and irrelevant information that is not required for standardizing the document. Ushur also sees numerous sheets in the same file – some of which are example data, standardized insurance tables and so on. The document transformation engine identifies such extra data in the file and is able to filter them out before it is transferred to the downstream processes. This is an important step to clean up the input file so that the probability of downstream errors are reduced.

• Filtering out irrelevant files: In certain use-cases (RFP for example), these files are usually attached in an email and include other supporting documents some of which are not relevant for the transformation operation. The Ushur document transformation engine identifies the valid attachments by classifying them and then eliminating extraneous documents to optimize processing.

• Tackling variation from multiple brokers: The representation of data within these Excel files is myriad due to brokers all across the globe. Even though the information that is present is similar, the way it is represented in the Excel file widely varies. For example, the date of birth can be represented in forms like date of birth, birth date, DOB etc. Recognizing categories of variations is important to ensure consistency.

• Effective way of ensuring data consistency: There are multiple enterprise use-cases which leverage this engine. This results in use-case specific transformations and validations. To enable citizen developers to self-use this product, an effective and easy way of representing these customisations is one of the biggest challenges in solving this problem.

• Large files: Large Excel files (around 10k rows and 250 columns) have to be normalized quickly and at scale. Hence, focus on quality and latency is of utmost importance to ensure any automation creates value. 

The Ushur Approach

Ushur begins with table extraction. The data users want usually resides in tables within these excel files. Surrounding the tables are huge chunks of irrelevant data such as legends, demography info, huge headers, titles and other noise. The extraneous noise affects the performance of downstream tasks such as classification and transformation. The Ushur novel table extraction algorithm helps us to effectively customize table extraction for multiple use-cases. We use a combination of NLP and Vision Techniques to solve this problem.

The next step is column classification. Ushur recognises different column headers and normalizes them into CRM accepted headers. Since these excel files are sent by multiple brokers from around the world, the variation in representation of the data is immense. Ushur’s domain specific models help to cater to use-cases per domain.

The final steps are transformation and validation. A lot of transformations and validations are required to be performed on these normalized input tables. This ensures data consistency and easy feed into the customer’s system of record. Since, this is a highly customizable problem depending on various use-cases, it’s imperative that we enable citizen developers to perform these operations at their convenience. We enable this by the mechanism of “rules”. We have created our own rule language that end users can use to write their rules. 

Once we have executed the above steps, we now have a clean, normalized and consistent excel file. We send back this asset as an excel file or as a JSON to be fed into the customer’s CRM. 

Conclusion

Ushur’s columnar data transformation engine is a part of the patented Ushur Document Intelligence Services Architecture (DISA) and deployed within Ushur Intelligent Document Automation™ (IDA). DISA applications have led to significant improvements in business metrics for our customers – in one case, one of Ushur’s clients was able to reduce manual labor from 30-36 hours to about 3 minutes, and see many examples where there was no human intervention of any kind, freeing up agents to focus on high-touch, more meaningful interactions, rather than back office tasks. Best of all, the ability to create new rules very quickly via the Ushur no-code flowbuilder enables Ushur to provide ROI to customers in days.

There’s been a significant amount of buzz and excitement around generative AI and ChatGPT lately, and for good reason. Not only is it a potentially transformative technology for just about every industry under the sun, it’s one that is rapidly opening up to a growing number of people.

One of the better qualities we humans have is a capacity for true creative genius. When transformative technologies are opened up, that ability to create is unlocked for a larger portion of the population. Think about GPS capabilities, for example, which started as a niche technology designed for and by the military. It was ultimately opened to everyone, and soon we had GPS capabilities built into every new car. Applications like Google Maps and Waze were created, eventually paving the way for companies like Uber and Lyft to disrupt the entire taxi industry. Today, I can go for a 15-mile run through the woods and know exactly where I am, where the trail markers are, every detail about every turn and elevation gain, all by simply wearing a touch-screen watch on my wrist. Touch screen technology has existed for a long time. GPS has existed for a long time, too. It’s the assembling of these pieces to create better human experiences that is truly profound, which is why technologies like ChatGPT are so compelling.  

Natural language generation technology has been around for nearly a decade. Many companies have created Machine Learning models known as Large Language Models or LLMs. Essentially, this boils down to using massive amounts of data to train a model that can generate answers to questions. In its simplest form, think auto completion when writing an email or sending a text. The underlying technological principles are not new, but that level of accessibility is in its infancy. Today, we are just beginning to scratch the surface when it comes to the potential applications.

Think about the explosion of innovation that has followed our shift away from on-prem data centers to cloud infrastructure. Before Amazon, GCP or Azure the process of building, deploying and running software was an onerous one for founders. Startups needed massive early stage financing purely to run servers and storage racks. Now, the cost of starting a company is minuscule in comparison, largely thanks to the availability of cloud infrastructure. If you’re building application software today you don’t have to worry about all of the hardware investments and overhead you did a decade or two ago. Now that the cloud has become commoditized and is accessible to everyone, it has made it easier for more startups to get their innovations off the ground — and quickly. In turn, more innovations follow at an increasingly rapid pace.

A lot of the recent chatter around ChatGPT has been what generative AI will mean for long-standing incumbents. There have been significant layoffs across big tech, enough that most of us in the industry know someone impacted. Does ChatGPT mean the end of Google, Facebook, or their revenue models? While that may be the newsier angle, I don’t think it’s the right place to focus at all. These companies will regroup, and remain powerful. They have leveraged their incumbency well, and many have invested in LLMs and generative AI themselves. They have enormous assets that they can invest in creating new technologies based on generative AI, or fund smaller companies already doing the work. I don’t believe they’ll be disrupted nearly as much as people might think, they’re well governed companies with strong strategic vision. Going back to the example of Uber and Lyft, many pundits and experts predicted they’d mean the death of the auto industry. Those companies – and their considerable resources – were able to adjust and adapt, and today demand for personal vehicles often outstrips supply.

But when we talk about disruptive technologies, it’s an absolute certainty that eventually a giant or two will be knocked from their perch. Where a status quo that no longer serves the customer exists, the potential for disruption is ripe. Google has enough data banked to continue innovating for multiple generations. They are famous for moving on from projects and products that don’t work. They wrote the book on making adjustments. But if we look at other big companies that have crumbled quickly, they share some clear commonalities. Monopolistic practices and processes had set into the way they operated, making it impossible for them to leapfrog into the next generation. Blockbuster, Circuit City — these were companies in the good-to-great category that weren’t quick enough to adapt and adopt when a newer, better way of serving the customer came along. Today, this is the same challenge healthcare and insurance companies face. In these regulated industries, incumbency is no longer an advantage. How do they adapt and survive in the face of increasingly sophisticated consumer expectations? 

If there’s one clear obstacle between regulated industries and the wider adoption of technologies like ChatGPT, it’s the inherent bias within them. Many people think of AI like it’s something with a personality that can imitate or replace a human. But at the end of the day, it’s just a machine. Even its ability to generate language is a very statistical, mathematical, science-driven outcome. Its ability to learn is based entirely on the data it is fed, and so it might not be representative of all populations but rather the populations contributing most actively to the data set. Those anomalies and biases, the false negatives and false positives, have to be weeded out. For some applications of generative AI, like ChatGPT’s simple search function, 70-80% accuracy is good enough for the user. For others, 98% might fall short. 

For some applications of generative AI, like ChatGPT’s simple search function, 70-80% accuracy is good enough for the user. For others, 98% might fall short.

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For example, let’s say you’ve applied for a life insurance policy. On the other end, a team of underwriters looks at your application information — age, habits, personal data, income, lab results, blood tests, a physician’s summary — and manually identifies your risk against a predetermined set of markers. That level of risk then dictates how high a premium you’ll have to pay. Some applications are rejected outright. Today, it costs most life insurance companies upwards of $500 just to reject a life insurance application. A technology like generative AI can come to the same conclusion regarding those risk factors based on the biomarkers in your application at a fraction of the cost. Of course, an approved application carries a higher financial risk for the provider than a rejected application. So while a company may be able to use technology that is only 70% accurate to reject applications, that rate won’t cut it for approving them. Regardless, even if just half the manual work is eliminated customers will be served more quickly and effectively at a lower cost to the provider. The immediate opportunity for industries like healthcare and insurance is to identify which applications they can accept under 100%, and begin to leverage generative AI for those tasks. 

Applied to the world of healthcare and insurance, generative AI has enormous potential capabilities. For customers of these industries, costs continue to go up and access to care is dwindling. In the United States especially, going to the doctor is an experience full of friction. Recently, I started to feel a bit unwell the day before a long flight. It wasn’t an emergency situation, but a time sensitive one. Though I’ve been seeing my primary care physician for over 20 years, they couldn’t see me on short notice and sent me off to urgent care. All I really needed was a quick diagnosis to give me peace of mind before I sat on a plane for 16 hours. A technology like ChatGPT has the potential to provide a diagnosis like that, without requiring a trip to the doctor. Or worse, urgent care. 

Access to healthcare is critical. I have better than average insurance, but still couldn’t get the help I needed when I needed it. Think of how it must be for one of the millions of people who don’t have the same quality of insurance or care. It shouldn’t be like that, nor does it need to be. Technologies like ChatGPT have the potential to democratize healthcare, to make it more available and accessible in a way that betters our collective quality of life. The big question for today’s incumbents is whether they’ll be the ones providing that improved experience, or whether they’ll go the way of Blockbuster. The opportunity to adapt and improve is at their fingertips, but action is imperative.

For those who are not familiar, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is an automated system that uses technology-enabled triggers to triage customers within a phone support pipeline. The concept of IVR itself dates back to 1962, and throughout the last two decades, IVR technology has become a staple in complex professional industries like healthcare, telecoms, finance, insurance, and education. 

IVR is so penetrative, in fact, that most customers have strong feelings about the technology — and most of these feelings aren’t good. In a 2019 study, 61% of surveyed customers reported a negative association with IVR, leading many companies to drop IVR systems from their customer experience (CX) strategy completely. 

Yet global IVR adoption is still growing and the market is set to reach a $6.7 billion valuation by 2026, representing a 7.9% year-over-year increase. So why are some businesses continuing to prioritize IVR while others are disregarding it as a valid component of customer support? 

Negative associations with general IVR solutions are reasonable. Most IVR solutions push customers into a predefined set of options that offer poor experiences and usually don’t solve their needs. However, many companies continuing to implement IVR solutions do so because their support departments are inundated with requests and often can’t offer service to customers in a reasonable time–or can’t get to all customers that need assistance. Paired with potential cost savings, companies are forced to implement far from imperfect IVR solutions as a best attempt to help customers.

The reality is that today’s IVR is not the same IVR that’s infamous for creating unhappy customers – and while the companies who are keeping IVR know this, they are also refining their strategy for using it . Those that know how to leverage AI-powered IVR are not turning their backs on the technology, and are instead welcoming it into their CX strategy with a twist. 

How Does Interactive Voice Response Work?

After hearing a prerecorded message, which includes a courteous greeting personalized for the company, IVR customers are given a number of options to choose from that will direct them to the right customer service option for them. 

In some cases, the IVR system can ask additional questions to further narrow down options and ensure proper redirection through multi-level menu functionality. IVRs are often supported by automatic call distribution (ACD) solutions. They place callers in a queue based on the information collected from IVRs, where higher-priority calls are answered first. As pointed out by IDC, they also traditionally rely automatic speech recognition (ASR) to hear what is being said to them, but usually lack natural language understanding (NLU) capabilities to “truly understand what is being said.”

IVR was created with the goal  of understanding the intention customers are calling with and responding accordingly. Not only would it make the conversation more personable, but it would also shorten wait times and improve call resolution rates–both having a positive impact on the overall customer experience. 

In practice, these automated phone systems can be frustrating due to their limited ability to provide tangible support. Customers may resort to using foul language or other creative methods to bypass the system altogether. 

What is AI-enabled IVR?

Humans like choice – some prefer digital messaging channels, while others lean more towards traditional calls. However, the more urgent the situation, the more likely they are to give your business a call, hoping that it’ll be the fastest way to solve their issue. You can imagine their frustration when their urgent phone call is met with an automated voice response and a 30-minute hold time (or longer). 

IVR call deflection is a  new approach to handling calls— urgent or otherwise. IVR call deflection empowers callers by giving them the opportunity to switch to a different communication channel like an AI-powered chat if they’ve heard their wait time is too long for their purposes. Their query will be resolved quickly through an automated solution, freeing up agents to handle more pressing issues.

Here’s how it works. When customers are met with long wait times, an IVR call deflection system will step in and give them the option to continue the conversation over a digital channel instead. It would sound something like this:

“Call volumes are unusually high. If you’d like to continue this conversation over text, press four or say ‘let’s talk’.”

IVR call deflection solutions benefit from recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI).  Conversational AI models use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand customer issues and concerns, and guide them through the final steps for self-service and resolution. Particularly as large language models (LLMs) become more available for use, conversational AI deployments will only sound more and more like an empathetic and capable support agent to customers. 

IVR use cases and benefits 

Better customer service and experience

The more complex the industry, the harder it is to maintain a positive customer experience. Take the Insurance industry, for example. When a severe weather event strikes an area, insurers that cover the affected area may experience extreme surges in call volumes. Offering an IVR solution that still allows customers to submit a claim and schedule a phone call with an agent can expedite claim closure and ensure customers are satisfied more quickly. 

For customers whose preferred mode of communication is not by phone, chances are they’ll reach for their phones and dial in, convinced that they’ll only get their request processed quickly if they choose a voice-based medium. These customers are surprised and delighted to discover a digital channel integrated with an IVR that is capable of handling their request, and may opt to deflect their call. 

Happier support agents

IVR deflection solutions for call centers mean more than just a faster resolution time. They also result in a more satisfactory employee experience. When many queries are handled automatically, your agents aren’t overwhelmed by the number of calls they have to answer. More importantly though, the conversations they’re assigned to are always within their area of expertise and of the severity that merits their involvement. This increases the chances of closing tickets, leads to higher productivity, and higher levels of employee satisfaction. Support teams want to help customers, but they prefer working on important cases that can make an impact. 

24/7 Support

Automated support is available 24/7 – customers can call anytime, day or night, and still have an option for self-service with call deflection. While customer service agents can only focus on one call at a time, call deflection integrated with an IVR can handle multiple calls simultaneously. IVR technology allows companies to provide a frictionless experience by resolving consumer queries in real time,irrespective of whether it involves providing information on travel insurance or updating financial forms. 

Better data management

Another benefit of intelligent IVR technology is the integration possibilities within each company’s data and Business Intelligence (BI) systems. For example, IVR systems allow enterprises to quantify exactly how many times each client has reached out with a request, or which types of queries are brought up most often. As a consequence of having that data, creating complete, up-to-date customer profiles empowers you to make better business decisions – after all, you’ll be basing them around reliable data.

Faster resolutions

One of the greatest advantages of IVR technology is its ability to effectively route calls. For example, when a customer contacts an insurance company, they’re connected to an agent who is qualified to resolve their issue. Gone are the days when a caller was transferred repetitively from one agent to another in the hopes that their request will finally be tackled. Effective call routing reduces handle time and increases first-call resolution. 

IVR Deflection, the best of both worlds

Support has come a long way in the last 60 years, and the businesses that take advantage of AI-enabled solutions now have solutions to help their customers and solve their issues more quickly. When integrated into an IVR solution, Ushur Invisible App™️ is the only product of its kind designed to intelligently automate workflows, resulting in a better customer experience and higher retention rates. 

With Ushur Invisible App™, organizations can implement a call deflection solution over chat or SMS that guarantees safety, security, and compliance while also helping triage a slower and expensive voice-only customer queue. Plus, Invisible App doesn’t require a name and password like a usual app so customers don’t suffer from login fatigue.
Learn more about how Ushur can help you with call deflection.

Tucked within a busy month of business travel and board meetings, I had the opportunity to host an industry dinner in one of my favorite international cities — London.  

It was a shorter visit than I typically prefer to make, just three days, but I still managed to see an old friend for dinner and take in a few of the city’s historical gems. I visited the uniquely odd Lloyd’s of London building, with pipes and plumbing exposed all along the outside of its walls to ensure that no pesky leak or backup ever destroys the precious treasures within. I even got a backstage glimpse of rock n’ roll history — original accident insurance policies for all four Beatles and manager Brian Epstein were on display at the Lloyd's Lab. 

But the true highlight of the trip was the dinner itself, and the accompanying conversation. More than 20 healthcare and insurance executives attended to talk about tech’s hottest topic — AI — and its potential disruptive impact on both customer experience and digital transformation. 

I kicked off the discussion by briefly introducing a few key concepts, starting with the notion of “just-in-time” experiences like Amazon and how they’ve permanently changed consumer expectations. I talked about conversational automation, two-way engagements and interactions with customers, and how important it is to offer frictionless experiences that meet users on the communication channel of their choice without sacrificing experience fidelity. I provided first-hand insights into what it takes to deploy these types of experiences, and how it’s become possible in an increasingly no-code world to create them without infrastructural overhauls. 

It was the Q&A that followed, however, that really drove the discussion to new heights. Healthcare and insurance are two highly regulated industries, both are a little behind the curve on digital transformation efforts as a result. Lack of awareness, fear and hyperbole are obstacles AI faces almost universally, and those worries are compounded for the not-so-early adopters who require infallible degrees of accuracy and precision from any technology they deploy. This level of caution often leads to great questions, and made for a wide-ranging dialogue that lasted nearly three hours. Everyone was incredibly engaged, insightful and thoughtful. There was commentary I expected, like skepticism around AI and whether the time is right to fully embrace its potential. And there were themes I hadn’t considered that appeared widespread among the group, like concerns around the potential misuse of AI to commit fraud. 

There was even higher level discussion around whether AI could lead to unemployment, or economic upheaval. From my perspective, any automation or efficiency that’s widely adopted will lead to some level of disruption and obsolete jobs. Historically, all give rise to new jobs as well. More importantly, they fill gaps in need that widen as the population grows. Consider the advances made in food production and farming during the 20th century. Without the level of automation we’ve adopted in agriculture and farming, the world’s 8 billion people would suffer from widespread, global famine beyond even the worst conditions we see today. 

Those same 8 billion people are being served by roughly 40 million knowledge workers. The scale we are asking them to achieve is impossible without automating a significant amount of the work. There is already a significant disparity between need and resources. Times change, and we must change with them. Perhaps there is no better proof than those insurance policies on display at Lloyd’s. Each Beatle’s insured policy amount was a measly 200,000 pounds. Can you imagine what it would cost to insure Sir Paul McCartney in 2023? And yet he continues to perform, well into his 80s, and I assume his accident insurance has only gotten more comprehensive! People may be resistant to change on the surface, but we adapt incredibly quickly to new conditions. 

To close, I want to offer my sincere thanks to all of those who attended the evening’s event, and who kept the conversation so lively well into the night. It is that level of passion, interest and genuine care that makes the industries we serve such an incredible resource on the path to innovation. Keep an eye out for more of these events in the future. We might be in your city soon.

Ushur, the leading no-code digital Customer Experience Automation (CXA) platform, and Virtusa, a global leader in guiding clients through the challenges of digital disruption, are excited to launch a new partnership.

Virtusa’s appetite for disruption comes from the teams and technology it has centralized in its business. The unique expertise that Virtusa has acquired helps their teams guide insurance carriers through turbulent transformations and leverage digital capabilities like those from Ushur’s AI-powered, no-code platform. Across Property and Casualty, Life and Annuity, and Group insurance, Virtusa prepares clients for the next revolution of technology in their core businesses — no matter what it may be.

The complex and regulated ecosystem of carrier technology solutions make digital transformation projects burdensome without technology and service providers like those brought to bear with this new partnership. The Virtusa and Ushur partnership launches digital transformation projects for insurance carriers into a new class of accelerated delivery because they are already enterprise-grade to the core.

Digital Transformation as a strategy for customer experience

Digital transformation replaces the unscalable and manual versions of insurance carrier processes with more-repeatable, technologically-driven solutions. Leaders in these industries are constantly looking for ways to reduce journey friction, accelerate development cycles, and cut operational expenses with digital innovation because time kills customer experiences.

Virtusa clients going through digital transformation efforts can now bank extra time by using the flexibility of machine learning (ML) thanks to the Ushur platform. When speaking with claimants, partners, customers, and other stakeholders, Virtusa clients need Ushur’s state-of-the-art engagement capabilities. With just a couple of clicks, Ushur and Virtusa clients can rely on conversational AI and machine learning so they no longer need to programmatically account for every possible path and route a customer could go.

CX often suffers from technology underinvestment, and both customers and employees already have elevated expectations of what technology-first solutions should look like – it should be easy and it should be fast. When it comes to making digital transformation real, customer experience excellence is a bigger hurdle than many others.

Enterprises already understand that digitization projects are essential if they currently rely on people-first processes for customer service. Scale of customer interactions is increasing, not decreasing. Even in the best of times, it can be hard to find enough of the right people to help triage at that scale. Additionally, people leave jobs, or switch companies, and competing for that customer service expert is a difficult path for achieving growth.

Building a practice around Customer Experience Automation™️ is a new and emerging strategy for adding automation to customer service functions, and can truly help enterprises accomplish their digital transformation goals.

What is Customer Experience Automation?

Customer Experience Automation™ (CXA) is the interdisciplinary intersection of artificial intelligence, process automation, and conversational interfaces blended to optimize the customer experience and engagement.

Automation removes procedural barriers that prevent expedient resolution. Artificial intelligence (AI) uses historical data to understand and predict future behaviors. Customer experience is the product of two-way conversations where action matches the intent.

How The Partnership Benefits Carriers

Insurance carriers, and financial services organizations are already using digital-first strategies for interactions with members, customers, patients, agents, brokers, and providers, and they rely on partnerships like the one between Ushur and Virtusa.

Virtusa establishes a practice at each client for tackling customer experience projects and brings in the best-in-class technology needed to make delivering those a reality. Virtusa will use the Ushur CXA platform to engage directly with business users to better understand customer experiences, and then build out the digital representation of those customer experiences. The partnership brings the experts in digital transformation the kind of technological capabilities they need to make those conversations seamless

We want to say that Virtusa gets experts on digital transformation and Ushur gives them the tools to build customer experiences. The no-code capabilities mean they can easily get agreement from Virtusa clients.

Insurance Automation

Everyone involved in the insurance journey, from market development to service and administration, expects digital-first self-service to be available. Carriers with self-service-first principles will naturally rely on intelligent automation in the insurance journeys to engage with customers, claimants, brokers, adjusters, and providers.

Brands can improve digital customer engagement by leveraging the API-driven customer experience automation platform via integrations to make it the ideal technological bridge between consumers and the back office claims management, policy administration, underwriting, and billing systems.

Conclusion

The new partnership between Virtusa and Ushur highlights the capabilities of Ushur’s Customer Experience AutomationTM platform and puts it in the hands of the insurance carriers that Virtusa is guiding through digital transformation projects. Ushur applications can deploy in days, are easy to task for reuse, and are simple to deploy.

Virtusa expertise and technology, partnered with the Ushur customer experience automation platform, will help the industry's leading carriers tackle the challenges of new customer experience programs in the coming years. Together, this partnership will design and deploy the unique value-creating customer experiences that carrier customers have been waiting for.

It’s important for carriers to be able to reach all of their customers - both personal and commercial - to alert them when their insured property and possessions are in the predicted path of a hurricane, tornado, or hailstorm. Insurance carriers already think about how to get organizationally prepared for catastrophic (CAT) events. What they rarely, by comparison, warn customers of are the regional severe weather events that happen much more frequently and still impact their customers. With a risk frequency that has increased 5 times in the past decade, this is an underserved opportunity for both service and risk mitigation.

Challenges with Severe Weather Alerts

Alerting customers of impending weather events is a difficult proposition for insurance carriers  for a number of reasons, so carriers may be reticent to try and be overly proactive when it comes to less catastrophic events. Following up after the weather event, and potentially more than once, can compound the expected degree of difficulty. The challenges carriers face include cost, forming a communication plan, and guiding a unique claim journey.

Warning is only the first step in serving and supporting customers. Even if a customer followed all instructions that their carrier provided for safety and property protection, damage may still have occurred. Immediately reporting any loss is essential to begin addressing a customer’s immediate needs and support them in protecting their property from further damage. Without guidance from a carrier, customers may not realize their policy covers immediate expenses and could miss the benefit from a clean up vendor or access to emergency services already designed to provide value to them.

Proactivity can be expensive

Carriers certainly have methods to communicate with their customers but they are most commonly designed for planned outreach; be it monthly payment reminders or annual renewal confirmations. It can be expensive, if not impossible, to use those digital channels if they’re not prepared and configured to send at scale, with limited lead time to craft a tailored message and contact an event-specific audience. Telephonic outreach via a service center is a one-to-one approach that cannot scale to reach thousands of people simultaneously and speed matters. Plus carriers need to bolster their inbound call capacity with as many people as possible to field calls after a storm. After the severe weather has passed, the volume of first notice of loss calls coupled with triaging and dispatching key customer support and loss handling resources will consume all available claims resources.

For the same reason that existing digital and telephonic channels cannot respond, scale or run fast enough for severe weather event warnings, carriers may be unable to proactively check in with their customers to find out if they were impacted. Nor will they be able to usher them into the claim reporting process, and ensure they are receiving the support they need as quickly as possible. 

Communications require a strategy

Carriers need a communication plan when it comes to alerting customers of an impending severe weather event, and the context of the type of event is an essential component. Severe weather can take any number of forms and duration, and carriers would give their customers different advice for a winter flurry than they would for an approaching wildfire. One size does not fit all when it comes to safety and loss prevention guidance. 

Carriers need a clear matrix of team members and responsibilities in order to be efficient and effective when it comes time to warn customers of the next and fast approaching weather event. This includes identifying the specific customers at risk, and the most relevant and helpful information they will need to prepare. After the weather has passed, those same at-risk customers need to be reached again, so carriers can confirm whether they have been impacted. If they have, they need to be guided toward reporting a claim, and offered local emergency support information. 

More is not better - Generic warnings can get lost in the noise

While it may be operationally expensive to send out severe weather alerts, it’s also detrimental to send too many warnings, and ineffective to customer’s experiences if they are generic and not applicable to their location. Customers who are numb to alerts are prone to ignore, if not opt-out from their carrier’s alerts, and will miss the one that winds up damaging their property. With more than 20,000 severe weather events across the United States in 2022, over-distributed alerts would be experienced as spam to all but those in the actual path of the storm. 

The corollary desire to not want to overwhelm customers with warnings is the additional concern that carriers could warn the wrong people. Weather patterns shift, and they’re difficult to predict with 100% certainty. If an insurance carrier sends notifications too far in advance, they risk missing customers under threat, and including those who will be spared. And the extent of the severe weather event could be under or overstated, eroding the alert’s credibility. Both or either gaps could again result in customer’s ignoring a future SMS message when it does apply to their property location. 

Challenges Aside: The defense to being proactive

The purpose of insurance is to reduce financial uncertainty and make accidental loss manageable. Policyholder expectations of service from their carrier are already established by proactive and easy self-service experiences they enjoy in their personal lives, from online retail to social media. It is difficult to justify that while consumers are forewarned when their clothing order delivery will be delayed due to inclement weather, they may never receive practical advice from their carrier on how to prepare their home for the same severe weather event

That same online retailer may reach back to confirm customer satisfaction, while that consumer may not receive an empathetic message from their carrier to confirm that they incurred no damage from the storm. 

Additionally, offering proactive communication and reaching out in times of uncertainty can offer a needed sense of security and build brand loyalty in ways that reactivity via a contact center with long wait times may not. 90% of customers confirm severe weather alerts from their carrier are valuable. It’s also cost-wise to advise customers to protect their goods and belongings in order to avoid damage that would have resulted in a claim; it can even reduce the severity of a loss. For example, by advising customers to keep their cars under cover during a hail storm, they can prevent ruined windshields and dented hoods, if not total losses.

Many insurance carriers have networks of emergency repair services, like board-up companies, that they engage for rapid post-loss customer assistance. With the expertise and services at hand, they and their business partners each would benefit from giving customers gentle guidance towards a network of preferred vendors before the severe weather arrives. Being proactive continues to bring value to the customer after the weather event has moved on. 

What Warnings Could Look like

In 2022 there were 18 catastrophic weather events in the U.S , which insurance carriers are already organized to deal with. Those disasters alone took almost 500 lives and cost $165B.  Between 1980 and 2022, the U.S. has sustained 341 weather and climate disaters with a total cost in excess of $2.48T. While the total cost of the additional 20,000+ severe weather events is not known, they still posed a threat to people and property. The full scope of the damage of these less catastrophic events may be less, however customers who are in their path will still value the opportunity to prepare and protect themselves and their property.

Carriers today can use automation to proactively engage with their customers before, during and after both catastrophe and severe weather events. This enables carriers to bridge the gap in loss prevention and claims service, to support both the largest disasters and the thousands of less catastrophic but still impactful storms. Establishing templates with a defined communication plan means a carrier can control their outreach and send at the opportune time. Proactive engagement has become a commodity expectation for customer service. Carriers can differentiate their customer experience by increasing the scope of severe weather events where they help their customers prepare, and then initiating two-way conversations to support the post-event claim reporting journey. 

Open doors, kept open

By proactively checking in with customers after a severe weather event, carriers can learn about the nature and extent of damage a customer has incurred. Substantial damage or even customer preference for a less severe loss can be ushered to a person-to-person conversation, that can include dispatching emergency repair services and authorizing temporary living expenses. By comparison, carriers can introduce customers signaling less significant damage, perhaps a downed tree on a fence, to a digital first notice of loss experience. Carriers can offer customers the option to upload photos of the damage, receipts for any immediate out-of-pocket expenses, or repair estimates. This helps the carrier better understand the scope and size of the loss for claim reserving, begin the expense reimbursement process, and even adjust smaller claims without needing to complete an onsite damage appraisal. 

The Expense of Waiting

Long-running auto and property claims include many discrete interactions between the carrier and customer — what we refer to as Micro-Engagements™— and each represents an opportunity for a customer to unintentionally feel forgotten and churn as a consequence. While a customer is juggling contractor visits and overseeing clean-up after a severe weather event, and potentially temporarily living in a hotel, they are also still living their day-to-day lives.

From working at jobs to coordinating school transportation, and attending extracurricular activities, life doesn’t come to a complete stop after a severe weather event. When a carrier provides customers the ability to opt-in for proactive claim status and payment updates, or send a text message to #claimstatus to ask a question, they are offering the same speed and ease that every customer has learned to expect as an everyday consumer. 

That same ease doesn’t only apply to customers checking status information. Customer Experience Automation™ also applies when the claims adjuster needs to reach the customer, perhaps to complete and e-sign a proof of loss, or even to schedule a convenient time for a phone call.

Conclusion

2023 has already seen immense levels of significant weather with 10+ atmospheric rivers causing flooding and erosion on the west coast, and Nor’easters wreaking havoc in New England. Every weather event is a chance for a carrier to reach out to their customers and help them avoid a claim altogether by giving them advice and best practices in times of a potential disaster. 

If you and your call center and claims operations teams want to add automated proactive and secure two-way communication to your insurance journey, or you’re worried about being overwhelmed by new claim volumes for severe weather events, the Ushur Customer Experience Automation™ platform is specifically designed to help you move quickly. Conversational AI in the Ushur platform keeps customers engaged, and Ushur Invisible App™️ makes gathering information and managing documents simple and secure.
If you’re interested in augmenting your severe weather customer communication plan with automation, check out Ushur’s pre-built automation workflows included with our Severe Weather Alerts and Management solution pack and learn how it can provide value within weeks, or contact us at ushur.com/request-demo.

Insurance companies receive numerous emails, which contain requests for proposal (RFP) quotes from brokers. These emails have valuable information that can help insurers to make informed decisions about coverage and pricing. However, extracting data with the desired accuracy from emails can be a significant challenge even with the help of AI. Here are some of the challenges while using AI to extract data from RFP quotes.

• Unstructured data: Email data lacks a predefined structure and contains information in a variety of formats such as blobs of text, images, and attachments. AI must consider data present in the subject, email body, signature as well as attachments. AI models must be able to extract and integrate relevant data from these sources.

• Complex Data: Quotations from brokers widely vary in terminologies and can contain technical terms, acronyms, and jargon. The content can be highly subjective, necessitating contextual understanding and deep domain expertise. It is a challenge to train an AI model to capture these intricacies.
• Language Variant: Emails include a combination of dialects, language constructs, and grammar. It is quite common to see people using slang, emoticons, abbreviations, and colloquial language that are variant in nature. In the case of RFP emails, an additional level of complexity is variations in syntax, semantics, and terminology used by different brokers. These variants make it a challenge for AI models to interpret and extract the meaning from emails. The models must understand the nuances of the various industry specific language.
• Regulatory Compliance: Insurance companies must comply with strict regulations to ensure the security and privacy of customer data. AI models must comply with these regulations, including GDPR and HIPAA, and maintain data security and privacy. This requires effective planning and execution on how to handle, store, and destroy data. There must be auditable proof provided to customers to assure that their data (particularly PII data) is handled appropriately and is protected.
• Accuracy and Consistency: Accuracy and consistency in predictions are crucial for insurance data extraction. Incorrect data can result in errors in underwriting and pricing, which negatively impacts the organization’s profit parameters. AI models must extract data accurately and consistently across different data sources. If the models have lower confidence, then such extractions must be called out to possibly bring in a human-in-the-loop kind of construct.
• Data Volume: Insurance companies receive a large volume of emails daily. AI models must handle large amounts of data without compromising on the precision and timing requirements at the forefront of the pipeline design.

Using AI to automate the RFP quote intake process can help insurance companies reduce the time to respond to requests, giving them a competitive edge over those that process quotes manually. There are also potential benefits such as increased efficiency, monetary gains, and so on, without losing sight of the numerous challenges of using AI to extract unstructured data from emails in the insurance industry.

Ushur has overcome these obstacles and developed a data extraction framework for a Fortune 500 company. Using our intelligent data extraction capabilities and the Ushur Invisible App, our customer is now able to respond to incoming quote requests in 10 minutes rather than 5 to 6 days. Our AI pipeline can accurately identify and extract around 170+ entities from unstructured emails and provide highly structured information within a few minutes.

After conducting an extensive evaluation of various techniques, Ushur concluded that an ensemble of multiple methods was necessary to effectively extract the various entities from the email.

Ushur established a hierarchical relationship between the entities to accurately associate them with specific insurance concepts and devised mechanisms to narrow down the region of interest for each entity. An efficient modeling approach, which could capture these hierarchical relationships and select appropriate extractors for each entity was required to implement this. After careful consideration, Ushur determined that an ontology-guided method was the optimal choice.

This approach enables a structured and comprehensive framework to create the data extraction pipeline that ensures accurate and consistent results across large volumes of incoming emails from our customers. The approach is validated by accuracy rates exceeding 90% on a corpus of over 10k emails across a period of about 12 months. Ushur accomplished this by combining a novel ontology-guided extraction approach with an ensemble of NLP techniques.

Our approach

An ontology is a formal description of a set of concepts in a domain that depicts their properties and the relationships between them.

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The steps involved are:

1. Define Ontology: The ontology provides a framework for understanding email structure and content and can guide the information extraction process. For example, an ontology for the insurance industry might include concepts such as “broker,” “insurance policy quote,” and “group,” and relationships such as “group has an insurance policy” with properties such as “quote’s due date”, “broker’s name”, etc.
2. Pre-processed Email: It is easy to work with pre-processed emails. This involves using NLP techniques such as tokenization, sentence segmentation, and part-of-speech tagging to identify and label relevant text components.
3. Extract Data: The Ushur data extraction approach allows each node in the ontology to be associated with an extractor. These extractors could be simple regular expressions, NER-based (Named entity recognition), complex pointer networks, or an ensemble of extractors chained together.
4. Store Data: Extracted data needs validation to ensure that it is accurate and complete. The extracted data is stored or presented in a structured format.

To conclude, an ontology-based approach provides a consistent framework for data extraction from unstructured content. When combined with the power of AI, this can assist businesses in automating and increasing the efficiency of their RFP intake process.

There have been many a lively conversation between Ushur and external companies who are replacing their aging person-to-person texting solution or contemplating introducing one for the first time, and we decided to turn it into a piece on digital transformation and the channels enterprises choose to support and why.

Digital transformation has only been part of the enterprise's daily vocabulary for the past decade or so, but it has been underway for more than half a century. That is because the age of the digital consumer driving that change is new, and yet digital solutions for business and government are somewhat older. As proof, the precursor to Internet, ARPANET, was created back in 1969 by the US Department of Defense and businesses have spent just as long adopting digital systems to facilitate their day-to-day operations. Today, our mobile-first moment we live in has left companies who have spent the last 50 years adopting other technology trying to catch up with today's mobile-first and text-first customer expectations. We've come to learn that their strategies for mobile-based customer engagement must be proactive and automated.

A digital history

Email became a mainstream channel of business communication in the mid-1990s—a huge leap forward from postal mail in speed, and far more convenient (and legible) than faxing. While the first text message "Merry Christmas" was sent (from a computer) in 1994, it was not until 2000 that Americans were sending 35 text messages monthly. Just two years later, there were 250 billion SMS messages being sent worldwide. By 2007, texting became more popular than calling.

96% of smartphone owners text + 80% of professionals use text for business purposes

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One look at these statistics, and it becomes no surprise why automated text messaging is popular for business communications, too. However, before a company explores introducing an SMS automation platform, or even replacing a texting solution that may be reaching its end of life, some due diligence is warranted.

An argument for texting

Text is the digital channel, but thinking about the process as strictly person-to-person (i.e. manual) won't achieve an organization's objectives for improved customer experience, operational expense, and employee engagement. Texting needs to be bi-directional and can be automated and still satisfy the demands of a digital-native enterprise customer base and employees.

78% of people wish they could have a text conversation with a business

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From this perspective, it's also a big miss to think about texting as strictly an inbound conversation that your customers initiate. Look at your own personal text message app - you likely see a range of proactive, automated communications and reminders separate from your contacts list, be it an alert of a power outage in your area, a shipping notification, or a nudge to confirm your restaurant reservation. Many enterprises have figured out that their customers prefer this as a channel and have begun reaching out via automated text messages.

Proactivity in texting customers is a departure from many peoples' understanding of the value that automated text messaging provides—and is a new best practice to have to incorporate. By comparison, most automated text messaging services will focus on the benefits of a preset schedule for marketing campaigns, and the ability to reach out to contact lists on a specific date with a link to new sales resources to expand the business. Our point of view is that expanded text message marketing is not actually the primary motivation. Rather, we believe that text automation and having the phone number of your customer represents a fair chance to engage in real-time two-way customer service thanks to the flexibility of AI-driven SMS workflows. Businesses can expand and enrich their customer journey in new and different ways.

Digital transformation and procurement

The goal with an SMS solution (new or replacement) should be a transformation (a complete change), but it is easy to get boxed into a tactical shift or even worse, no meaningful change at all. With today's elevated pace of change, sustaining the status quo is losing ground. Businesses must learn the behavior of adopting and adapting at a new, if not uncomfortable rate.

Introducing a new digital channel and selecting a technology solution begins with some internal scrutiny to fully understand both the current and target state. That target state must consider not only the desired customer experience, but the needed speed to value, and the intended operating model across your business and IT teams to deploy and develop your texting service and capabilities.

A checklist looks like:

• Scrutinize competitor approaches carefully because they may be tactical and less a source of customer satisfaction than an expensive and slow attempt to simply check a box. No company can afford to fake it, and your customers, who are also consumers in their daily lives, will quickly recognize it.
• Hold any prospective solution provider accountable for sharing customer experience and operational expense outcomes.
• Optimize for text message automation partners who have experience in SMS but can support the various channels your customer experience goals require via integrations or otherwise.
• Review the specific conversations where SMS is needed for customer engagement. Data to source includes your call center logs and interviewing your front-line employees.
• Look for the highest volume of questions coming into your organization - odds are, many involve requesting the status of something—like a payment, a claim, or an account change. You may discover that 20% of the inquiry types drive 80% of the activity.

When thinking about making the change from responsive to proactive, status inquiries are a great problem to start with. Pivoting to proactive and automated outreach removes the urgency and potential frustration of customers wanting to know something inherently relevant to the service a business provides them for which the service provider already has the information handy. After all—the best question is the one that is answered before the customer has to ask.

Proactivity as a practice can be as simple as an automated SMS reminder of a payment due date. Or a progress alert with a missing action step or task as an application is moving through the internal review process. As work is being processed within an internal system, there are opportunities to automatically trigger a complete and consistent message, say, when their claim payment will be issued and the amount.

If you're skeptical that proactive, automatic text messages can be a win-win - let me share just one example of our customer's success stories—Offering proactive claim status updates quickly resulted in a 35% reduction in inbound phone calls.

Conclusion

Users are constantly looking for the easiest way to interact with enterprises, and small businesses and business users are desperate to find an optimal process for using software to help their customers. That could be day of appointment reminders, pre-written messages, or keyword-triggered workflows with auto-replies to help a support team as a start.

When implemented correctly, customer experience automation supports inbound and outbound automation journeys across all channels—not only SMS. Engaging customers will help you get closer to them, better address their needs, and establish a loyal relationship. A partner who can help you think about digital transformation comprehensively will look at the channels you support and offer recommendations and opportunities for optimizing that relationship with the right tools at the right time.

If you're curious about the benefits of introducing SMS or other channels into your customer experience and want to learn more, reach out to consult with an expert!

Today, we are announcing our $50M Series C funding. Having established a great base of marquee customers in Insurance and Healthcare, built a world-class team, expanded our products portfolio and established a healthy go-to-market momentum, I can confidently say that we are well on our way to reach escape velocity with closing our Series C. This is a significant milestone for Ushur, setting us up with a strong balance sheet that will enable us to grow significantly. We intend to use the proceeds for continued market development and dominance in Customer Experience Automation (CXA), investing in our AI-powered platform and expanding our global customer base.

Avoiding the land mines

Our startup journey began with our founding vision to create a customer experience automation platform to drive better experiences. We memorialized our intent with our company name by calling it Ushur. Early validation from our first customers who adopted our solution and created value for their business while delivering delightful customer experiences nurtured our early viable and lovable product. We built on this early success and grew stronger by the increased velocity of our deployment footprint by expanding into multiple verticals while increasing our addressable market, now tens of billions of dollars.

Reflecting on our journey, we are mindful of the odds we overcame to get here. We are very grateful for the outcomes we have experienced as we join an elite, tiny percentage of the best of the best startups that get to this stage. We are rooted in humility as we acknowledge the role serendipity plays. The intangibles from lady luck tip the balance between success and failure. There are many other reasons for the vast majority of startups to fail. For companies to get past Series C, it requires overcoming many of these challenges: founder alignment, market fit, team, and last but not least - access to capital.

Founder alignment

At Ushur, we have been lucky that Henry Peter, our CTO and co-founder, and I are completely aligned in our vision for Ushur. We have a clear sense of purpose of why Ushur exists and what our mission is. Between the two of us, we have complementary skills and have spanned the full breadth of execution end-end to parachute in and help the team in any situation. Founder fallout and founder fatigue are often the reasons companies find exit paths or die. Fortunately, Henry and I have figured out swim lanes and strategies to tag team and stay fresh after all these years of working together.

Teamwork makes the dream work

Next, one has to be lucky to assemble a very core group of people - your early employees who are scrappy, have a chip on their shoulders, align with the mission, and evolve from generalists into specialists. At Ushur, we have been incredibly fortunate to assemble such an aligned group. Michael Fisher and Sreevathsa Duglapura are our product and engineering leaders who have navigated this journey with poise and patience. A significant investment we made post-Series B was to strengthen our leadership team. With help from our amazing people leader Sarah Stevens, we have created a framework and safe space for our team to thrive by enabling them to leverage their talents guided by values that foster growth and reward risk-taking.

Getting to green pastures

And then, you must have market availability and readiness to adopt your offering. It is not for the faint-hearted to focus on enterprise customers as your initial GTM motions and stay the course. The long sales cycles, lumpiness, and the more considerable initial investments to find product-market fit and go-to-market fit are often reasons why more founders gravitate to mid-market or SMB plays. But Ushur has focused on Global 2000 and Fortune 500 customers from day one. The growing demand for automation, in general, and the customer experience, in particular, has been impeccable timing for us. We have built a world-class, go-to-market team that has focused on brand and demand in equal proportions. Thanks to our two GTM leaders - Ron Gupta, our CRO, and Kashif Mahbub, our CMO, we grew 6X in the past two years as our customers in Insurance and Healthcare looked for solutions to navigate the pandemic, the Great Resignation, and the growing urgent demand from their customers for better service experiences. We established our presence on four continents without boots on the ground because we were a cloud-native, AI-native platform from Day 1. Our post-Series B journey required us to continue our customer pursuits in Insurance, and we are proud of the team for having made tremendous progress with Fortune 500 and Global 2000 insurers. We expanded our footprint in Healthcare, landing 3 of the top 6 healthcare companies in the world and a host of other marquee healthcare customers. Serving the healthcare market needs is very close to my heart. Having cared for my terminally ill mom for over 10 years, I intimately dealt with providers and payers with excruciating friction. Eliminating these pains, making such experiences a thing of the past, and transforming these industries are deeply personal to me.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush

Retaining our existing base of customers is such a critical requirement. Ushur could not have asked for a better leader to lead our Customer Growth and Retention function. Vandana Rao perfectly balances understanding our technology and managing post-sales value creation for our customers. Under her leadership, we have demonstrated off-the-charts net retention revenue (NRR) metrics - thanks to an incredible effort by our CSM team, ably supported by our engineering and product teams, who have taken care of our business by enabling our customers to deploy the most comprehensive CXA platform.

Gurus and mentors

It is time to also shout out to all the fantastic advisors and mentors - formal or otherwise, from whom I have learned a great deal. Thank you, Murli Thirumale, Ted Reed, Phil Bruen, and Douglas Kim, for all you have done to coach me. And then, I have two CEOs whom I have watched execute and learn from - Chet Kapoor, CEO of DataStax, and Sudheesh Nair, CEO of Thoughtspot. These advisors are my Dronacharya - the legendary, revered teacher from the great Indian epic - Mahabharata.

Good VCs, Bad VCs

Most often, entrepreneurs deal with the hand they are dealt with concerning the VC partners they choose. I have heard my fair share of horror stories of the VC-Founders dynamics that lead to turmoil and failed companies. We have been fortunate in this regard to have investors who are 100% aligned with the core vision for Ushur and have enabled us to execute without any distractions. Because of the shared vision and conviction, our existing investors doubled down on the company and underwrote our Series C investment. As a first-time CEO and founder, I stumbled a few times along this journey but have gotten stronger with great support and mentorship from our board.

Our earliest angel investors seeded us, and our Series A, B, and C investors have nurtured and helped us grow. A big shoutout to Sridhar Chandrashekar, Larry Rosenberg, Murali Venkatesan, Pankaj Patel, Joe Lonsdale & Bhaskar Ghosh from 8VC, Mohanjit Jolly from IronPillar, Bharat Rajaram from Aflac Ventures, Barry Mosheim from Pentland Ventures. Saving the best for last, I would not be the CEO I am without the unflinching support of Robert Schwartz from Third Point Ventures. Rob's witty, insightful, and deep scaling experience as an investor and board member has been the difference maker for Ushur. I always look forward to a conversation with Rob, which is always a fun-filled and experience-rich banter.

Getting to blue oceans

Our post-Series C journey requires us to scale fast. As one of my advisors reminds me, time and again, to achieve scale, you have to have repeatability. This intentional repeatability will bring focus and efficiency to any business. Our platform has evolved so much since our MVP/MLP. As we extend the depths of our platform capabilities, we are focused on accelerating value creation. We are enhancing our CXA builder experience. We are working on some fascinating AI initiatives. By adapting to the industries we serve, the advancements in language intelligence with Large Language Models & Generative AI Ushur's AI-native CXA fast tracks solving problems that will require armies of developers and AI scientists. This speed-to-value differentiation is our moat - one we will significantly invest in as we scale. Ushur has on-boarded several partners and channels. We are also expanding the various systems you can connect to Ushur. The vibrant partner ecosystem and interconnectivity allow our prospective and existing customers to overlay the most modern system of intelligence for massive value creation. Contrary to what may appear like a competitive, crowded space in CX, our intentional attempt at value creation through CX Automation is the first of its kind. Our big bet is that our vision's completeness and execution focus will lead us to the blue ocean to become the de facto CXA Cloud leader.

As we grow and scale, we will always be mindful of the core principles of our startup journey to stay humble and be nimble. It's still DAY 1 for all of us as we make our way onwards and upwards.

Ushur, the leading no-code digital customer experience automation platform, and Sutherland, a global innovator in bringing digital transformation to the front- and back-office, are now working in a strategic partnership.

Sutherland's digital transformation blueprint is built on a three-pronged approach it sometimes calls the “3 ‘A’s of digital transformation”: Analyze, Automate, and Augment. Sutherland helps clients analyze historic and real-time data, automate the processes best fit for reinvention, and augment the capabilities of both human and digital workers. All of this is done in a human-centric way.

Together, bringing Ushur’s platform and real-time customer experience automation capabilities, Sutherland is taking a leap forward in the digital transformation of its insurance, financial services, and healthcare industry clients. Highly regulated healthcare payers and providers, financial services providers, and insurers alike handle a myriad of complex processes day-to-day – and they’re often difficult to automate.

Digital transformation allows for the replacement of the unscalable and manual versions of those processes with more-repeatable, technologically-driven counterparts. Leaders in these industries are constantly looking for ways to elevate customer experience, reduce journey friction, accelerate time cycles, and cut operational expenses with digital innovation.

Sutherland clients can now rely on Ushur’s pre-trained machine learning (ML) models and add the flexibility artificial intelligence provides when interacting with customers, agents, brokers, members, patients, claimants, providers, or other stakeholders.

What Role Does Customer Experience Play in Digital Transformation?

When it comes to making digital transformation real, customer experience excellence is a bigger hurdle than many others. CX often suffers from technology underinvestment. Plus, both customers and employees have elevated expectations of what great customer-enabling technology should look like – believing it should be quick and intuitive.

This underinvestment in CX technology during digital transformation efforts implies that brands have historically tried to build their consumer experiences around customer support teams. However, processes that depend solely on people don’t satisfy the increasing customer expectation for the availability of self-service.

Neither do they scale as well as those built around technology. So, if companies plan on expanding their offerings, they’ll always need to hire more people – or in the current economic climate, they may need to do more with fewer employees.

That’s difficult for any number of reasons – not least of all because, even in best-of-times for an organization, employees change jobs, leave companies, and can otherwise pick up more work.

The absence of more helping hands sometimes leaves customers high and dry when they need help most. And that can happen at the most inopportune moments – like when they’re in the middle of an accident or trying to find medical care. Digital transformation projects can mean the difference between ‘being there’ in their time of need or being absent.

Customer Experience Automation: What It Is, Why It Matters

Customer Experience Automation™ (CXA) is the interdisciplinary intersection of artificial intelligence, process automation, and conversational interfaces blended to optimize the customer experience and engagement.

Automation removes procedural barriers that prevent expedient resolution. Artificial intelligence (AI) uses historical data to understand and predict future behaviors. Customer experience is the product of two-way conversations where action matches the intent.

CXA uses process automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and customer experience (CX) together to hold conversations with customers directly. The goal is to usher them to a final resolution in their self-service journey while letting them speak in their own words and while automating the back-office processes that historically forced them to wait for final confirmation. CXA is designed to facilitate completing every task, no matter how minute, with the least cognitive load possible.

It is the application of an AI-powered technology platform that is purpose-built to automate, scale, and remove the friction from the interactions between a company and its customers – from the beginning of a conversation through its resolution.

• CX and operational efficiency go hand-in-hand. By approaching digital transformation from a customer-first lens, organizations realize a much greater holistic return on investment (ROI) than optimizing for operational efficiency or cost reduction alone.
• Customer Experience Automation is all-inclusive. Any organization can execute a CXA strategy, regardless of their past technologies investments, current resource bandwidth, or industry regulations.
• Artificial Intelligence makes automation human again. Automation on its own improves the bottom line. Automation powered by AI helps systems understand humans – using their sentiment and intent to embed empathy into self-service experiences.

The application of Customer Experience Automation lets organizations transform into highly efficient and empathetic enterprises by engaging authentic digital experiences at scale that are aligned with what customers, partners, and employees want and deserve. With CXA, consumers and businesses build more meaningful, satisfactory, and less transitory relationships – helping each other pursue success in the least fiction-filled way.

Customers often don’t really need all the “bells and whistles” to work effectively with a brand – they just need to be able to transact with you seamlessly.

In fact, working to delight customers with over-the-top experiences can backfire in some cases. Legacy brands can seek to outperform digital-native competitors only to create overly-involved experiences for customers. But it is the ease of the experience that drives both customer satisfaction and retention.

How The Partnership Benefits Healthcare Companies, Insurance Carriers, and Financial Services

Healthcare companies, insurance carriers, and financial services organizations are already using digital-first strategies for interactions with members, customers, patients, agents, brokers, and providers, and they rely on partnerships like the one between Ushur and Sutherland to deliver on those plans.

As Sutherland expands its use of Ushur across its multiple business segments, companies will see expanded digital self-service capabilities and automation strategies that bridge gaps in technology infrastructure.

Insurance Automation

Frome quote submissions and policy changes to filing and resolving claims – plus everything in between – customers, claimants, agents, brokers, and providers expect digital-first and proactive service. Brands can improve customer engagement by integrating intelligent insurance automation into claims management, policy administration, underwriting, and billing processes.

Healthcare Automation

New service and support is now available across the health ecosystem for patients, members, employees, physicians, pharmacists, clinical teams, employer groups, brokers and consultants, payers, and more. Healthcare automation can elevate member and patient experiences, make it easier for patients/partners to work with you, augment live interactions to reduce staff burden and operating costs, and support better health and wellness.

Banking Automation

From loan servicing and collections to hardship inquiries and account resolution, plus everything in between, financial service institutions must put their customers first. For those interactions that don’t fit within a mobile application or portal, brands can offer ease and speed by leveraging AI and machine learning to create self-service and proactive experiences.

Conclusion

Ushur workflows can be built in hours, are simple to standardize and templatize, and can be a secure connection between customers and backend core systems. Easy integrations with the API-driven customer experience automation platform make it the ideal technological bridge between consumers and the business back office.

Sutherland analytics and digital platforms work in tandem with the Ushur automation platform to create a unique customer experience. And Sutherland has the industry experience to help clients identify the most impactful use cases and appropriate handoffs. The new Ushur and Sutherland partnership is a critical opportunity for companies tackling customer experience initiatives in 2023 and beyond.

Ushur platform, an Introduction

People who first hear about the Ushur platform often ask what all can one do with the full suite of its capabilities. For better or for worse, people often have to deal with the answer that one can do pretty much anything. It’s a platform designed to let non-technical users build customer experiences that can be run once, twice, or a million times, and that leverage the pre-built capabilities that make those experiences cutting-edge and representative of a modern consumers experience.

The platform centralizes around a no-code flowbuilder by which users drag and drop each step of the experience. Users can use any number of pre-built modules, but altogether the small blocks of capabilities turn into a thorough experience representative of the quality enterprise customers demand.

A platform alone offers only so much value, which is why an API-centric architecture provides so much value to Ushur customers. The Ushur platform integrates with services like Salesforce, Zendesk, Twilio, or Amazon Connect. Those integrations extend the pre-built capabilities within the Ushur platform and make the experiences even more feature-rich and personalized. Ushur customers can serve up information from back-end systems, as well as persist data back to those same systems from customers. Altogether, that makes data exchange and gathering a hassle-free building experience.

Products on top of the Ushur platform represent pre-built technological capabilities to emulate well-known experiences like mobile applications and customer portals. Invisible App™, Ushur Hub™, Conversational Apps, and SmartMail package essential components to make solution-design with Ushur partners and your internal stakeholders easy, repeatable, and quicker.

Customer Experience Automation™

Ushur leads the category of customer experience automation (CXA) and has an opinionated point of view on the components and trajectory of the space. CXA, from our point of view, is the automation practice by which customers converse with brands in their natural language and all appropriate resulting process implications execute behind the scenes. Consider the scenario of reaching out to a customer and asking them how they are doing, and how easily they have access to food and shelter (a social determinants of health use case). With Ushur, customers (patients) can communicate in a natural dialogue, and Ushur can connect them to the local resources they need to achiever more stable housing and food. Ushur can also persist that data into the customer relationship management (CRM) system, so brands can track their past conversations and results.

Customer experience automation bridges the gaps opened by point or spot solutions. The bridges are created to cover siloes in businesses who all own different portions of their technology stacks. CXA differs from other spaces like robotic process automation in that it is designed to be end-to-end, natively.

Who do we speak to?

Ushur is designed with compliance and security in mind to service our customers handling sensitive data and transactions in the most intimate moments of their relationships with their customers, partners, and internal stakeholders. Our clients span insurance, healthcare, and financial services and we help them optimize their customer experience strategies in a time frame that make sense for them — projects that usually have to wait quarters or years can be started in weeks or months.

Participate in the Partner Program

Ushur partners with some of the most established technology providers in the enterprise space that have already realized that they need a customer-facing (consumer, partner, internal stakeholder) interface and automation solution. Across the insurance, financial services, and healthcare sectors, Ushur helps technology providers who are serving their industries expand their capabilities to include conversational AI, prepackaged app-like interfaces, and email triaging capabilities.

Ushur’s partner program is designed to make it easy for technology providers who need to move quickly with building customer experiences in an affordable and maintainable design. Help your customers create a CX strategy that reflects the profile and brand experience they want their customers to enjoy when interacting with them on a day-to-day basis.

Part of Ushur’s core culture as a company is a collective yearning to solve problems. We serve a core set of customers that tend to share common needs when it comes to customer engagement, but the way we’ve built and shaped our platform is rooted in a much higher level of analysis of the way people and commerce work. 

Ushur was initially inspired by disappointing user experiences within shared online marketplaces, like Craiglist or AirBNB. In these scenarios, the dynamic is simple: A prospective buyer or traveler navigates through a listing and makes a decision.

Of course, a dynamic so simple also means that there are questions left unanswered. And these unanswered questions come at a most inopportune time–at the height of the consumer’s interest. They are never more likely to buy than they are with the listing right in front of them, but if a key piece of information is missing most people will simply move on to the next option.

What if there was a way to connect buyer and seller in real-time? This question is at the heart of our innovation strategy, but so many industries have left this path critically unexplored, even as the demand for personalized consumer experiences grows daily.

Today, customers are expected to wade through thousands of online reviews from unrefined sources to make decisions about a high-value purchase. Instead, customers should be able to interact with an expert who can navigate them through the process of selection, purchase, set-up, and maintenance. 

The auto industry, and the process of buying a car, is a perfect use case because it represents the intermediary point at which many organizations arrive and unfortunately stay. Buying a car used to be one of the all-time most stressful processes a consumer experienced. The people who sold them had bad reputations. Both customer and salesperson were incentivized to haggle, be confrontational and withhold key information. Most critically, customers never left the lot sure they’d gotten the best deal.

What if there was a way to connect buyer and seller in real-time?

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Fast forward to today, and buying a car is now just about as easy as clicking a button. Even in-person transactions are swift and painless because the internet has democratized information about car pricing. That one major point of contention–the best deal–has been removed from the equation. The salesperson’s role has shifted from negotiator to facilitator. What hasn’t changed is that the onus is still on the customer to do all of the requisite research on the car itself. The sale is quick, but the education process is long and painful. 

A few years back, I was in the market for a car. I knew the year I wanted, and the color. I wanted a specific interior that wouldn’t scorch me during a hot California summer, and I wanted to be sure it was a certified pre-owned vehicle. With such specific criteria, it took me more than six months to find the car I wanted. When I finally did it was in Texas, in a lot where it had been sitting for over a month. I bought the car via text message with the dealership within an hour, and they shipped it off to me the next day. I got the deal I wanted, they got the customer they needed, and everybody won. But what if I’d been able to see all the cars that matched my criteria by simply plugging them into a two-sided marketplace app used by dealers and customers? I’d have had that car a lot sooner. This should be the standard to which any modern, customer-facing business aspires.

While this all starts with customer delight and customer experience, the long-term implications are so much broader. Obviously, the buying experience is improved and differentiated. But customers are also more likely to make an educated decision. They’re going to be more satisfied with what they purchase, and less likely to be disappointed. Ultimately, people will feel comfortable making more and bigger purchases because when they do, they’re actually getting what they want. Real-time connectivity between buyer and seller is the next great frontier.

The biggest conference in Insurance is here, and we couldn’t be more thrilled. Ushur is hosting many exciting events at InsureTech Connect 2022 in Las Vegas to help Insurers transform their customer experience with AI and automation.

Tired of sunk costs, long timelines and digitization projects that just don’t deliver? Ushur is announcing Invisible App 2.0 - an automated, app-like experience to digitally self-service customers and partners, without the overhead of developing and maintaining traditional apps and infrastructure. Our VP of Product, Michael Fisher, is launching Invisible App 2.0 on the Expo Hall demo stage. Join us live to see its impact through demos and customer stories.

Customer experience and operational efficiency are two sides of the same coin. Learn how to maximize ROI for both at our executive panel: The Art of Customer Experience meets the Science of AI and Automation - as our Co-Founder & CEO, Simha Sadasiva, discusses with Guidewire, Unum and Equitable on approaching digital transformation from a customer-first lens.

We recognize that customer expectations are constantly evolving and it’s hard to keep pace. Ushur is sponsoring the Customer Experience, Retention and Acquisition track with sessions on building customer loyalty through meaningful experiences.

There’s lots of activity at our booth for both days. Stop by booth #3021 to chat with our experts on how mission critical use cases can become frictionless with AI and automation, without any coding involved. We’ll be doing press interviews and raffling off an iPad, in addition to offering a special InsureTech promotion to sign up for our platform.

Please RSVP for our events and meetings here. Can’t wait to see you at InsureTech Connect!

Recently, I was speaking to a friend about the work we’re doing here at Ushur. They asked me a simple question, with a complex answer–“What should the ideal customer interaction look like?”

The reason the answer is so complex is that most companies simply don’t understand what the full lifecycle of customer engagement entails. The collective approach is and has long been, largely transactional. Companies look at transactional points, design and construct transactional experiences, and support all of them with transactional tools. To me, the world “interaction” itself implies a one-and-done attitude. As a result, most companies miss the mark when it comes to the holistic customer journey. It often happens in painfully obvious and avoidable ways that create a confrontational relationship between provider and consumer.

A good friend of mine is going through cancer treatment. It took him five proactive phone calls to schedule his first appointment with a specialist. The amount of friction he’s experienced as a claimant and the amount of work he has to do to understand all of his options as a patient would be hard enough on a person in full health–let alone someone dealing with the mental and physical strain of a serious illness. Another close acquaintance recently experienced an accidental fire in their kitchen. They’ve spent two months living in hotels, jumping through hoops to prove to their insurance provider that it should be covered under the terms of their policy–a policy written by the provider. Why should the responsibility fall on the customer?

On an individual level, we would all almost certainly act with more empathy. It’s this mindset that we need to bring to the next generation of engagement. Most of the organizations we serve are engaging with customers around life-altering moments. They might be buying a home or a car, going through treatment, or filing a death claim for a loved one. These are the instances in a person’s life that doesn’t require additional friction, and the process of engagement should reflect that reality.

Today, disproportionate emphasis is put on creating new customers at the expense of existing ones. But it is far easier and more efficient to retain and delight an existing customer. It’s also easier today than it has ever been to leave a product or service or provider behind in favor of a competitor. Unsurprisingly, the need to retain customers is shifting to the forefront for businesses across every industry. What this means is that there is a massive opportunity in the world of insurance, healthcare, and financial services to improve when the time of service comes.

Companies aren’t oblivious to this. They know they have gaps in the customer journey. Where they fall short is how they approach those gaps–they try to eat the entire elephant in a single mouthful.

On-boarding for a new customer shouldn’t look the same as support for an existing one...

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“Holistic” doesn’t mean one-size-fits-all. It’s not something that can be created once, alongside an expensive consulting firm, and applied to every customer with whom you engage. A complete journey is made up of bite-sized interactions, engagements that happen at different times to different people experiencing different circumstances. On-boarding for a new customer shouldn’t look the same as support for an existing one, and so on. They are strategically compartmentalized experiences that make up a better whole.

That’s why we’ve taken the approach we have at Ushur, built around the concept of micro-engagements. Modern organizations can solve every part of their customer journey with micro-engagements, a well-thought-out approach to the entire lifecycle from first contact through service and ongoing support. Our mission is to ensure that whether someone is filing a claim, shifting a 401K, or going through treatment, they know they will encounter minimal friction. They know they’re not going to get stuck, that they’re going to complete the transaction successfully and as intended. Every customer journey should be that easy to conceive of, experience, and complete.

What claim experience would you design if you could build an end-to-end policyholder or claimant journey with responsive conversational abilities and the ability to deploy that workflow across any channel? Thanks to the just-announced partnership with Guidewire, you can deploy that journey with just a few clicks.

Ushur is excited that we are soon to be listed on the Guidewire Marketplace, and will be joining the Property and Casualty (P&C) technology platform’s ecosystem of partners. Now enterprises with a Guidewire core system can use the Ushur ClaimCenter Accelerators for First Notice of Loss (FNOL) and Workers Compensation (WC) claim acknowledgement to automate critical inbound and outbound customer and claimant conversations.

Guidewire ClaimCenter is a leading P&C claims management system. ClaimCenter enables adjusters to process and resolve claims faster by removing the friction from internal claims handling, with automated workflows powered by data. Ushur, by comparison uses drag-and-drop capabilities to make designing automated, 2-way customer conversations easy. Business analysts can build workflows that incorporate conversational artificial intelligence, something that used to require the expertise of data scientists. The Ushur canvas and single-click deploy drastically reduce the cost of building and enhancing critical high-value conversations across not only the claim, but entire insurance lifecycle.

“It’s hard to overstate the change that automating customer experiences can bring to any organization and the effect a successful and cost-effective digital transformation can have on a brand’s relationship with their customer” says Meredith Barnes Cook, Vice President of Industry Groups at Ushur. “Ushur focuses on making customer experiences intuitive and partnering with Guidewire means gathering data and starting claim conversations for auto and workers Compensation can be a part of this year’s digital transformation projects.”

A McKinsey report from 2020 on the State of P&C covers the key topic of costs in Property & Casualty and breaks down how generating productivity to match or exceed the costs is imperative for any carrier in the industry, “...the industry needs to reset its operational efficiency. In recent years, while labor productivity has risen, overall industry expense ratios have also increased.” Ushur’s partnership with Guidewire matches this demand in the industry. The integration maximizes existing core system investments in Guidewire by introducing a productivity layer for process automation and efficiency while interacting with customers and claimants. It uplevels customer experience while ushering P&C carriers through an agile digital transformation that will also reduce costs and improve carrier employee experience.

Bruce Holbert, Head of Global Channels and Partnerships for Ushur, describes this new listing as “a game changer for Ushur’s partnerships and the Guidewire install base.” He said, “the Guidewire customer base is an established group of P&C carriers who probably have years worth of digital transformation projects they plan to execute to improve their overall policyholder experience. Ushur’s platform with capabilities that make it easy to build, deploy, and manage intelligent automation workflows means they can attack those transformation plans at warp speed.”

Ushur’s integration listing on the Guidewire Marketplace includes extra details about the Ushur platform. The apps in the listing will immediately help carriers meet their customers in their preferred channels and ease friction-filled experiences.

If you have unanswered questions about the Guidewire partnership and the best use cases for Ushur’s Customer Experience Automation platform, reach out to us directly or schedule a demo.

Digital transformation is something every modern company talks about, thinks about, and worries about, all of the time. The reason for that worry, largely, is that most organizations approach the task backward. 

Many companies have a tendency to think about what they need to change rather than the outcome they’re trying to drive. They view digital transformation as something that has to be tackled all at once, an end-to-end revamp across the entire organization, with IT as the centralized decision-making engine.

In my experience, that strategy is a recipe for disaster. I’ve personally never seen it work. Organizations embark on these painful 3-5 year journeys to replace a legacy platform, spend upwards of $50 million, and in the end, are left staring at a partially transformed business. That’s because modernized infrastructure alone doesn’t actually modernize the system of customer engagement. 

In reality, digital transformation can happen piecemeal, in a way that delivers targeted benefits to customers and users immediately rather than years down the road. It can be done for a lot less than $50 million right out of the gate, and it can be done without a multi-year overhaul of whatever legacy systems seem to stand in the way of progress. Let’s talk about how.

Start with the End in Mind

Digital transformation should begin with a simple question–what does the customer experience need to be? Using that as a guiding principle helps identify the right processes and infrastructure along the way. We believe that digital transformation can, and should, happen in stages–starting with customer experience. 

Instead of looking inward at what they don’t have, organizations should look outward at what their customers want. Insurance providers, for example, can identify their most friction-prone customer engagements that lead to the most inbound interactions, and tackle those on a case-by-case basis without revamping their core policy admin or claim systems. The solution doesn’t have to start at the center. 

Instead, organizations can identify what we refer to as “micro-engagements”–then digitize and modernize those experiences in ways that delight the customer. Many of our customers have seen immediate success with this approach of “a la carte” digital transformation because it’s strategically designed to have a positive impact on the customer as quickly as possible. It also allows breathing room to complete the rest of the journey the right way. The impact happens faster, the initial investment is lower, and you have a clear line of sight to value with real-time customer feedback.

Delight and Retain Customers Through Periods of Great Change

We believe immediately eliminating any friction that exists in the way customers are served gives organizations the best chance to retain those customers through the long process of a complete digital transformation. Modern customers want to do business with companies that meet them, not ones that expect to be sought out. Part of this dynamic means that companies can’t expect their customers to suffer now for the promise of better things later.

One of our customers, a large insurance company, needed to modernize the way it engaged with customers. For instance, one process required claims adjusters and disability benefits specialists to manually call people going on absence for any number of reasons–maternity or paternity, injury, illness, life events–resulting in outbound phone calls that took countless hours to collect a few basic pieces of information. 

But its central claims system operated on a 25-year-old mainframe, and to replace that mainframe would have been a five-year, $50 million initiative. We found a quick way to ingress info from their legacy mainframe into our platform and egress it back once it was processed. We enabled the digitization of all claims conversations, completely automating a process that used to take an average of three weeks and six call attempts per customer. Now, 90 percent of claimants complete the process in under an hour, via text. All without a single change to their underlying infrastructure.

We call our approach to this an 'invisible app'–an experience completely intuitive for anyone using it, all self-contained without the need to download anything.

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At its core, digital transformation exists to modernize the way we conduct business. That should start with the customer experience. Everything else on the back end can be managed and orchestrated over time. Meanwhile, you retain your customers and provide them with better service, right away.

If you’ve been reading my co-founder Simha Sadasiva’s blog lately, you’re probably at least somewhat familiar with the concept of micro-engagements already. In the backdrop of the fact that Ushur was just officially issued the patent (US20170193557A1) on micro-engagements, I thought I would talk a little bit about the underlying technological strategy that makes this approach to Customer Experience Automation both unique and possible.

More and more of our daily lives are automated, particularly as consumers. But automation is not necessarily making things smoother for all customers on a consistent basis. To borrow an analogy from Simha, think about how much easier it is to use an ATM than it is to use the self-checkout at a grocery store. Of course, one action is far more complex than the other, with many more moving parts. But to be a viable long-term solution for consumers, self-checkout eventually needs to deliver the same painless, user-centric experience offered by the ATM.

The reality of most technologies available today, including any type of automation or AI, is that the customer is usually an afterthought. Modern technology companies are almost exclusively focused on solving back office infrastructural problems, the impacts of which they expect will eventually trickle down to the consumer. That has never worked and never will. We founded Ushur based on the idea that the customer experience must be solved first and intentionally designed into the underlying platform. When simplified, the key differentiator for Ushur is that we’ve built a platform that is architected specifically to engage at scale while meeting users where they are.

While we certainly didn’t anticipate the pandemic, we knew we needed to arm our customers with the ability to act instantly. We knew that users were suffering from information fatigue and cognitive overload — heavy websites, log-in requirements, experiences full of friction. By comparison, micro-engagements with Ushur provide a frictionless and lightweight experience. We also knew that very few consumers in today’s market are stationary. The perpetually-moving nature of micro-engagements allows the user to continually engage at any point in time based on their lifestyle and their needs.

We’ve mentioned micro-engagements, but have not really explained what they are, so what are they? Generally, they are easy ways to exchange small snippets of critical information. It’s helpful to think of micro-engagements as being measured in units. At any given point, an insurance company, healthcare provider, or financial services company is in the middle of countless small and separate units of conversation with customers. These conversations together are like a sea in that they’re fluid and might start or go anywhere — a phone call, an online portal, an email, a text. Each of these is a micro-engagement.

At the enterprise level, there are hundreds of thousands of conversations happening at any given time. Our overall experience as customers consists of each of these units. Response time, ease of use, and the facilitation of next steps all come together to formulate the holistic view and measure of a good customer experience. We set out to enable companies to provide exceptional micro-engagements that satisfy those measures with the goal of creating an overall experience that is simply awesome.

So why does micro-engagement matter? It is our belief that if a system were to bring a compelling experience to the customers, it has to be built as such right from its foundation. In a busy mobile world with so much information it is too much to ask a customer to stay engaged with an enterprise for too long. The enterprise must meet them where they are, in mobility and in short time intervals. We believe that the micro-engagements that form the foundation of our platform is getting the enterprises to meet their customers, where they are, in their journeys.

When we initially founded Ushur, the platform was designed for real time engagement, person-to-person. But we noted the nature of person-to-person engagements becoming increasingly asynchronous, and we decided the platform must be a purposeful part of the solution. We started by alleviating a common pain point — call center wait times. Instead of consumers calling in and waiting for help, an experience that might vary wildly in quality from one customer to the next, we decided to give enterprises the ability to reach out to people in a way that fits within their own personal lifestyle and maximize the value of their engagement.

Around this time, society had started to change around us, too. One trend we noticed in particular was the concept of micro-donations; people who didn’t have big sums of money to give but who wanted to make a positive impact regardless. We drew a parallel between this and consumer experience to develop the concept of micro-engagements.

How do we break down experiences to their component parts; both front end and back? Our approach is taken module-by-module. Most engagement solutions start in a similar place — a short module intended to send a message to the user with the enterprise reaching out for a specific reason. When we want that user to respond, we employ a different module. When we want them to upload a document, it’s yet another. This allows enterprises to literally build a workflow for the user piece by piece, like a Lego set.

Of course, automation on the backend needs to happen in parallel with this modular approach to customer engagement. We use the same modular, workflow-based approach here, too. And at the end of the day, no matter what the system is doing on the backend, it is still doing it on behalf of the end user and in service of their data. In some cases, the customer might only experience the engagement as a single unit, while on the backend there are actually three modules that make up that experience. A good example of this would be the collection of personal information. Say I want a customer's date of birth, phone number, and address. The customer will experience this as a single form, while on the backend it’s processed as three separate engagements.

If I may return momentarily to the self-checkout analogy to conclude, technology alone cannot solve a problem. A scanner alone isn’t enough to guarantee a good customer experience. How do you determine how many people will be in line? How many items will they have? How quickly they’ll scan and bag them? There is no way to control or enforce the experience unless it starts the moment a shopper picks their first item off the shelf – or perhaps even earlier! Customer experience automation has to be an end-to-end experience. The modular approach allows for flexibility within each and every stage of the journey, like being able to replace a small section of pipe rather than refitting an entire house’s plumbing.

Similar to a full customer experience automation strategy, customer engagement is not made up of one interaction, but many. Each of these moments requires a different action and a finite result, therefore the underlying modules that drive each interaction must be different. Tune back in next week, when I’ll dive a bit deeper into how this all looks for our customers in the implementation phase.

Ushur is pleased to announce that it has won three 2022 awards from Comparably! The Ushur leadership and Human Resources teams take immense pride in making the company a great place for our employees, and Comparably has reaffirmed that by choosing Ushur as the winner of awards for: Best CEOs for Women, Best CEOs for Diversity, and Best Leadership Teams.

Comparably selects winners by issuing surveys to employees at tens of thousands of companies who anonymously give feedback, and Ushur employees resoundingly voted to support our CEO Simha Sadasiva and our current leadership team.

Who is Ushur?

Ushur is the world’s first Customer Experience Automation (CXA) company using cloud-native technology to help enterprises reinvent their customer experience. Ushur has helped our clients get closer to their customers by making it easy to build, deploy, and test industry-leading customer experiences. We’ve helped Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies become tech leaders in using AI to converse with their customers and resolve their inquiries effortlessly.

The technology we build is only a part of what is important to Ushur, we’ve always strived to be a first-class company in terms of culture and support for our employees. VP of HR, Sarah Stevens, says, “We want Ushur to be a great place to work. The Ushur employees are the best in the business. From engineering to product to marketing, we know there is no better group of employees. Our CEO and Co-founder, Simha has been instrumental in creating a culture where everyone can bring their best selves to the job.”

Co-founders Simha Sadasiva (CEO) and Henry Peter (CTO) founded Ushur because they saw an enormous gap between the confusing customer experiences offered by some of the world’s biggest enterprises and the intuitive designs created thoughtfully by digital-native companies. This is not the only gap that still bothers them, as Simha Sadasiva says, “We have a long way to go to make our society, and our working environments equitable. Equal pay, Equal opportunity, Diversity and Inclusion and Flexible work are all key to making this endeavor possible. I am committed to keeping the bar high and making sure we have a great workplace for all.”

Why does this recognition matter for Ushur?

Ushur is a growing business, and this recognition serves as confirmation that Ushur is building solid foundations that will help us grow the right way. Ushur is a company dedicated to being the best possible environment for all professionals, and to do so we need capable leaders from all backgrounds.

Ushur is overjoyed to receive these awards, and we thank Comparably for the recognition of the effort we’ve spent to date. We’re also excited to continue our growth as an organization with diversity as a central tenet to our core identity.

Conclusion

Ushur is a great place to work with great leadership! If you want to help us redefine the way enterprises build and optimize their customer experiences, let us know!

About Comparably

Comparably is a leading workplace culture and corporate brand reputation platform with over 15 million anonymous employee ratings on 70,000 companies. With the most comprehensive data on large and SMB organizations in nearly 20 different workplace categories – based on gender, ethnicity, age, experience, industry, location, education – it is one of the most used SaaS platforms for employer branding and a trusted third party site for workplace culture and compensation. For more information on Comparably’s studies and annual Best Places to Work Awards, visit Comparably News.

Starting with Ushur Hub

There is a school of thought that incumbent carriers, even those that are industry leaders, are at a disadvantage to be digital innovation leaders, because people with more time spent within the industry are less inclined to see the opportunities for change. Yet what I have learned from my own insurance journey, is that success and longevity in the industry requires change to be foundational in the company culture.

What if you could give every single customer from whom you needed sensitive documents a portal-like experience to upload their files securely and cost-effectively? Or a portal-like experience where they could check the status of a claim they had made against their insurance? These "Just-in-time" experiences are what Ushur calls "Invisible" and we are excited to share that we are launching Ushur Hub for general availability, today.

What kind of results has Ushur Hub seen already?

95% of IT leaders are worried that documents exchanged over email are a vector for bad actors to gain sensitive data. Documents can be sent to the wrong party, and it's unsafe to have key data sitting in an inbox to be forwarded accidentally with just a click. With a portal-like experience, IT leaders can rest assured their files and data are in the correct place, with the correct people. It also shortens turnaround and processing time.

A leader in the pension management business saw a 95-99% reduction in processing and turnaround time for pension file contribution management. That's due to the fact that they, like many other businesses, had previously used email to receive updates for pension contributions via static files. Those files would then have to be received, confirmed, and then manually evaluated and submitted to core systems to make updates to each employee's contribution plan.

A process with that much intervention is fickle and error-prone. By comparison, the resulting process with Ushur Hub received the employee contribution data, confirmed receipt to the sender, persisted contribution files to a core system, and provided a historical view of their interactions with the enterprise.

What makes Ushur Hub powerful?

Build on top of Ushur's no-code builder and with Customer Experience Automation stack

Client portals are not a new idea in the tech world, but Ushur Hub offers an easy way to build and deploy portal-like experiences that exclude it from the long drawn out development processes for IT teams. With drag and drop automation abilities and no-code configuration of portal experiences, the development and deployment costs of portals shrink significantly. No-code capabilities disrupt the world of IT-driven portal creation because it doesn't depend on traditional software programming paradigms.

As a result of this disruption, any business partner or key stakeholder becomes worthy of their own portal. Automation experiences that didn't seem worth the time and investment, are now tractable with Ushur Hub.

Ushur Ushur Hub first gives users an intuitive interface for choosing which automations to launch

Secure document exchanges, managed file transfers, or bespoke client portal software are usually the solutions that sit in front of sites created and managed by IT teams. They're often just secure file transfer protocol sites (SFTP) sites. That just means they are file directories on a server that have been approved and whitelisted for receiving files or key information. They can feel like nameless and faceless vehicles for transferring files. Ushur Hub by comparison helps users select the end destination with ease and confidence, and without requiring business users to learn technical commands for moving files around.

Ushur Ushur Hub communicates status, and can even auto-correct submitted files when paired with Ushur Intelligent Document Automation

When users send their pension management vendor an email with a document attached, they depend on the employees within the vendor to send them back a confirmation email. Additionally, the receiving employee has to process that file by hand - meaning correcting information and uploading the file to a core system; or even worse sending back an email asking for missing information.

When a user instead submits their monthly file via Ushur Hub, they instantly get feedback whether the file was uploaded or not. They can see historical tracking information for previous files submitted. And if the pension management team has also implemented Intelligent Document Automation, they receive immediate feedback on what data is missing or is incorrect in the file they submitted!

What are some of the best use cases for Ushur Hub?

Originally, Ushur Hub was born of the need to securely handle a monthly file submission from an employer with data on the current status of pension contributions. If that doesn't mean anything to you, you can imagine a columnar file where each row represents an employee and the monetary value that their employer was contributing to their pension fund.

It's the same principle for defined contribution plans (like 401k's) where employees elect how much money they want to defer pre-tax to their retirement account. If it's a percentage of their income, and they were recently promoted, that value they contribute will change. That contribution amount could even change every couple of weeks! But whenever it does, there is an employee responsible for taking the employee roster from an employer and persisting the values into a core system. That could mean that someone is receiving an email as often as every couple of weeks which they need to manually evaluate and from which they extract key information to persist.

Any document which is regularly submitted and contains private data is one that businesses don't want to sit in an employee's inbox. It would feel like overkill to build a portal for each and every one of those cases, until you realize how easy it is to build, deploy, and maintain these portal experiences. It's not just a game-changer for business-users, it's a life saver for IT and security teams.

Finally, in any automation where files submitted would benefit from the ability for submitters to view and track the status of their submission, Ushur Hub can provide peace of mind to both originally submitting party and recipient.

No-Code Integrations & Advanced Analytics

Ushur Hub is the next product to change customer experiences, but the Ushur Customer Experience Automation (CXA) platform has included major capabilities for the platform included in this release - both advanced analytics and no-code integrations.

No-code Integrations

No-code integrations in the Ushur platform means that enterprises can easily let business users, who have been appropriately permissioned, add the ability to make real-time updates to their core systems of choice. With just a few clicks, IT administrators can provision the first connection and then business users can see all the relevant fields to update in their workflow dropdowns. These integration procedures save business time and money by minimizing the dependency on systems integrators.

Finally, in any automation where files submitted would benefit from the ability for submitters to view and track the status of their submission, Ushur Hub can provide peace of mind to both originally submitting party and recipient.

Advanced Analytics

Ushur is introducing advanced analytics to the Ushur Customer Experience Automation platform to make it easy to inspect, analyze, and optimize customer experience campaigns. There are two components we've added that are key for perfecting customer experience: Micro-analytics and Macro-analytics.

Micro-analytics provide the view of every minute interaction between a brand and their customer. In each initiated activity, an Ushur client can view how their customers are engaging with the deployed customer experience workflow: whether they've opened it, tried to complete it, and where they left off. By analyzing the initiated activities, brands can see whether there are problematic steps in the customer experience process.

Macro-analytics show the holistic view of a customer experience campaign and how the thousands of customers have interacted with the automation workflows designed by an enterprise. A business can see what percentage of their overall target group have completed key processes like updating their address, or reviewing their account information.

All together, the segmentation and predictive analytics capabilities included in the advanced analytics feature help businesses get closer to their customers than they ever have been before.

Conclusion

If you want to see how these products and features can help you build a customer experience you can be proud of, reach out to us at Ushur.com. We'll help you understand the gaps in your customer experience, and how an automation platform like Ushur helps brands get closer to their customers..

Otherwise, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and stay tuned for more exciting announcements in the world of customer experience.

Intelligent Automation is the practice of using predictive machine learning technologies to automate a variety of business processes. Using intelligent automation to avoid human intervention, streamline decision-making, and offer scale in real-time can completely change operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. These technologies center around Artificial Intelligence (AI) but also Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Business Process Management (BPM). They help business leaders design solutions that altogether result in Intelligent Automation solutions across numerous industries.

For examples of Intelligent Automation, the healthcare industry uses chatbots to send appointment reminders and confirm or reschedule. The automotive industry uses RPA technology to reduce risk to human factory workers and improve defect discovery. Finally, the insurance industry can eliminate manual rate calculations and streamline paperwork in claims processing.

How is Intelligent Automation (IA) Different from Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?

Rather than being two distinct technology umbrellas, RPA is an application subset within Intelligent Automation. RPA focuses primarily on the automation of back-office tasks. RPA is used to automate repetitive items that offer little to no variation in how the task is performed. Like most all tools in the Intelligent Automation space, RPA solutions leverage a graphical user interface so that its users aren’t compelled to leverage a software development stack. Intelligent Automation can use Artificial Intelligence to tackle more complex tasks.

RPA is rules-based, adhering to set parameters, while Intelligent Automation can leverage machine learning algorithms to "learn" as it goes and become more efficient at a task. As a result, RPA has fewer and more specific applications than the more general category of Intelligent Automation.

The Benefits of Intelligent Automation

Companies incorporating different types of Intelligent Automation are streamlining business processes to the benefit of both customers and employees. With greater efficiency comes several benefits.

Improve Accuracy

Humans are great at many things, but machines are better at consistency in their real-time decisions and at data extraction. Intelligent Automation can improve overall accuracy and quality as a result of the consistency in the solution results. Also, Intelligent Automation can automatically document processes, uncover potential compliance violations, and provide a consistent approach to meeting standards. Most significantly, every interaction is filled with volumes of data and automation, or bot, can extract key data for further improved accuracy.

Enhance Customer Experience

Customers expect the modern enterprise to respond quickly, provide value, and understand them deeply. Intelligent Automation with natural language processing (NLP) can answer customer service questions, provide direction for new product launches, and even offer personalized experiences based on customer activity.

Reduce Cost and Resources

Machines can take on repetitive tasks without ever growing tired or making careless mistakes. This allows an enterprise to improve performance while maintaining labor costs. People can do what they do best—thinking critically, creatively, and oriented towards problem-solving.

Where Can You Apply Intelligent Automation?

Intelligent automation also benefits from another level of inherent value in that it can integrate with core legacy systems. Building upon different systems, automation can complement existing digital technologies for several key uses. There are several intelligent process automation use cases. Here are some great examples.

Claims Processing

Manual claims processing takes weeks of emailing and calling a client to resolve issues and obtain missing information—even in a digital world. It's error-prone and inaccurate data entry can delay resolution, creating a poor customer experience. Intelligent automation can streamline the claims process.

Intelligent automation reduces resolution time from weeks to hours...

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Intelligent automation reduces resolution time from weeks to hours on average. Tools like advanced conversational AI helps reach customers more quickly in their natural language and provide consistent documentation throughout the process. AI can also comb documentation from PDFs and other files, text conversations, and even images to complete information retrieval. It brings simplicity to otherwise difficult process mining. All this happens without extra labor from human teams or customers.

Email triage

Forrester Research found that while email is by far the preferred way for customers to reach companies, nearly 14% of companies never respond—possibly due to the complexities of unstructured data. The rest rarely respond quickly enough to satisfy customer demand. Intelligent Automation works 24/7 to resolve email faster.

Intelligent Automation can leverage a combination of artificial intelligence capabilities to triage email, social, and even calls; no matter what method customers prefer, AI can respond and resolve instances or engage a customer service agent for more hands-on queries. It scans email content to route it to the correct team member and automates documentation by pulling data into a CRM.

Customer and Employee Support

As businesses grow and scale, support teams may struggle to maintain high accuracy in query resolution with an influx of requests. It's frustrating to feel that the number of support tickets only grows, and that true success is always a case away. Intelligent automation leverages AI like another team member—one that never sleeps, needs a break, or takes off work—to facilitate workflows and reduce the load on support staff.

For example, AI can perform email triage to route customer inquiries to the right person the first time. As a result, support staff can focus on high-touch, complex cases and reduce customer frustration. Also, staff can create, update, and modify tickets through a central repository monitored and driven by AI. At the end of the day, automated responses and updates lessen the volume of tickets and improve resolution times—an improved experience for both customers and internal teams.

Streamline Business Processes with Intelligent Automation

IA solutions can improve efficiency in an organization without adding to team members' workload and support staff. Instead, it allows them to refocus on creating the best value they can for customers again and again.

Intelligent automation is a powerful tool that can accelerate progress and increase profitability. If you're ready to learn best practices and take advantage of the unique combination of machine learning and intelligent automation that Ushur's platform offers, talk to an expert today.

The world of self-service has truly exploded over the past decade, but I would argue that to date, there has not been a customer experience that demonstrates the value of automation more clearly and universally than the one we have at the ATM.

It might sound pedestrian, with promises of checkout-free grocery stores and fleets of self-driving vehicles on the horizon. But any organization that plans to make an investment in automation–which should be every organization–can learn a few important lessons from the ATM before they start.

The benefit of an ATM is painfully clear. Would you rather walk into a bank, wait in line and speak to a teller, or simply walk up to a machine? In this case, the human element is not additive, it’s a roadblock.

Every automation experience we at Ushur want to enable should be like walking up to an ATM, done on the customer’s time, at their pace, at their convenience. But a vast majority of financial services companies, insurance companies, and healthcare companies still make their customers come inside the bank.

But customer experience automation is all about meeting the customer where they live, and that’s where we can learn our second important lesson from the ATM. Some people still like to go inside the bank. Maybe it makes them feel more secure. Maybe they’re friendly with a specific teller and want to say "hi". Maybe they just miss the way things used to be done. Automation has to be connected and implemented in a way that works for those people, too. Each demographic has a slightly different preference in terms of how they conduct business, how they build relationships, and what they expect from a customer service experience.

It’s essential to meet the needs of one customer without abandoning another. A 70-year-old customer may have bought insurance at their agent’s corner office for most of their life, while a 30-year-old customer never even knew that was an option. Asking the former to give up their personal interaction for an automated phone call is as jarring as it would be to ask the latter to make a trip to the offices.

There is an opportunity to bring in a new architecture, a purpose-built platform that can solve customer experience automation that can meet every demographic through any channel. While there are different channels of interaction based on demographic preferences, there are certain workflows that can be achieved across all channels. This dramatically improves the user journey, lowers the overall cost, and creates delightful experiences for customers.

Voice is an important, but ultimately limited, channel for automation. Today, simple asks and requests that should be fulfilled quickly are not, and that creates friction. The interpersonal elements of most customer engagements are far better replaced by an app-like experience.

Take, for example, a disability benefits company. Their customers may be new moms on maternity, more likely to interact via SMS. Or they may be someone in their 60s recovering from surgery, more likely to call in. Both probably have documentation that needs to be submitted, but neither is very likely to own a fax machine. So the challenge becomes, how do we start the customer experience in two different places–phone and text–and end in the same place with the ability to digitally submit documents?

We call our approach to this an 'invisible app'–an experience completely intuitive for anyone using it, all self-contained without the need to download anything.

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We call our approach to this an “invisible app”–an experience completely intuitive for anyone using it, all self-contained without the need to download anything. Those who call are tactfully transitioned to the Invisible App later in the engagement when it will be of value to them rather than an unfamiliar inconvenience.

Making new technology accessible to multiple demographics is perhaps the greatest and most fundamental challenge businesses face today. Modern customer interactions have to unfold in a way that meets customer expectations and engages them without friction. Unifying varied forms of contact and communication through a holistic approach to customer experience automation is a universal challenge. Our vision is to make the processes and interactions that drive customer engagement–like transferring funds, adding a beneficiary, or submitting a claim–as easy as a routine visit to your nearest ATM.

Hurricane season is fast approaching and 2022 is predicted to be as busy as 2021, which was the 3rd most active on record. Insurance carriers are already rallying their operations to get ready for repeat waves of new claim reports that span catastrophic losses to minor damage.

Consumer expectations have evolved at an accelerated pace over the past two years and across all generations. Not only do customers expect the option of easy self-service when interacting with a provider of a service or product. Customers also increasingly see proactive communication as a commodity experience.

When one thinks about service in the context of insurance, the claim journey is understandably the interaction that comes to mind most often. And survey after survey reaffirms that a poor claim experience is a leading reason why a customer changes carriers.

Customer Experience Automation™ (CXA) is an opinionated technological stack that handles not just the automation usually handled by things like conversational agents (chatbots), but also knowledge work automation for back-office processes. Ushur handles conversational texts, phone calls, or emails, routes them, and through enterprise-grade integrations (and security), makes customer experiences feel seamless. While other companies have built, or bolted-on, parts and pieces of a CXA stack, Ushur is the only CXA platform that has pre-built the stack to make it possible to achieve time to value quickly and make rapid experimentation effortless.

But before we delve into ways that Customer Experience Automation™ can transform the claim experience, it’s equally important to explore how carriers can also help their customers prepare for a significant weather event.

Loss prevention has traditionally focused more heavily on businesses, with industry specialists providing thought leadership on how to prevent losses from occurring in the first place. However, catastrophic weather events like hurricanes do not discriminate in their impact and destroy homes along with commercial structures.

It’s important for carriers to be able to reach all of their customers - both personal and commercial - to alert them when their insured property is in the predicted path of a hurricane. And while just an alert would be helpful, CXA can make this proactive engagement more meaningful. Many insurance carriers have networks of emergency repair services, like board-up companies, that they engage for rapid post-loss customer assistance. Imagine as part of a proactive hurricane alert received via SMS or email, a carrier could give a customer access to those same resources and empower them to protect their property. That same communication would also include 1-click access to report any subsequent damage.

With the power of CXA, carriers can tailor each customer’s claim journey, be it the result of a hurricane or an individualized cause of loss. Catastrophic damage warrants a person-to-person conversation to dispatch emergency services as quickly as possible. Conversely, customers who may only be dealing with a damaged fence from a fallen tree may prefer the first notice of loss process that they can initiate from their phone or laptop, and with the upload of a photograph and repair estimate, see their claim propel forward to payment. CXA can enable straight-through processing (STP) of claims through its ability to understand, validate, and interface data to a carrier’s back-end core claim system.

With the power of CXA, carriers can tailor each customer's claim journey...

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Long-running claims include many discrete interactions between the carrier and customer; what we refer to as Micro-Engagements™. While a customer is juggling contractor visits and overseeing clean-up after a severe weather event, and potentially temporarily living in a hotel, they are also still living their day-to-day lives. From working at jobs to coordinating school transportation, and attending extracurricular activities, life doesn’t stop after a hurricane. When a company provides customers an option as easy as a text message to #claimstatus for the timing of their claim payments, the brand is offering the same speed and ease that every customer has learned to expect as an everyday consumer. That same ease doesn’t only apply to customers checking status information. Customer Experience Automation™ also applies when the claims adjuster needs to reach the customer, perhaps to complete and e-sign a proof of loss or even to schedule a convenient time for a phone call.

For this year's hurricane season, if you and your call center and claims operations are already worried about being overwhelmed by new claim volumes and keeping every policyholder satisfied, consider advanced planning to try CXA within your customer service. See what it takes to drive automation from days to minutes, and start with small-scale experiments for customer service automation. Ushur proves value as quickly as a single-click deployment, and with easy development.

If you’re curious about Ushur and how it quickly drives value for your customers in an increasingly busy annual hurricane season via Customer Experience Automation™, contact us at ushur.com/request-demo.

Conversational AI is the application of learned patterns in historical conversation data in order to provide a human-like dialogue for your customers whether via text or voice - sans human involvement. In essence, conversational AI uses natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU) to communicate with users in a natural way using human language instead of computerized speech patterns.

Insurance carriers, like those in the three use case examples outlined below, are already using conversational AI effectively in their claims process and to afford a personalized touch to their conversations even when their operations teams can't field calls. They're using it to gather and update personal information, automate email responses, and streamline disability claims management. In every case, customer satisfaction increases along with the accompanying increase in NPS. Intuitive conversational AI saves time and money and improves customer communications.

Where Can Conversational AI be Found?

Conversational AI is now so commonplace that it's already in many of the transactions that we make through voice assistants and virtual assistants, daily. From online purchases and bank transactions, to how we work with customer service agents at every level, the practice of evaluating and generating conversational experiences with automatic speech recognition to accomplish a specific task is now a mainstay.

This set of technologies has become expected and preferred because people are short on time and want to be able to resolve issues with customer support quickly. Very few people choose to wait on the line to "Speak to a Representative" if they have other options presented to them.

If you have ever asked Alexa about the weather or received a text appointment reminder or interacted with the popup chatbot in the lower right corner of your screen on a website, you have already used conversational bots and value their capabilities.

Insurance carriers who use conversational AI lower operational expenses, grow their employee engagement and improve customer satisfaction for their companies.

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Benefits of Conversational AI for Insurance Carriers

Insurance carriers who use conversational AI lower operational expenses, grow their employee engagement and improve customer satisfaction for their companies. It offers alternative channels for customer interactions which lightens the load on call center workers and allows them to focus on high-value customer interactions. By leaving rote tasks to be handled efficiently with automation applications, insurance carriers can help employees work with less stress and more engagement; providing better service that in turn improves morale.

With advanced Conversational AI, users can choose from multiple channels-text, email, mobile phone, website-to get the information that they seek in real-time, when they want or need it. Customer satisfaction is improved, along with NPS, when customers' questions are answered in real-time.

3 Examples of Conversational AI Done Right

The claims processing journey is notoriously difficult to navigate because of the many different steps, the number of contributors, and the different types of information that it requires. From FNOL/FNOI to claim closure, there are numerous shifting variables to manage within each claim. It's that variety that can be an opportunity for great service and customer satisfaction, or a series of missteps that lead to unhappy customers and dejected employees. Rather than dealing with the stress of those pitfalls, conversational AI automates claims processing for speed, convenience, and efficiency. It's ultimately carriers' brands and their consumers that benefit. 

Tower leverages intuitive conversational AI in their business for claims processing to gather and update customer information. For example, Tower often sends letters to policyholders to update their personal information, and occasionally gets a letter bounced back to sender. When that happens, Tower simply uses Ushur to send an automated outreach to the customer via either text or email to securely update their profiles. When the customer responds, no matter which platform they use, the details immediately and automatically update in Tower's backend systems. Tower has seen customer engagement and satisfaction increase with the convenience of providing the relevant information via the channel of their choice, and employees enjoy the additional benefit of being freed to focus on high-value transactions.

Automating Email Responses

It's inefficient and time-consuming to use important employee resources to sift through hundreds or thousands of email requests every day and determine who is the appropriate audience. Further, manually routing each email request from one person to the next is prone to mistakes and it leads to missed opportunities. Here we can introduce digital assistants.

Conversational AI is a critical tool for scaling manual, human conversations. And, as it happens, Irish Life was looking for a way to decrease their email response time before they found Ushur's AI-powered SmartMail. Immediately, it decreased the email indexing time of each email from an average of 2.5 days to mere seconds. It was also able to match classification metrics of human sorters exceeding 80%, instantly. And with the machine learning capabilities of AI, the sorting percentages tend to increase as its models see more samples and learn the patterns better. SmartMail uses advanced technology to address the lack of accuracy and slow processing of business processes that used to require user input.

Streamlining Disibility Claims

Disability claims are fraught with asynchronous tasks that can slow down the claim resolution process. Missing information and documentation can elongate the process to days and weeks when one agent is responsible for contacting each party and then entering the information into the appropriate systems. While those risks for slow processing are enough, add to that the fact that claimants must contact that same agent for information on status. Adding documentation, data entry, and employee responsibilities all together, insurers have the perfect storm for terrible response times and the perfect opportunity for improving the process using conversational AI capabilities, such as Ushur's Invisible App.

That inefficient use of resources, with its associated negative user experience, was exactly where one large 250 Fortune insurance carrier found itself, particularly with short term disability claims related to postpartum care.

In the case of this specific disability claim solution, the majority of the claims were processed manually and the insurance carrier experienced considerable delays collecting key dates needed from claimants to process their claims. Contact center agents had to individually call claimants to collect key dates or send paper-based forms to collect the data. On average, it would take six calls, and over three weeks, to get the information. In a typical case, it took multiple contact attempts to families who were adjusting to newborns; a sensitive and private time for most families. Suffice it so say that customer satisfaction was not high.

Using Ushur's intuitive mobile-like experience via Invisible App, the carrier was able to trigger an automated outbound message to the claimant to request information in a convenient and white-labeled container, bearing the familiar look and feel of the carrier's brand within the conversational interface. Once the customer provided the needed information, Ushur was able to automatically write the acquired data to the backend legacy systems. Essentially, the carrier could offer modernized customer experiences on top of existing technologies.

Insurance carriers who use conversational AI lower operational expenses, grow their employee engagement and improve customer satisfaction for their companies.

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After implementation, 85% of claimants provided all the necessary information in less than an hour as compared to weeks. The resulting decrease to the call center agents' time lowered expenses and allowed those same agents to focus on high-value accounts and claims. Additionally, customer satisfaction improved as users could respond within their own time frames and in their preferred channels.

Getting Started with Conversational AI in Insurance

Implementing conversational AI at your company isn't difficult with Ushur's no-code customer experience automation (CXA) platform.

Ushur engages customers, members, claimants, brokers, and agents over email, mobile browsers, SMS and more. We use machine learning, natural language processing, conversational AI, and intuitive user-built workflows, to understand what people are saying and decide the next best action on an individual case-by-case basis. Using speech recognition, Ushur can be responsive rather than prescriptive to better improve your company's digital transformation efforts. Ushur doesn't require developers to deploy an experience so much better than a bunch of chatbots.

In recent years Ushur has helped many financial services companies lower costs and boost their operational efficiency. If you're ready to modernize and realize the full potential of your customer experience using AI, ML, and NLP, request a demo today.

Imagine automating up to 25% of business processes, and allowing human teams to shift to deeper problem-solving and customer relations tasks. Then picture reducing the operational cost to insurers by up to 20% through that automation and digitization strategy alone. Imagine reducing inbound phone calls by more than 30%, simply by providing customers with proactive status updates.

With artificial intelligence capabilities, insurance companies and the insurance sector can step fully into the world of digital transformation, making these improvements (and so much more) a reality. Let’s explore how AI technology is changing the insurance world to make it faster, more efficient, and even better for customers, and carrier employees.

Insurance AI Application Trends to Keep an Eye On

Data science is bringing new innovations to the very traditional world of insurance and that's good news for customers, employees, and insurance executives alike. Here are our favorite things coming true thanks to this new tech.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is revolutionizing analytics

AI will soon have even more data sources to process, thanks to new sensors in IoT and their expanded use in insurance products.  Sensors have already caused considerable waves in industries like manufacturing and agriculture, and help insurance companies handle critical aspects of the insurance process.

For example, auto carriers are using data from devices in vehicles to track driving data or assess damage after an accident. Health companies leverage data from fitness trackers to offer health rewards based on activity metrics and predictive analytics. Sensors in homes and buildings can trigger warnings to avert a catastrophic loss. With the right processing support, insurance companies are leveraging data to deeply understand user needs and bring state-of-the-art data analysis to better understand the consequences of human interaction.

Robotics change risk assessment in dramatic ways

As advances in robotics inch us towards autonomous vehicles and devices, insurance companies need to adjust how risk assessment plays out. For example, they may need new methods for assessing risk and property damage in 3D printed buildings to add to traditional assessment tools for standard builds. Evaluating liability in a car accident may include reviewing black box data.

On the other side, robotics could also provide the ability to offer frictionless assessments. Take robotics capabilities in medical care--while insurance companies will need new processes for insuring hospitals using robotic surgeries in addition to traditional surgeons, healthcare may also present less risk (for organizational and individual risk) by using robotic assistants to monitor chronic illness in consumers 24/7.

Advanced cognitive solutions enable richer insights

AI is taking on human-like processing thanks to advances in cognition. For example, neural networks are models inspired by the structure of the human brain. Deep learning —traditionally implemented by leveraging neural networks— allows insurance companies to process billions of data points from IoT, customer interactions, robotics, and even other unstructured data sources.

In the past, the data that AI now can process without difficulty was too complex to train models to evaluate. Now there are models trained to evaluate images pixel by pixel or syllable by syllable. Natural language processing, computer vision, and image classification are becoming more economical to use in production by the day and don’t rely on human beings.

Even better, the prevalence of new technologies will make it easier for companies to adopt and customize new solutions like individually tailored insurance coverage. The insurance industry may be able to create new types of protocols to manage security or develop new use cases. Thanks to existing solutions, it can more easily train machine learning models or build better automation strategies.

How AI Is Shaping Insurance Now

These are trends are not mainstream across all carriers, but AI is currently impacting insurance through fraud detection, better customer response, and real-time automation. For example, one insurance company used a virtual assistant to automate claims processing and reduce process duration from three weeks to one hour. In addition, Tower Insurance used artificial intelligence products to completely reinvent their customer experience despite being a company started during Queen Victoria’s reign.

The most critical component for making these and other use cases a reality today is a solution that offers quick deployment with no coding or technical expertise required to create automated 2-way conversations. For example, an intelligent automation platform already trained on insurance-specific conversational data delivers a solution that insurance companies can deploy right away.

And instead of replacing customer service representatives, underwriters, or claims adjusters, they offer support and consequently can improve response times and automate typical inbound and outbound requests. AI ensures employee availability to customers with more complex service needs and more time-intensive claims processes.

Getting Started with AI

Thanks to no code options and ease of machine learning deployment, insurance companies don’t need their own trained data scientists or team of developers. Insurance companies can reap the full benefits of things like omnichannel conversation automation, email triaging and document processing for:

• Car insurance companies to expedite insurance applications, claims processing, policyholder service, and virtual assistance
• Medical insurance providers to provide appointment reminders for wellness care and ensure medication adherence
• Life insurance companies to take maximum advantage of virtual medical assessments for underwriting new policies and eliminate the paper, time, and friction for claims when ease and speed provide empathy

These tools are designed to satisfy the customer satisfaction initiatives across all groups in the insurance sector as insurers fight for market share.

The best first step after finding the right tooling, is using claims data or customer data (sometimes gathered and stored over decades) to try and distill useful information. Insurers stand to benefit from evaluating that information to better their underwriting processes, insurance policies, and gaps in customer communications.

AI Will Change Insurance—It’s Time to Make a Move

AI is the future of insurance, and intelligent automation will soon shift from being a key differentiator to enabling experiences that customers expect all the time from their insurance carriers and health plans. It may feel like early days for insurers and as if AI is only usable in marketing efforts, but that is not the case. Companies are already reducing friction and improving customer experience without expanding their technology departments. They’re enjoying the benefits of virtual assistants, addressing fraudulent claims, gaining real-time insight, and responding to the very competitive insurance market.

It’s time to discover how artificial intelligence can drive value for companies in the insurance space, their customers, and for their own employees.

If you want to see how Demo Ushur’s AI Capabilities for Insurance Today

What is call deflection?

Call deflection is reducing the number of inbound calls that require human service agents (call centers, helpdesks) by offering alternative digital self-service channels. The primary goal of call deflection is to reduce the amount of time customers spend waiting for an answer to their question.

Typically, customers must wait on phone lines, but enterprises can instead increase opportunities for them to resolve their questions or challenges. When it's done well, it also reduces the load on a live agent on customer service teams.

How does deflection benefit the staff who otherwise would be tasked with answering those incoming calls? It requires just as much focus and concentration from a representative to respond to simple questions as it does to handle complex ones. Agents must context switch dozens of times per day, if not hundreds, and that mental effort takes a toll on their patience and resources.

Due to the high-touch nature of the calls into customer service, it's in everyone's best interest to only put calls through that can't be handled through any other form of customer support.

What call deflection is not intended for

There is understandable controversy in guiding customers away from human service agents. It feels disingenuous to position it at for the consumers benefits when we all remember times when we’ve shouted "representative" to a poorly coded IVR solution that made us want to throw our phone out the window. For customer call deflection to benefit both a business and its customers, companies must also understand what call deflection is not intended to do, such as:

• Rerouting customers away from humans:The purpose isn't to reduce human interaction. Call deflection provides multiple support channels so that customers can choose the most efficient and convenient resolution for their needs.
• Leaving challenges unanswered:Well-timed call deflection knows when to bring in human intervention to help ensure customers leave the call satisfied.
• Treating all calls exactly the same: Personalization is essential for customer service. Call deflection requires personalization methods so each interaction builds the relationship instead of harming it.

Call deflection is more than a voice recording from the customer support team over the phone or adding a chat function at the bottom of a website to represent a knowledge base. It's a proactive, considerate look at overall customer communication strategy, website design, customer service channels, and technology to guide customers to what they need.

How to Use Call Deflection

Businesses need consider a multi-faceted approach to call deflection that provides value for customers at every single interaction, no matter how simple or complex. Here are a few unique ways to implement call deflection principles.

Give customers the option to choose channels—and then switch

Providing customers a choice for when and how they interact with a company is a powerful feature, but especially if that choice is adaptive and personalized. For example, companies could use email triage to route customer service-related emails to the right person and department the first time. This could help prevent frustrated customers from feeling that they must call customer service to resolve issues after receiving no answer through digital channels.

Even better, customers can choose to take a different communication path once roadblocks appear. When a customer decides to call in with a question and they hear that the current wait time is one hour, if they're given the option of switching to text message, they can receive an instant answer. With the touch of a button, they're out of the call line and handling needs through an alternative service channel.

According to a report from Gartner's research, 70% of service interactions over the phone don't have to happen at all—artificial intelligence could resolve them before the need for a human agent. That should inform a digital transformation strategy.

Call out common points of friction

Companies can display their phone number and other contact channels prominently on their website, but merely making the channels known won't solve customer questions. A company must also make critical information easily viewable and searchable. For example, imagine a customer is having an issue loading a certain feature in the company's app. With a little digging, the company discovers that this is a common issue with iOS users. The fix is a 30-second toggle in their phone's location settings.

It takes much longer than 30 seconds to call customer service, and many customers may simply uninstall the app. However, a prominent section on the website with a direct link to this exact fix and other common troubleshooting solutions prevents an unnecessary call center touch. The customer fixes their problem and feels seen.

Companies can organize these tips in video form, allow customers to read them, or even program chatbots to walk customers through particularly frustrating tasks. With a searchable database right on the website, customers don't have to spend a lot of time before they get their answer.

Use chatbots to engage and scale

Chatbots never get tired and never sign off work. They can pull data from previous interactions to customize interactions and predict what customers might need. They offer a realistic way to scale communications and handle even those sudden large number of calls pop up.

As chatbots have evolved, they’ve become more realistic, and many customers may not even realize they aren't talking to a human. Chatbots can address customers in their native language thanks to multi-lingual programming. Customers have overcome their initial distrust of chatbots and now may prefer a live chat with a bot to humans thanks to lightning-fast response times 24/7.

Chatbots can handle most customer service inquiries but nowadays these self-service options are designed to tag human agents for complex, high-priority tasks. This blend of human and machine intervention improves call center performance without increasing the team or running the customer service team into the ground.

Create a thriving community space

Some companies have created spaces where the community can support each other. For example, peer-to-peer support allows customers to receive answers to their questions and give their own solution to others. It deflects calls and helps build brand loyalty.

Anecdotal answers also provide companies with valuable information about customers' real pain points, common troubleshooting issues, and even new problems before they become more widespread. A community space offers real-time information, and making it searchable offers even more answers to help customers help themselves.

Along with help articles, troubleshooting FAQs, and yes, customer service agents and associated chatbots, customers can find and receive information about their specific issue more easily than ever. These methods preempt the call in the first place unless it's necessary.

How to build a call deflection strategy

So how can companies ensure their call deflection strategy offers real value for customers and not just cost savings for the company? With a handful of non-negotiables.

Preempting and Timing are absolutely everything

A key strategy in customer satisfaction when it comes to call deflection is a tactic of preemption with proactive information. Preempting the call is the best way to handle calls to a customer service center. If 70% of calls are unnecessary, imagine the vast majority of those are best handled by distributing key information at the right moment.

But if that can't happen, timing the right alternative is best. Suppose a customer can find an answer to their problem through the community board or the FAQ section, excellent. If they need more help than what's available on the website, having the choice to email, chat, or call is still the best option. It may only need a quick email to solve.

Let the customer lead

The early days of automation frustrated customers because they had no choice and the designs were brittle. Shouting frustrated commands at a machine that didn't understand and sent them in circles or a chatbot that couldn't process even simple communications—this is the worst nightmare of someone contacting a company.

Now, customers can choose their interactions through the channel that suits them best. They can find answers before having to call. They can abandon long wait times at the call center for more convenient chat options or even schedule callbacks when it's most convenient. The choice transforms call deflection from avoidance to personalization.

Carefully consider the journey

The early days of automation also failed to deliver results because call deflection strategies weren't fully fleshed out. Chatbots simply directed customers to the call center or very limited resources without nuance. Call deflection didn't consider what channels customers preferred to use, or were already attempting to use, so they went unnoticed. That’s a failing strategy for customer satisfaction through automation.

Instead, call deflection only works when each different channel offers a comparable and viable option to calling customer service. If customers can't resolve their issues through these alternatives, they won't bother, and companies risk poor feedback. When they are equally as effective as calling for resolving most issues, they can revolutionize customer service.

Create the best conditions for customer resolutions with call deflection

Call deflection can relieve customer service agents while ensuring that customers receive valuable assistance for their questions and challenges. It can free up agents to handle high-touch, complex challenges and ensure that companies can scale their customer service offerings without adding extra cost or labor. The right call deflection strategies will be a significant business differentiator, and help build strong customer relationships through personalization, efficiency, and convenience.

Call Deflection Use Case Example

There’s an easy to imagine scenario across three customers all waiting on the phone for service agents, but with different outcomes.

• Customer A called with a quick, standard question, and has been waiting 26 minutes. This customer is thinking about hanging up, and maybe that means in the future they’ll consider moving to a competitor.
• Customer B isn't sure if the question is simple or not. They're tried to self-service the question before calling, but now a long time into the wait, they're anxious and considering hanging up.
• Customer C called with a complex question that has taken 30 minutes to resolve. This customer waited almost an hour to reach a customer service agent due to call volume and began the call frustrated but in need of help.

A common thread across all three customers is that each is on their own specific journey, and the service representative is a catch-all for the business when automation is unreliable and inflexible. IVR Call deflection can revolutionize the way companies manage customer service using limited resources in the post-pandemic, remote work age, but only if they understand it’s true constraints and true potential.

Customers may want the choice to access a human service agent but may not always need one for simple needs. A subset of customers may prefer to avoid human agents altogether unless absolutely necessary. Call deflection helps both groups because it reduces wait times and relieves burden on contact centers.

Excited to leverage call deflection for your business? Request a demo today!

Why is customer satisfaction the most important metric to keep in mind when evaluating and designing automation solutions? To explore that question and more, Ushur invites Maureen Flemming, Program Vice President, Intelligent Process Automation at IDC to break down the current market for Customer Experience Automation.

Renowned for their ability to collect data and share valuable insights, IDC’s latest research has made it clear that enterprises this year are prioritizing modernization efforts to drive customer satisfaction (CSAT), and are focusing less on the internal automation that a customer never sees.

Customer satisfaction is now an essential guiding metric for automation. Enterprises have been investing in automation for back-office and front-end applications for years—yet customers continue to demand more digital and intuitive experiences. Some businesses approach this by adding more features to their mobile applications. Others have responded by implementing IVR systems. But what automation strategy truly yields the greatest benefit?

Solutions that focus on the customer and not the application have the greatest chance to turn into successful, scalable modernization initiatives. Businesses that provide effective self-service options see increases in customer satisfaction, as well as reductions in costs and operations strain. If a business only focuses on the internal processes that are easiest and fastest to automate, they will still have to divert time, money, and manpower to the pain points that cause friction in the customer journey and decrease satisfaction every day.

Ushur is very excited to host Maureen Flemming for this fireside chat on using AI and automation to “Focus on the Customer, not the Application'' to show how frictionless customer experiences and end-to-end automation go hand-in-hand. From conversations to core system updates, Customer Experience Automation (CXA) is changing the way businesses engage with their customers. CXA empowers enterprises to communicate both proactively and responsively while overlaying core systems with a no-code approach to adapt quickly to evolving consumer preferences. Implementing CXA future-proofs the enterprise strategy for every customer journey, modernizing communication across all channels. More significantly, there’s no rip and replace or coding involved.

If you are a business looking for a competitive edge in acquiring and retaining customers, this webinar with IDC is a must-attend. Don’t miss the chance to ask Intelligent Process Automation analyst, Maureen Fleming, burning questions about your automation strategy. Register here and see you there!

What Is Intelligent Process Automation?

Intelligent Process Automation is the next evolution for automation technology, where robotic process automation (RPA), natural language processing (NLP), and artificial intelligence (AI) intersect and become something better.

If robotic process automation alone is taking rote tasks and using software to handle repetitive tasks, intelligent automation gives automation flows their own metadata and design.

It can be helpful to think of IPA as an executive function that improves the workings of all your digital process automation. That means that it can become flexible and more responsive to your human-powered workplace and customer base.

Basic tasks also are pre-built and easily reusable between flows so that each automation solution isn’t designed or built from scratch. For example, intelligent automation depends on capabilities like pre-trained machine learning models which can be disposed of without further development and model training.

At its best, IPA allows companies to design their automated processes to make decisions and “learn” from experience; change with input from past automation results.

Which Technologies Are Involved in IPA?

IPA applies artificial intelligence, conversational AI, natural language processing, and a host of other “intelligent” tools to your existing automation to augment your entire process. These technologies are already being used in digital processes to improve sectors like insurance, banking, and healthcare.

What Are the Benefits of IPA?

For some time now, businesses have automated processes like payroll, invoicing, and data entry. Simple automation can save businesses hours of human labor and can also save them from inevitable human error. However, traditional automation also comes with severe limitations. Simple automation cannot easily handle workflow changes and isn’t flexible enough to respond to unexpected inputs. As a result, the automation breaks down whenever the underlying application changes or a customer interacts with it in some non-predetermined fashion. Traditional automation has also likely depended on programming languages that require expertise in a technical field.

What are some simple examples of brittle automation? Consider the automation flow that takes a document placed in a shared folder every week by staff, prepends it with the date, and then copies it to an SFTP site for the next person to review and process. That solution could be as light as a combination of bash scripting and Python to lighten the load for service staff, but is a lift for an IT team to build and maintain. Each time a person diverges from this straightforward process, IT and service teams would have to scramble to resolve the issue and add technical debt to their queue.

If your business relies on older automation designs, you've probably already experienced the unavoidable downtimes resulting from your IT team scrambling to rewrite and redesign “bots” so that your system can get up and running again.

Intelligence process automation doesn’t suffer the same limitations and consequences of brittle design.

IPA tools bring automation with a brain, and allow automation flows to learn from past mistakes, handle unstructured data, and collaborate with a human operator to keep customer experiences up and responsive. IPA can also take in new information and change course as needed, so that your automation keeps running even when circumstances change.

What Is the Difference Between IPA and RPA?

There are a number of important divergences between IPA and RPA. Inevitably, they get lumped together, which is why it’s worthwhile to tease out the differences and values.

Robotic Process Automation

RPA stands for robotic process automation. It’s an umbrella term that refers to the category of software solutions used to build and deploy robots that carry out digital back-office tasks.

Robots can make keystrokes and navigate online systems. They excel at predictable, repetitive tasks with a clear sequence of steps, which is why they are widely used in areas like data entry, invoicing, and payroll. Simple robots can be programmed to track employee hours and issue paychecks; they can also be programmed to calculate overtime pay and deductions.

Robots perform these menial tasks more quickly than most employees, and they do so without the volume of errors human intervention typically incurs. Automating menial processes can save businesses the cost of labor, while eliminating the cost of repairing errors in operations. Automation also frees up employees to focus their energy on more complex tasks. For these reasons, RPA technology is largely focused on improving operational efficiency within the enterprise, impacting the employee experience but less so the customer experience.

Intelligent Process Automation

IPA takes process automation to the next level for various industries. IPA platforms apply artificial intelligence tools to manual business processes. Of course, each solution can look quite different depending on the use case; there is a broad array of tools that key components of IPA can bring to bear. Computer vision and natural language processing are just a few of the more common tools used by IPA to create a more flexible, and interactive automation journey.

Computer Vision

Computer vision allows computer programs to “read” and “understand” complex visual inputs, so that they can collect data from video and still photos even when that information is not clearly labeled. Inputs such as photos of damaged property, personal identification, and scans of standard forms are good examples. Computer vision can be used for insurance inspection and claims settlement, among other things.

Natural Language Processing

Similarly, natural language processing tools, or NLP, allow computers to communicate in human languages; written or spoken. NLP-enabled programs can read and respond to texts that are written the way people really speak. Chatbots are powered by NLP; so are search engines.

Machine Learning

IPA can also apply machine learning tools to the automated processes themselves. Machine learning, or ML, allows the software to identify patterns in large data sets and is the product of many data scientists expertise. Eventually, ML-enabled programs can make predictions based on those patterns. This allows them to course-correct and to keep improving their own functioning by, essentially, learning from experience.

While Robotics Process Automation improves operational efficiency for employees, Intelligent Process Automation leverages Artificial Intelligence to self-service more sophisticated customer intents. To make an impact on your customer experience, you'll need an Intelligent Process Automation solution that understands the problems and jargon unique to your industry and those that it serves.

IPA and RPA: A Difference in Focus

RPA and IPA have fundamentally different focuses: RPA is focused on a process, while IPA is profoundly data-focused. You don't need to have RPA tools in order to implement IPA. But if you are already using RPA, then Intelligent Process Automation platforms can complement your existing end business processes.

For example, RPA excels at capturing and storing data. IPA can take this process a few steps further by applying NLP and mining written texts for data to drive scale. IPA can use NLP to “read” emails from business partners and customers and extract all the relevant data so that it can be stored and later studied; thereby injecting intelligence into an automated process.

What kind of data are we talking about? It could be anything from sales data and transactional data to contractual information. When you use intelligent automations in your workflows, human employees no longer have to sift through an endless email inbox looking for actionable information.

Intelligent Process Automation Use Cases

IPA can be used for digital transformations in virtually any field and certainly different industries. Here’s how a few key sectors are already using this technology.

Insurance Industry

Insurance enterprises rely heavily on communication with customers who reach out to their service centers regularly, and all with a unique language and tone. The high volume of communication and varied intent can be a problem for brittle automation flows dependent on human actions. That’s why any tool that is flexible and intelligent enough to improve communication on a high level is a game-changer for people in the field.

Claims Processing Across Industries

Ushur’s insurance claims process automation slashes the time needed to process claims regardless of whatever data format they originate in. An insurance enterprise can use Ushur’s intelligent process automation so customers can submit claim details over any channel and receive proactive status updates as they arise and are generated by backend systems. And, with fewer delays and less friction in each engagement, customers report a far greater level of engagement and satisfactory outcomes.

Banking and Financial Services Industry

The banking and financial services sector is rapidly growing its online presence, and customers expect to carry out a broad range of activities via their devices. The sector also still sees inordinate operational costs in their customer service centers despite heavy investments in other existing automation technology which leaves gaps in their overall customer experience. Intelligent automation is changing what’s possible with customer experience in banking.

Ushur is using IPA and conversational AI to facilitate smooth conversations with both existing customers and prospective customers. Conversational AI means that chatbots can understand customer queries and interact directly with backend systems to resolve their issue. 

At the same time, Ushur’s solution allows early adopters to capture data from conversations with clients, and learn steadily more from each experience. As a result, every customer interaction becomes a growth opportunity, in which the chatbot learns how to improve its services. The more data the bank can capture, the better it can serve its customers via use of analytics.

Healthcare

Effective communication is a vital part of the healthcare sector, and IPA solutions make it easier for healthcare facilities to listen to patients and learn from their concerns while safely and responsibly collecting and storing data in a format humans understand.

But Ushur doesn't stop at simply collecting information. The system builds on the intent captured through Conversational AI by automating routine tasks across backend and legacy systems. The result is smoother workflows and greater customer satisfaction through the use of complementary technology and use of AI.

Conversational Intelligence

Ushur is working closely with clients in the insurance industry to implement IPA solutions so that customers can be better served at all times. Ushur’s Language Intelligence Services Architecture (LISA) is a framework for services that serve Natural Language Processing, Natural Language Understanding, Sentiment Analysis, Topic Detection, and Metadata Mapping to understand and respond intelligently to customer conversations.

LISA can understand human speech and respond in kind. The system can handle a variety of customer queries and perform triage, passing customers along to a human agent whenever necessary. Using LISA means that customers get their issues resolved quickly, while agents are freed up to focus on the customer relationship and make important decisions.

Getting Started with Intelligent Process Automation

IPA has a very broad range of applications, extending well beyond what we’ve outlined in this post. At Ushur, we believe that every business -- in every field -- can transform their customer experience through automated business processes that eliminate the friction and risk from every customer engagement.

Curious about what IPA and associated new technologies can do for your business? Get in touch today and start a conversation about how Ushur can help you maximize your company’s potential.

Ushur is attending the most influential week in healthcare and it’s taking place in Orlando, Florida (also digitally) at HIMSS22. HIMSS is finally back in person and we’re so excited to meet everyone there! While we are running a booth with excellent gifts, and also managing a must-attend event at Topgolf for select attendees, we’re most excited to connect you to our industry experts and show you our world-premiere Customer Experience Automation (CXA) platform. If you can’t make the event, we do also have a digital booth with useful content for you to view and download.

Ushur working with the Health Industry

We’re attending in person because this is an excellent opportunity to meet you and listen to the problems keeping health providers up at night. We’ve been working with industry leaders in the healthcare sector on their problems, and there are a lot of things we’ve learned from working with them we’d be glad to talk to you about.

Ushur has been working with healthcare providers to deliver Customer Experience Automation™ capabilities that make working with customers engaging and stress free. We’ve helped companies in health and insurance cut their processing times from hours to minutes and reduced their operating expenses by up to 80%.

Benefits of Customer Experience Automation

Customer Experience Automation™ is a entirely because it uses AI-driven workflows to interface with customers, and yet it can update the core systems that IT teams of healthcare organizations have already invested huge capital into. Ushur is able to make all that possible, even while using a drag and drop builder to design the automation workflows. The workflows also deploy with a single click. 

Altogether, using CXA to build out customer experiences offers a chance to deliver a seachange of customer experience. It’s cost efficient for building automations once and then again when you want to work on updating and expanding them later. We also are HIPAA compliant, and can handle the types of sensitive information that customers expect their providers to process securely.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology has seen tremendous growth across all sectors. A PWC survey, conducted midway through 2021, found that 86% of more than 1,000 executives said that AI would be a “mainstream technology” at their company. More than half cited the Covid pandemic as the reason for the acceleration. 

For insurance carriers, the greatest benefit of AI was that it helps create a more satisfying customer experience. Of those surveyed, 65% saw an improved customer experience with AI, and 31% expected to see improvements within two years. Insurance executives also reported improved decision-making, greater efficiency, cost savings, and more innovative products and services.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology can transform your insurance firm. In this article, you’ll learn:

• What AI is as it applies to the insurance sector
• The key benefits of AI for insurance companies
• How Ushur can prepare you for the future of business

What is AI?

AI is the broad application of machine learning models trained against historical data in which some behavior was closely measured. Those models can then extrapolate that data into predicted patterns. A specific subset, conversational AI, is a technology that combines natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) in the packaged form of software such as digital assistants and chatbots with responsive capabilities. 

How Does the Insurance Industry Use AI Technology?

Insurance carriers use AI in several ways, from handling quotes and automating the FNOL process to claims processing and engaging with customers. AI can also be used to onboard agents and brokers and customer satisfaction surveys. These are just some of the uses. 

In addition, you’ll find AI being used to learn from client information for property and life insurance companies, and auto insurers may incorporate AI in their usage-based insurance (UBI) data collection.

McKinsey & Company, in their Insurance 2030 report, predict that by 2030, AI will have a “seismic impact” on the insurance sector. They envision that data science and AI will be used for everything from underwriting and fraud detection to claims processing and customer service.

What are the Benefits of AI for Insurance?

For insurance professionals, there are many benefits of using AI, from risk assessment, underwriting, and real-time pricing data, to speeding up the claims process and enhancing the customer experience. There are also benefits for the company, such as greater efficiency, cost savings, and employee retention.

The top five benefits of AI for insurance companies are:

1. Better customer experience and engagement

Whether it’s to get a quote, file a claim, or submit information, communicating with an insurance company can be stressful for your customer. AI helps streamline these traditionally time-consuming processes into a fast and seamless experience.

2. More productive employees and greater job satisfaction

By intelligently routing customer service requests, insurance staff can focus on high-value interactions for enhanced customer engagement while enjoying less stress and improved morale. For example, using AI during the sales process can improve the close rate by 41%.

3. Faster claims processing

An insurance claims process, when handled manually, can take weeks. The standard way involves multiple phone calls and emails to collect essential information, creating a backlog of unsettled claims. With AI-enabled smart bots, claims management can be completed in a fraction of the time. As a result, claimants can be reached more easily with fewer attempts, and this improves efficiency while creating a more satisfying process for customers.

4. Lower operational costs

By using AI in their day-to-day operations and automating previously manual tasks, insurance companies can realize tremendous cost savings. Juniper Research forecasts that AI use in claims management will lead to yearly cost savings in the insurance industry of $1.2 billion by 2023.

5. More time for high-value interactions

Traditional insurers spend a lot of time fielding phone calls and routing emails to the proper staff member or department. AI frees them to focus on more complex issues as well as more meaningful engagement with your customers.

This past year for Ushur was one marked by growth across every corner of the organization. Our team tripled in size, and our revenue tripled in kind. We also tripled the number of verticals we serve, as well as our execution footprint.

As we’ve grown, I’ve found my own role changing alongside. I think about the early growth of a company as evolving from a small family into a small village. As a small family, and then as a tribe of 30-40, it was fairly easy for me to interact frequently with everyone. I had opportunities to work directly with most people, hold skip-level one-on-ones with those I didn’t, and really get a first-hand pulse on the state of the organization on an individual level.

Of course, at 150 employees that becomes near impossible. Part of healthy growth is knowing where to step back and let others help. To use an analogy from the world of sports, I’ve transitioned from player-coach to coach — thanks in large part to an expanded leadership team that has helped elevate Ushur to its next stage.

As part of that redefined role, I felt it was critically important to establish a clear, concise set of cultural values to help guide us as we continue to expand in every direction. Too often, growing companies lose the spirit of what made them great to begin with.

In close collaboration with our leadership team and our unstoppable head of HR, Sarah Stevens, we settled on three key values to serve as the framework for Ushur’s culture both for today, and for tomorrow.

It’s essential to meet the needs of one customer without abandoning another. A 70-year-old customer may have bought insurance at their agent’s corner office for most of their life, while a 30-year-old customer never even knew that was an option. Asking the former to give up their personal interaction for an automated phone call is as jarring as it would be to ask the latter to make a trip to the offices.

First and foremost, we believe in a people-first approach to the way we run our business. Doing right by our employees is something I’ve championed since I had a team of two. When it comes to work/life balance, I simply believe that life takes precedent, always.

Through the process of building and growing a company, it’s easy to lose sight of the reality that your team determines success. CEOs and founders face tremendous pressure to prioritize customers and shareholders. I’ve always felt that if you hire the right people, empower them and take care of them, they will take care of your business.

We do right by our employees, and we expect them to do right by our customers in turn. When those values align, our stakeholders are rewarded.

We also believe in the pursuit of excellence. For us, the prospect of winning isn’t just intriguing, it’s fun. If you’re in the tournament, you want a chance to play in the championship.

Doing something someone has never done before is rewarding in ways that extend far beyond the boundaries of the workplace. And knowing that your colleagues are on that same mission, with the same mindset, makes for an environment that’s both inspiring and welcoming.

Of course, the pursuit of excellence never supersedes our people-first approach. The first principle is highest.

Finally, we believe in a growth mindset. It doesn’t matter what you don’t know. People who approach their work at Ushur with an intent and willingness to learn will always be successful here.

I myself am the product of a $100 education. I don’t believe that specific accomplishments are required to achieve others. Regardless of where a person comes from or who they are, greatness is attainable with a growth mindset.

These values represent our cultural framework, whether we have 200 employees or 20,000. Our executive and management teams are committed to empathy, kindness and leading by example. We are actively growing and hiring today, so if Ushur sounds like the right place for you please reach out.

What is it? Why is it costly? How should we avoid it? Why should we avoid it?

Channel hopping is a phenomenon common to the insurance world that is defined by the behavior of customers, claimants, or anyone else contacting a carrier, starting their interactions within one channel (e.g. SMS, email, phone, or a portal), and then leaving that channel, to “hop” into another channel mid-completion.

Why do customers channel hop? Because they discover their needs cannot be met within the path where they started the conversation. Research confirms that all too often, customers do not get their inquiry resolved within a single conversation. So they abandon one channel, and begin their service journey all over again through another path, or multiple.

Let’s think about it from the perspective of a claim payment status example. In the channel hopping scenario, our customer might call into their insurance company’s contact center. If the service representative could not quickly retrieve that information, or worse, the customer was holding in a call queue, they may abandon that channel. And then they have to begin their quest all over again, perhaps this time by sending an email to their claims adjuster. In the customer’s eyes, this was a quick question that should have been easy to answer immediately.

Why is it costly?

Channel hopping is a costly problem for both the policyholder and insurance carrier. When a member can’t update their information, like add a driver to their policy on their first attempt, the burden is placed on them to follow up and follow through, including seeking a more reliable channel and beginning their conversation all over again. Consider sometimes this is an emotion-laden experience already, perhaps following an injury, and that’s before the friction added to the experience by the insurance company not having a way to resume the conversation where it left off, nor an easy way for them to self-report their claim.

The cost of the customer journey grows with the number of channels the customer has to consume from. The 2021 Gartner Customer Service Behavior and Expectations survey showed that there’s a 300% difference between a customer experience journey traversing 4 channels as compared to 1. It also estimates that only 9% of customers have had an adequate enough experience on a self-service channel that they don’t feel they have to channel hop.

That added friction is also costly in terms of time and customer experience, affecting customer satisfaction. Policyholders are more likely to shop for other plans when they’re frustrated with their own customer experience. It’s also expensive for insurance companies who have to manage duplicate support requests, as the same customer inquiry is moving through multiple, separate channels.

Keep in mind that insurers are under extreme pressure to mitigate the effect of their operating costs on their bottom line. Other industries have much more successfully reduced their unit costs, and insurance hasn’t kept up.

How should insurers avoid channel hopping?

Channel hopping is costly to both the insurance carrier and the policyholder, so the question remains – how can you avoid channel hopping? It’s important to build and design self-service channels where your customers can resolve their journeys without needing to channel hop, and those experiences are those that are built with empathy and well tested.

Customer Experience Automation™ (CXA) feels like a tremendous burden to start doing and do perfectly the first time, but the reality is that testing and experimentation are the best path to successfully meeting your customers’ demands in their experience. First, you need to build experiments around your customer automation flows with criterion for success and failure. Second, you need to provide an architecture for rapid experimentation and easy collaboration between your business users. Third, you should be able to build an experience once, and deploy it to any channel. Finally, you should walk a mile in the shoes of the consumer with your own customer experience automation flows and empathy-test each trial.

Ushur’s CXA platform is the only enterprise Customer Experience Automation™ platform that lets business users act as the owners to build and deploy these customer experience workflows without any help needed from their IT partners. The Ushur platform lets business users build end-to-end automation flows that are integrated with backend systems, but also makes it easy to wrap those automation steps in a secure and mobile-friendly interface. By enabling business users to drive those mobile-first experiences and manage the experimentation lifecycle of the automation flows, Usher makes it simple to successfully optimize the customer journey and prevent the frustrating process of customers hopping between phone, email, forums, and chats.

The rapid experimentation that the Ushur platform affords is fundamentally tied to both the proprietary Invisible App™ and the unique combination of machine learning (ML) capabilities Ushur makes easy-usable by business users. By deploying your customer experience automation workflow – the steps you need your customers to execute to successfully resolve their interaction with your company – with an Invisible App™, regardless of which channel they begin their journey on, they’ll have a unified experience wherever they pick up. The industry-specific machine learning models Ushur exposes to business users also make those conversations natural and intuitive so there’s no need to switch channels in the first place.

Why should insurers avoid channel hopping?

Automation is only a portion of the broader digital transformation all carriers need to go through to satiate customer desire for instant gratification, and channel hopping gets in the way of that. A 2020 Deloitte survey showed 46% of companies in the insurance industry are still in the stage where they are either planning to or have no plans to implement digital capabilities. The 54% who are ahead of the curve and already implementing the kind of digital expertise consumers demand of modern business have a serious leg up on their counterparts, and will be less likely to frustrate their customers as their preferences for digital offerings expand.

If you’re concerned about your customers coming to you for a question or concern and not being able to resolve their problems in a single interaction, let us know! We’d love to talk to you about best practices for modernizing customer experiences.

ITC 2021 In Vegas

After having to host last year’s event virtually, ITC Vegas 2021 was filled with energy, excitement, and plenty of opportunities to share expertise about the direction that insurance is heading technologically. As a refresher, or for those who didn’t know,InsureTech Connect is the world’s largest gathering of insurance leaders and innovators and it occurs annually - this year it was hosted at Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas.

Ushur was excited to be part of the scene this year; in the news and on the agenda, where our CEO and co-founder Simha Sadasiva was part of a panel about the insurance customer experience revolution.

“It was wonderful for the insurance community to come together again in-person,” noted Simha. “The energy level was enough to light up the Vegas strip! Our booth was busy for the entire event, where we had the opportunity to meet with hundreds of attendees spanning carriers, brokers, core system providers, system integrators, and business process outsourcing companies.”

In the News: FINEOS Solutions Partnership

Ushur and FINEOS’ joint solution, joining FINEOS Integrated Disability and Absence Management solution (IDAM) and Ushur’s industry-first CXA platform, was not only showcased during a demo at the Ushur’s booth but also featured in Ushur’s executive panel!

Why the partnership?

Ushur just expanded its strategic partnership with FINEOS, the leading global provider of core systems for life, accident, and health insurers. The partnership facilitates key stages in the processing of absence management using IDAM.

IDAM will now integrate with Ushur’s CXA platform, and allows for intelligent automation for both front-end customer-facing communications and also back-end internal processes. The integration will simplify anything from document upload to data integration.

Together, the Ushur-FINEOS solution provides end-to-end automation of customer journeys and delivers the information to empower a smarter, more responsive and improved customer experience.

Executive Panel: State of Insurance Customer Experience: AI, Automation, and the CX Revolution

In the last two years, technological advancement in the insurance industry has grown incrementally as carriers around the world have had to adjust to a post-pandemic vision of doing business. Advancements in conversational AI, natural language learning, and intelligent AI technologies are changing the way the insurance carriers deliver on the insurance customer experience.

Simha Sadasiva, CEO and co-founder of Ushur, led a panel of industry experts and decision makers that included Steve Rullo, EVP at Great-West Life, Jennifer Daniel VP, Premier Tech at Aflac, and Jason Andrew, Chief Alliance Officer at FINEOS, for a lively discussion about how AI and automation transforms customer experience. They discussed specific use cases and possible impactful strategies for the future, including the new solutions partnership with FINEOS.

For a recording of the panel discussion, click here.

Cool Booth - Live Demos

If you made it to our booth during ITC, you may have gotten a chance to meet with Ushur’s Global Head of Insurance, Meredith Barnes-Cook, Insurance Woman of the Year. She and Ted Reed, a 37-year insurance industry veteran and former VP at Unum met with people who were interested in learning more about Ushur’s CXA platform.

Especially since throughout the conference, representatives were offering live demos in three different areas; AI-powered quote intakes, claims processing with Ushur’s Invisible AppTM, and how Ushur’s CXA platform can expedite the digital transformation of your company.

Ushur is excited to provide a robust, agile CXA platform and be part of the solution for insurance digital transformation. Let us know if you want to see it in action.

Introduction

In this three-part series of blog posts, we address why open enrollment is so important to employees, their employers, and health insurance plans. Unfortunately it is also a process where employees may delay or avoid critical steps that are intended to maximize their use of their benefits for better health outcomes and lower out-of-pocket expenses. In this third post, we will discuss the ways that employees can choose and change their Primary Care Physician (PCP) and reap the benefits from working within their in-network choices for both their standard and specialized care. In the first post, we addressed the basic details of open enrollment and the differing benefits needed for different age groups, particularly people approaching 26 and 65. And in our second post, we talked about the information that is gathered during open enrollment, specifically Health Risk Assessments (HRA) and how it is used to inform employee care management for this critically important task. 

Open Enrollment: Details

Open enrollment season is the only time that employees can sign up as new clients or simply renew their benefits plans with the companies they work for (barring certain circumstances such as a new job, marriage, birth, adoption, or divorce). Despite the fact that the benefits enrollment process occurs every year at the same time, many people simply let their insurance choices carry over from year to year without reviewing their options, wait for the last minute to try and enroll and make changes in the 11th hour, or else miss the deadline for enrollment altogether.

Employee engagement around open enrollment is something that can and should be actively maintained and encouraged throughout the year by both a business and carrier so that open enrollment is just one part of your employees’ experience around their overall health and wellness. It’s so important to maintain high levels of engagement because your open enrollment process is just the beginning of an ongoing health management process where your employees partner with their health plan to fully use their benefits to improve outcomes and lower costs. The open enrollment process is also just the beginning of an ongoing healthcare management process that includes all your employees, especially when it comes to maintenance and preventative care.

Choosing a PCP is an essential part of the ongoing healthcare management process that a health plan offers their clients—but the Journal of American Medicine Association reports that it’s a key relationship that has been on the decline. If the process of PCP choice was as easy to research, select, and contact as looking for a restaurant on the internet, employees would be more willing to take the time to choose. But it’s a manual process, current systems are hard to search, and they have little to no rating systems which is a great way to make PCP selection frustrating.

With Ushur’s Invisible App™, you can easily build simple, intuitive process workflows that use automation to encourage more employees to choose a PCP as part of their open enrollment journey.  This not only establishes a medical partner in each employee’s well-being. It is an easy way to build an understanding of the wellness and financial value of always seeing care providers that are within the health plan’s network. Employees, their employers, and the health plan benefit from the ongoing involvement of a PCP who has been vetted for their medical expertise, along with being more affordable.  

Primary Care Physician (PCP) Selection

Some people forgo choosing a Primary Care Physician (PCP) completely. In fact, every year the number of people who have chosen a PCP has decreased, including people in their 60s.1 While the reasoning behind the decrease can be appreciated, namely healthy customers perceive they don’t really need to go in to see the doctor, it is also not the best decision for their long term health nor optimized for cost savings; a substantial proportion of medical costs are for preventable conditions.

Having even one visit with a PCP is a best practice because it establishes a relationship and sets a foundation for future visits; whether for preventative care or because of illness.

And studies show that patient satisfaction increases when patients have chosen a PCP to work with,2 whether they visit the doctor regularly or not.

Unfortunately, most technology solutions offered by benefits packages makes choosing a PCP difficult and time consuming rather than a time savings. Instead of recognizing a member’s location and physician care needs, and then delivering relevant results, choices are listed in pages and pages of physician choices and offer no way to know which one provides the best care for a member’s specific requirements. If a member does decide to check a physician rating system, it’s another manual process in which they must leave the insurance provider’s site, inadvertently leading individuals to a PCP or specialist that is out of network and therefore more costly.

In-network Steering

Surprises are fun and exciting if it’s your birthday, but they’re not so great on a medical bill. The past year has been rife with these kinds of nasty surprises. As many as 18% of people use out-of-network providers and feel blindsided when hit with larger bills because of it. Because of the negotiated agreements between health insurance plans and their network care providers, in-network physicians and facilities cost less for the employee, the employer, and the health plan. For example, using an in-network doctor for an annual physical might involve the employee carrying a $40 co-payment. But going to an out-of-network doctor could result in that same employee paying 20% to 35% of the full-cost of the medical service, a difference that could translate to hundreds of dollars and an impacted level of employee satisfaction.

The best way to prevent this very expensive and unexpected error is to make sure that customers can easily access their network provider list whether they are at home, or on the go, perhaps even in a doctor’s office, about to schedule a procedure. And make it easy for the employee to see and understand the difference in cost if they choose to go out-of-network for care.

Currently, searching for network care is cumbersome and vague and offers few guarantees of coverage accuracy. Additionally, if there are differing levels of benefits offered, as is the case for many HR departments in many organizations, the employee has to know which plan they have in order to know which network of caregivers they can use. This unwieldy experience leads to costly employee billing surprises, dissatisfied clients, and time-consuming health plan call center operational costs. Customer frustration quickly rises as their employees have to waste time on a call for something that they should be able to quickly locate with their smartphones. For a small business especially, those benefits administration frustrations can erupt into a nightmare for the HR team

Ushur Customer Experience Automation™ Enables Decision Making

Ushur’s proprietary automation technology, Invisible App™, uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to create a personalized experience for each employee regardless of the communication channel. Drawing from their own information and the plan that they have chosen, Ushur’s UX-first technology platform allows employees to search for PCPs, facilities, and services, quickly and easily. Employees only revert to querying the health plan call center for more unique, complex inquiries. And even then, with the AI-driven Invisible App™, repeated queries on the same topic can be identified and addressed via intelligent automation and proactive employee communication. Altogether, the end goal of this automation lifecycle is to decrease health plan call center volume in order to drive cost savings and increase accuracy.

By drawing on each employee’s personal benefit information, members can ensure that their care provider choices remain in-network, with verified quality and lower cost. They can easily choose their PCP and even make an initial appointment. Using Ushur’s cloud-native Invisible App™ to make the research process easy and simple encourages employees to take full advantage of their benefits.

By drawing on each employee’s personal benefit information, members can ensure that their care provider choices remain in-network, with verified quality and lower cost. They can easily choose their PCP and even make an initial appointment. Using Ushur’s cloud-native Invisible App™ to make the research process easy and simple encourages employees to take full advantage of their benefits. 
Ushur’s Invisible App™ unblocks the confusion around the open enrollment workflow, making it the start of a healthcare management process that individuals can extend into their daily lives to improve their health, and ease their benefits information collection. For workers and HR professionals alike, it will pay off to simplify this entire process when it comes time to complete an HRA and gather other documentation. Thanks to Ushur, the stressful time and extreme effort associated with trying to choose and maintain physician care and services that are in-network can be a theme of the past.

Ushur’s Customer Experience Automation™ platform helps to create an employee experience that makes full use of their benefits for a better life. 

1. Declining numbers of Americans have a primary care provider
2. Managed Care, Primary Care, and the Patient-practitioner Relationship
3. An analysis of out-of-network claims in large employer health plans

In this three-part series of blog posts, we address why open enrollment is so important to employees, their employers, and health plans. And yet it is an event that many employees overlook, do not understand, and are prone to avoid for as long as possible. In this second post, we will discuss the information that is gathered during open enrollment and its importance to guide employee care management. In the first post, we addressed the basic details of open enrollment and the differing benefits needed for different age groups, particularly people approaching age 26 and 65. And in the third post, we will discuss how employees can choose and change their Primary Care Physician (PCP) and why this is a key component for them to gain the maximum value when working within their network choices.

Open Enrollment: Details

Open enrollment is the only time that employees can sign up or renew their benefits plans with their employers (barring certain circumstances such as a new job, marriage, birth, adoption, or divorce). Despite the fact that this process occurs every year at the same time, many people simply let their insurance choices carry over from year to year without revisions, wait for the last minute to try and enroll and make changes in the 11th hour, or else, miss the deadline for enrollment altogether.

Employee engagement around open enrollment is something that can and should be actively maintained and encouraged throughout the year so that open enrollment is just one part of your employees’ experience around their overall health and wellness. Your open enrollment process is just the beginning of an ongoing health management process where your employees are partnering with their health plan to fully use their benefits to improve outcomes and lower costs. With Ushur’s Invisible App™, you can encourage more employees to participate right from the start by completing their Health Risk Assessment (HRA) and to then receive proactive and personalized wellness program invitations. Then for the balance of the year, the health plan can check in with each employee to follow their participation, impact, and satisfaction.

HRAs Defined

Health Risk Assessments or Health Risk Appraisals are a patient-provided overview, usually but not always, in the form of a questionnaire, used to assess an individual's health status, risks, and habits.

In fact, as of 2019, 72% of large firms requested employees complete an HRA, either with an incentive or not. HRAs typically collect data from employees about their nutrition, fitness activities, stress levels, sleep habits, mental health, and sometimes even physical, and biometric information like blood pressure and cholesterol.

However, in the realm of healthcare, health plans and medical providers agree that these appraisals are not simply a bunch of data and personal information collected only to be stored away.

Not Stand Alone Information

The employee information that is collected on HRAs allows health care professionals to use the data in order to develop health profiles that can predict future health risks based on lifestyle and behavior. “Asking individuals about their habits and feelings—including their change readiness—gives health professionals insight into an individual’s risk of chronic diseases and which unhealthy habits an individual is ready to improve.”

These profiles not only provide health plans a way to advise and steer employees to better health but also guide wellness programs that can then encourage healthy living. For example, a company can hold semi-annual health fairs offering information on healthy living, different health screenings, and/or flu shots.

Despite the requests for HRAs in the workforce and the associated health promotions that go along with it, few employees一as little as 4%一actually complete the form.

Ushur Smooths the Way

Ushur’s no code, AI-powered Invisible App™ can help change those numbers.

The open enrollment process involves a lot of data gathering and in the beginning, much of it is sensitive personal and medical data. Data privacy is a growing concern for everyone, warranting an HRA invitation to include transparency in how the employee’s response will be used. There is a compelling “what’s in it for me” story to share with the employee that can be missed with a traditional form request.

Employees that need to make a change may be less likely to complete the HRA, especially if the invitation to complete the form signals a time-consuming process to follow. However, with Ushur’s Invisible App™, the process is easy to complete using the channel of their choice. This component of the Ushur platform provides employees with a highly engaging interface that guides them into the start of a vital collaboration with their health plan after open enrollment. The initial engagement sets the tone for the rest of the health care management process; easy, intuitive, and accessible.

Traditionally, companies use health care portals to collect data一that ends up unused in a stand-alone database, disconnected from legacy systems that can use the gathered information. Ushur’s Invisible App™ seamlessly takes the employees’ collected data and delivers it to the relevant backend systems. Health plans can work with employers to select care programs that are tailored to a specific organization’s needs.

Ushur uses intuitive AI-driven processes to keep employees happy, comfortable, and engaged - and makes their health plan an essential part of their tool kit for healthy living.

Ushur, creator of the no-code AI-powered Customer Experience Automation™ platform that seamlessly automates policyholder, claimant, member, agent, broker, and provider interactions, announces its membership with Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development (ACORD), the global standards-setting body for the insurance industry.

From an insurance carrier’s front office call centers to their back-office core systems, Ushur combines Conversational Automation with Knowledge Work Automation to intelligently automate customer experiences end-to-end and across all channels of engagement furthering digital transformation at an industry level.

“Our membership with ACORD, coupled with our powerful Machine Learning and Data Transformation capabilities, provides insurance carriers with speed, accuracy, and efficiency in processing the wide array of ACORD forms that they receive today. This is a game-changer for the experience of their customers, agents and brokers, and for their own employees,” said Meredith Barnes-Cook, Global Head of Insurance at Ushur.

Spanning new business applications, policy changes, and claims, Ushur can automatically recognize and immediately acknowledge a carrier’s receipt of an ACORD form. In seconds, Ushur’s CXA platform can also validate that each form is complete, reach back to the sender for missing data, and interface the information to the appropriate core system, CRM, or workflow solution.

Health plans in the post-Affordable Care Act world know that the more people who sign up for coverage during open enrollment, the wider the risk pool is. Similarly, having more employees sign up for the group benefits offered by an employer during open enrollment spreads the cost of the insurance over a larger more diverse group of people and allows insurance premiums to balance out.

Employers and employees agree that benefits are a key driver to both attract and retain talent. Approximately, 49% of people who work are offered some form of healthcare. That number is projected to grow every year. And high employee satisfaction with their employer-sponsored benefits contributes to job satisfaction. And yet today a significant number of employees say they do not fully understand the benefits that they have. They also want their benefits education to continue throughout the year. And they want their member communication options to reflect the changing way they interact with service providers since consumers have grown increasingly accustomed to digital self-service across all facets of their personal and professional lives.

Despite the numbers and the variety of benefits choices for employees, many employees wait until the last minute to enroll and then rarely, if ever, update their coverage again. The only time that employees tend to change their healthcare is when they change jobs...and then they go through the same confusing enrollment process again, perpetuating a cycle that negatively impacts their benefits coverage and influences their experience going forward.

In this three-part series of blog posts, we address why open enrollment is something that so many employees avoid until the last minute, finding it to be a confusing if not frustrating process. In this first post, we address the basics details of open enrollment and the differing benefits needed for different age groups, particularly people approaching 26 and 65. In the second post, we will discuss the information that is gathered during open enrollment and how it can be used to guide member care management. And in the third post, we will discuss the importance of employees being able to easily choose and change their Primary Care Physician and quickly find other in-network providers for better quality of care and savings.

Open Enrollment: Details

Open Enrollment is the only time that employees can sign up or renew their benefits plans with their employers (following their initial enrollment when they are hired) barring significant life events, including , birth, adoption, or divorce. While this process occurs the same time each year, employees’ expectations of a time-consuming, complex, and confusing process can result in them waiting until the last minute to review their options for the coming benefit year. And when it isn’t easy to understand what is new versus different, and how to align their current needs to all that is available, they may default to keeping the benefits they have. This can create missed opportunities to improve quality of care, wellness, along with cost savings for the member, their employer, and the health plan.

For many employees, understanding the enrollment process, timeline, and their applicable benefits options is difficult. From the plan packages and associated costs to specialized terms and insurance jargon, many people don’t know what’s being presented, and what is of value to them. And even more have no idea who to ask for help, as the clock ticks down to the open enrollment window closing.

Employee engagement leading up to, during, and beyond open enrollment is something that health plans should be actively maintaining and encouraging, using two-way conversations about overall health and wellness throughout the year.

A One Size Fits All Approach Leaves Many Behind

People’s needs are diverse and driven by various factors. They may be single, or have a partner or spouse. They may or may not have children. They may be interested in routine medical care, or may want to be sure their acupuncture visits are covered. Employees want to confirm for themselves whether or not their current doctor is in-network or not. Plus there are price considerations, with some people preferring lower out of pocket costs for copayments and deductibles, while others are looking to lower their health plan premium.

When employees are invited to a portal, and all are given the same list of available plans on coverage documents that are 20 pages long in a size 4 font with each medical procedure itemized, the burden is being placed on them to become benefits experts. Each employee wants to select their health plan with the confidence that what they purchased addresses what is most important to them. And since most (if not all) employees are not health plan experts, their experience today leads to confusion, frustration, and an inability to choose.

There are also two key moments when age is important. When a young adult turns 26, they are no longer eligible for dependent coverage on their parent’s plan. At the age of 65, employees are eligible to enroll in Medicare. In both instances, you have a member who may not even realize they are nearing a milestone where they are either required to move from their current plan or where they may be able to save money by shifting to benefits not previously available to them. In either scenario, their current health plan has one chance to retain that member by giving them months of lead time, including easy access to the information they need to make a fully-informed decision. Reminding these members of the upcoming open enrollment deadline helps them avoid any financial penalties, research their decisions ahead of time, and leave behind any of the associated fear and frustration.

Ushur Can Help

Ushur’s Customer Experience Automation™ platform can help.  With our ability to connect with members on the channel of their choice, be it SMS, email or chat, our Invisible App™ offers an easy, personalized, and secure process to guide employees through the open enrollment journey.  And open enrollment is just the beginning of the meaningful interactions that Ushur can automate between members and their health plan.  Periodic coverage questions can be easily asked and answered. Health Risk Assessments can be pushed out followed by reminders.  Tailored wellness programs can be offered, and members can easily add dependents, change their PCP or look for other in-network providers.

Assisting you to evolve from annual health insurance “set it and forget it” buying transaction, Ushur can enable health plans to form a partnership with each member—a partnership focused on their shared goals of a great member experience, excellent quality of care, improved health outcomes and increased cost savings. Intuitive Conversational AI removes the friction from those moments when the health plan reaches out to their member or the member reaches in. Come open enrollment next year, members will explicitly choose to renew, versus stay put by default.

Ushur offers a no-code solution allowing your teams to rapidly build automated communications to reach your members not only for planned, critical interactions but also when emergency outreach is needed. Even without having to download an app to their computer or phone, members can still experience the ease and speed of finding and providing information using virtually any data format. Ushur’s robust APIs integrate with your core systems to store and retrieve data so your members can access information about their benefits and coverage when and where they want it.

Learn more about how Ushur can transform your Open Enrollment to elevate member experience, drive quality of care and outcomes, and offer cost savings.

Culture. It’s one of the most often discussed yet least understood components of any successful organization. Our industry, in particular, is obsessed with the notion of culture—and not without cause. In the early days of a new company, when the greatest tool available is attitude, culture can be the difference between success and failure. It’s what allows small startups to punch way above their weight and make a name for themselves. It’s what allows them to add talent and build a team in an ultra-competitive hiring landscape.

Because it’s so critical to get right, founders spend a lot of time at the outset trying to decide what their culture will look like. But culture is not created simply through mantras and mission statements. It’s created through behavior. That, of course, starts with the founders. But early hiring is where a company’s culture really starts to grow and take shape.

At Ushur, we refer to ours as a “team-first” culture—that is, to say, the team came first. We built our company culture through a careful, strategic early hiring process. In my experience, there are five keys to building a great company culture at the outset:

1. Start with an honest self-assessment.

Who are you? What kind of culture and environment will allow you to thrive? Ultimately, that’s what’s most important. You’re employee number one, and the success of the company is largely dependent on your output. Hire other people who are culture builders and will add to the melting pot. Personally, I lead from the heart more often than not. I use data to make decisions, but in the absence of data, I rely on my experience, my instincts, and my overarching philosophy of kindness. When we began to build the team at Ushur, we looked for people with a similar outlook and attitude. That has become the foundation for our company culture.

2. Hire people with extraordinary intent rather than people with extraordinary skills.

Simply hiring the people who look best on paper is a surefire path to cultural confusion. I don’t consider myself to be the most talented person in the room, but I know I can match anyone’s work ethic. In my experience, people who truly want to achieve a goal typically find a way. A lack of talent may sometimes stand in the way, but a lack of effort will most definitely doom you from the start.

3. Identify growth potential

A person doesn’t need to know everything there is to know about a job before they’re hired, as long as they’re motivated to learn. Employees who can be coached and elevated are indispensably valuable to a company’s culture. Leaders created from within will always have a better finger on the pulse than outside hires. Early generalist hires can become specialists along the way, though where the skillset gap is significant or the charter needs focus, bringing in specialists can make sense.

4. Look for people with a chip on their shoulder.

Hunger, ambition, and a sense of pride aren’t qualities that can be learned. They’re inherent. They’re also hard to fake. As a founder, you should meet with anyone and every one your company hires. At Ushur, my co-founder and I were personally involved in each of our first 50 hires. Those face-to-face interactions make it exponentially easier to identify the intangible qualities that make a great cultural and organizational fit.

5. When the time comes, get out of the way.

The ultimate purpose of culture is to instill two-way trust — trust from your employees that they’ll have the opportunity to do their best work, mirrored by your trust in their ability to do the job. This can be difficult because it requires a degree of relinquished control. The desire to do it all is natural, particularly for product-led founders, but learning to rely on others is key.

The reality of startup life is that employees are asked to accomplish the same things they would at a large company with a fraction of the resources. That resource gap is made up for through creativity, hard work, and sheer will to learn to overcome the odds. To thrive within a startup takes a certain type of person with specific motivations and qualities that match. Ultimately, these are the people who will create, shape, and define your company’s culture. Choose them with care.

The promise of the new era of digital communications lies in reducing customers' queries, increasing their satisfaction, and all before they ask. In fact, when customers reach out to a company, they expect a customized and responsive experience that answers their questions with minimal effort. When customers are unable to get timely and relevant outcomes, their satisfaction drops. Ushur’s Silent Listener makes sure no customer conversation gets left behind.

The often disliked, static Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems of the past are making way for new, more effective, and more customer-centric ways of relaying information to inquiring customers. As more customers move towards quicker interaction, they are using self-service avenues to contact companies.

In many cases, the best way to deliver a satisfactory customer experience is by preemptively automating outbound notifications via SMS. Ushur customers have reduced inbound calls more than 30% and, in the process, improved CSAT by proactively sending status updates on matters in progress, like a claim. This automation of customer engagement addresses the high-volume of inbound calls and emails that deluge your employees and increase customer wait times. Proactivity is not difficult to introduce and it’s a clear win-win for you and your customers.

The often disliked, static Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems of the past are making easy for new, more effective and more customer-centric ways of relaying information to inquiring customers.

Name

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Unfortunately, when customer questions aren’t straightforward, traditional solutions tend to be rigid and frustrate customer communication by either using one-way emails; like the standard [email protected], or an unmonitored texting address that forces the customer into a black hole of transferred calls.

If a customer has a question, a complaint, or even a compliment, it’s only reasonable that they will want to communicate that idea by simply replying to the most recent notification that they received from their carrier. No matter if their reply is a quick, “Thanks!” or something where you need to actually take action – your automation platform has to make sure you always know what the customer said and rapidly route for that response for the right next step.

Ushur enables you to proactively reach out to a customer via a specific channel like SMS. Even when it’s a notification for which you aren’t expecting a response, our Customer Experience Automation™ platform allows the customer to respond through their channel of choice, and ensures you capture the feedback. For example, you may proactively reach out via text asking for missing information only to receive a response asking, “Why do you need this?" Thanks to Ushur’s ability to understand intent in text, we capture that response and can reach back to them in the channel of their choice; either with another text with further directions or an email or even a call.

Any Insurance Carrier Notification Could Be the Start of a Customer Conversation

A notification can, and often is, only the beginning of an omni-channel customer conversation. In addition, the assumption that proactive notifications wholly eliminate the need for the human touch is inaccurate and misleading. Instead, it’s reasonable to ask how and when that dialogue should be automated as compared to when it should be diverted to an employee.

To refine the automation process, anticipate your customer’s questions through proactive communication. Ushur has incorporated Conversational AI and advanced machine learning (ML) into its workflow automation capabilities. ML lets Ushur workflows understand each customer conversation, whether that is a voice call with an employee or a text, WhatsApp chat or email message. Additionally, Ushur's Silent Listener capability ensures a carrier will never leave a customer conversation behind.

From Walk to Jog to Run

As with any transformation, particularly a digital one, Ushur encourages an interactive approach that leads to increased functionality over time.

Walk

At the first stage of the process, Ushur’s Silent Listener will be actively waiting for any customer replies using our platform. If a customer reply has no automated response, Ushur triggers a friendly acknowledgement. The acknowledgement is something along the lines of “Thank you! We will review your question.”

Behind the scenes, with the assistance of Ushur’s no-code builder, you can automate a simple service recovery process to escalate each customer reply to the right team in a timely and effective manner. Customer responses can then be reviewed and addressed by the appropriate person. And all of the customer interactions are clearly visible to your teams, enabling them to take the best action.

Jog

At this second stage, you begin tapping into the power of Ushur’s proprietary AI capabilities. First, Ushur’s platform uses sentiment analysis to categorize customer responses. At that point, the responses are intuitively categorized into two groups; one group that requires an action from a representative and one group that requires no reply other than a simple thank you message.

Then, each automated acknowledgement can be appropriately worded and routed. Customer responses that need action are sent to the appropriate individual or department to be reviewed and addressed. Simple responses are sent to the customer promptly.

Run

In this final and most robust stage, you unleash the full power of Ushur’s Conversational AI and ML capabilities. The process is similar, except that Ushur’s platform now further refines the customer response classifications and then devises meaningful, automated responses using SMS or email. For example, regardless of the context of the original notification you sent, that began this conversation,

• Does a customer have a new claim to report?
• Do they need to request a change to their policy?
• Do they want to enroll in direct deposit to pay their bill?

Ushur’s reply via SMS or email then guides them through a tailored customer experience using the secure Invisible App™ and facilitates a successful outcome from that interaction, or what we call a Micro-Engagement™.

Engage Your Customers Where They Are

Engage with your customers where they want to speak to you instead of opening unmonitored channels that lead to customer disappointment and frustration. Let Ushur's Silent Listener capability intuitively and automatically process those messages and ensure each one is resolved for the best customer experience. Ushur’s platform understands the customer responses it receives. The analytics and reporting capabilities within our platform provide visibility and reveal new areas of automation to provide customer value.

You can exceed your customers expectations by not only answering their questions before they are asked, but including automating the understanding of their replies, as part of your digital transformation. By leveraging Ushur your customer experience will improve, you will increase CSAT, and grow your customer loyalty. All the while, you will decrease your inbound volume and improve your operational efficiency. Finally, the deflection of calls to an intuitive, conversational AI solution, strengthens your employee engagement and frees your workforce to delight the customer at multiple levels.

Automation and AI might be the two hottest technologies in the world right now. With adoption comes conversation, and lots of it. Our space is noisy, filled to the brim with intellectuality, excitement, hope, and big ideas. It can be challenging to stand out amongst the crowd. Predictably, the question founders and CEOs in our industry hear most often is, “How are you different?”

For many organizations, their differentiation is rooted in technology. Ours is rooted in the outcomes we intend to create. What’s truly unique about Ushur is our approach, and that begins with our origin story.

Ushur wasn’t the brainchild of PhD. technologists sequestered around a conference table, discussing the best ways to solve problems that our industry, in large part, creates. We saw end-users navigating through numerous portals, apps, and phone menus to get serviced. And we visualized a better experience that involved no friction for the end-customer - one that requires no apps to download nor portals to log into.

Ushur’s beginnings are as organic as they come, the indirect result of one of my favorite and longest-running personal hobbies. As a kid growing up in India, I loved music. I was a singer, trained in the South Indian style, and performed all throughout my formative years. At the same time, I became fascinated by the concept of America. I dreamt of pursuing higher education in the United States, but I came from a modest family and the possibility was simply out of the question. Instead, I went to university near home and eventually made my way stateside as a tech consultant.

Once I’d settled in, I sought out music once again. I decided to fulfill a lifelong dream by learning to play guitar, and through those lessons was introduced to a community of other musicians. One invited me and my family to a show at a fairly large venue. I showed up with a few unexpected extra guests in tow, my tickets presumably at will call, with no idea where to go. One of many ushers working the event clocked our confused faces, walked up to us, and proceeded to take care of literally everything — extra tickets, directions to our seats, bathroom requests, coat check, you name it. What had started out as a slightly stressful social situation had turned into one of the smoothest and most pleasant customer experiences of my life. That was the moment of Ushur’s conception.

Small but meaningful transactions like these, that enhance an experience or an outing or a night with your family, are something I think we miss at a societal level. They could almost be considered “20th-century” amenities. The digital world simply holds too much promise to ignore, and so a disproportionate amount of our innovative efforts are poured into that realm. The process of replacing personal interactions with early iterations of automation was never going to be silky smooth, and it hasn’t been. But it does need to get better. We need intelligent automation.

How did the modern customer evolve?

There has been much discussion amongst business leaders today about digital transformation and the fourth industrial revolution, and for good reason. It’s happening now, we are experiencing it firsthand and, in many cases, driving it with our actions. But from a customer perspective, I think the history of human commerce can be more accurately broken down into three distinct eras — personal production, mass production, and mass personalization.

Personal production represents most of humanity’s time on earth. Goods and services were highly localized, highly personalized, and produced on a small scale. Distribution was limited to walking or riding distance in most cases, and consumer expectations were dictated by reality. Then, the Industrial Revolution changed how we think about production, distribution, and scale forever. For the first time, humanity was not confined by what a human could produce, and there were almost no limitations on where goods could be shipped. In this second era, personalization went by the wayside and mass production ruled the day. It didn’t bother anyone that they all owned the same car in the same color — that wasn’t the value proposition. The value proposition was personal freedom at an attainable price.

Today, we are situated somewhat uncomfortably in that third era. These are uncharted waters — a consumer base that expects and demands highly personalized experiences, but at a global scale. We have more information about the ways people behave than ever before, and the promise that information holds informs — perhaps even inflates — our expectations. But the reality is, most existing implementations of automation and AI simply aren’t as sophisticated as the consumer.

An example I use often is the self-checkout at grocery stores. We’ve all had the experience of getting into self-checkout with a handful of items, certain it’s a better alternative to waiting in a long check stand line, only to find that a barcode doesn’t scan, or the bagging area is overly sensitive, or that we can’t find an item in the system. Maybe we’re buying wine or beer, and have to wait for an employee to come to check our ID. Suddenly, it’s taking longer than the normal line. This experience frustrates people, because it’s a half measure that makes their lives more complex instead of simpler. But that simply doesn’t work, because the core value proposition is simplicity. Most current implementations of automation are just not ready for prime time, and customers know that the moment they start to engage.

To fulfill its true promise, automation has to provide an experiences customers already largely expect.

The future is coming, there’s no need to rush it.

Apple disrupted the music industry with iTunes and the iPod, which enabled consumers to carry all of their music on the go in a pocket-sized device. Then, they combined an iPod, an internet surfing device, and a phone into a single device called the iPhone. Imagine if Apple had not created iTunes or the iPod prior to launching the iPhone. Do you think the iPhone would have been so immediately successful?

Today, most customer engagement solutions are in the pre-iTunes phase. Just like there were phones with QWERTY keyboards that you were stuck with - irrespective of whether you were browsing or you were typing an email. Enterprises today are stuck having to choose between big clunky AI solutions and legacy solutions for automating business processes. Or, they have to work with a standalone customer experience stack. We saw a need to leapfrog this legacy setup by combining knowledge work automation, AI, and Cx in one platform. We devised a “No-Code” approach to orchestrating the entire customer experience to make it as easy as using an iPhone.

Consumers drive the adoption of technology, not the other way around. Many modern organizations seem to have forgotten that fact. Too many businesses today have attempted to shoehorn early automation into the middle of their most critical function — customer engagement. This is destined to create a negative relationship between consumers and the market. We can’t ask customers to suffer through a worse experience than they’re used to while we work on a better one than they’re used to. At least, not if we hope to keep them around.

Early versions of anything are hard to create, and it takes brave people to act as the tip of the spear. But the early days of AI and automation are over. Those who were first to the table have already finished off the appetizers. The focus of innovators and creators today should be on the main course — creating an experience that is exponentially better, not just different. Again, Apple’s iPod comes to mind. It came out shortly after mini disc players, a technology that was different from CDs, sure, but not much better. How many people do you know who still own a mini-disc player, or ever even bought one? Consumers either lose faith in technologies that are rushed to market without enough forethought about the experience they provide, or they simply ignore them.

This dynamic is unfolding in front of our eyes today, in the world of social media. That industry has entered phase “2.0” of its existence, and the companies that are succeeding today look quite different than those that broke initial ground. The first wave of social media platforms — Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter — provided a consumer experience that said, “Share your whole life here.” Not much consideration was given to how profoundly this would change the way we exchange and digest information. New environments were created, arguably without enough critical thought. Over time, these platforms have morphed into breeding grounds for misinformation, organizational agendas, and negative interactions. Adoption among young consumers has dropped off a cliff. Meanwhile, platforms that offer consumers a place to show a smaller slice of their lives, like Instagram and TikTok, have thrived. Strategy tends to outcompete speed in the long run.

When we founded Ushur, our approach was meticulous. We didn’t take any institutional funding for the first few years of our existence. We wanted to optimize for building the right product for the right customer base, to create an unfair advantage for our clients and a sticky business for us. It’s how we measure success at every stage.

Today, we’re still in the bottom of the first inning. We’ve established the outcomes we want to achieve, and use that as a roadmap for the technology to follow. We have a clear vision for what to offer the end-customer, and how the experience needs to make them feel. We hide all the complexity of powerful technologies like AI and Intelligent Automation under the hood. We know that without incorporating the elements of human touch that first created commerce, we can’t hope to be its future. And that, I think, is what makes us different.

In 2018, the property and casualty industry was paid $1.6 trillion dollars in premiums. In 2020, during the heart of the pandemic accompanied by multiple environmental disasters like wildfires and flooding, insurance carriers were slammed with thousands of claims. And each progressive year promises more P&C insurance claims as environmental conditions worsen and newer risks grow, like cybersecurity. And yet, when customers are going through the trauma of these disasters, working on rebuilding their lives, the one thing that keeps them with their carrier is their satisfaction with the service.

Unlike other industries where innovation and technology have significantly transformed the way they do business, P&C has remained the same, much to their disadvantage, especially when it comes to the growing expectations of their customer base. Customers want easy-to-use, instant information and access to their carrier on platforms that are as mobile as they are. And during times of crisis, their expectations increase incrementally.

Thankfully, advances in Customer Experience Automation™ have helped ease the pressure on insurance carriers by enabling them to avoid delays in assisting customers in crisis; despite the increase in volume. P&C carriers are now switching to Ushur’s AI-powered automation platform to transform the entire customer journey and to give consumers the modern digital experience they crave to reach resolutions more quickly.

Prioritizing Customer Experience

Customer insurance loyalty is no longer guaranteed, particularly in a digital age when marketing and information is at every business owner’s and consumer’s fingertips. The insurance landscape is incredibly competitive. With so many options vying for a customer’s attention, consumers can find it difficult to decide. And while price is likely the reason for some to switch insurance companies, there is one key factor that is even more influential: customer service.

The rapid technological advances brought on by intelligent automation are increasing consumers' digital expectations. Generation C - the Connected Generation - is growing. Customers of all ages expect insurance carriers to provide them with guidance about their insurance products and services through digital channels. Millennial consumers were born into a world with a digital foundation, this expanding consumer segment wants to feel they have a personal and direct relationship with their insurance carrier. According to AARP, smartphone adoption by more mature customers exceeds 80%. After all, seniors also had to pivot overnight with the lockdown to getting their groceries delivered and prescriptions filled online. The insurance customer of today expects digital self-service and will look elsewhere if it isn’t readily available.

The immediate implications are clear for insurance carriers. By identifying and integrating Customer Experience Automation™ you can dramatically elevate the experience for policyholders, agents, brokers, claimants, and even providers. Ushur’s Intelligent automation has proven key for carriers to drive customer engagement rates up to 85%, cut processing times from weeks to hours, deliver 5x return on investment, power up NPS scores by 20%, raise operational efficiency, increase transparency into quote, policy, billing, and claims processing. All improvements that influence your customer’s satisfaction and in turn, retention.

Five Key Essentials in Customer Experience Automation™

By embracing Customer Experience Automation™, insurance carriers can personalize the customer journey across all P&C lines of business. The evolution of AI and computational automation is now overturning the traditional assumptions made about AI capabilities, to redefine the “routine” and “non-routine” in exciting new ways.

Here’s how:

1. Simplicity. Prior to AI-powered automation, filing a claim was viewed as a frustrating experience from the consumer’s point-of-view. However, with Customer Experience Automation™ this process is simple and accessible as soon as the claim begins. Quote submissions received via email do not get stalled in a manual validation process and data entry cycle. Billing and payments are improved through reminders and easy EFT enrollment.
2. Security. In respect to compliance, Ushur’s automated workflow is GDPR and CCPA compliant while seamlessly moving customer information forward. Ushur’s intelligent automation engine does this without involving people for manual processing, thereby giving your customers the benefit of faster resolution times and the advantage of using their preferred digital channels.
3. White label “Invisible App™.” Ushur’s one-of-a-kind Invisible App™ provides a secure and easy app-like user experience without the carrier cost of creating and maintaining mobile apps. It eliminates the customer overhead of installing an app before they can engage their carrier, such as to report a new claim. Invisible App™ can be seamlessly customized to your company’s preferences to deliver a consistent brand experience for all your customer needs. Invisible App™ can update customers instantly, elicit higher completion rates for missing information, and keep claims and other interactions moving forward in real-time. Build it once and deliver the same intuitive customer experience across any channel.
4. Conversational AI. Unlike standard FAQ chatbots, Ushur uses Conversation AI technology to understand your customer’s situation and provide real-time advice and resolution. The net result is the reduction in time for customers to get their thoughts articulated and have the process continue without delay or frustration. This unique technology can suggest next steps, and accurately guide the customer in stressful situations.
   Accuracy and speed by understanding images. Ushur’s unique optical character recognition (OCR) technology coupled with computer vision and deep learning can recognize and extract key details from photographs and documents. Ushur can reduce customer effort by reading, extracting and interfacing data, making sure the information is quickly transferred and not stuck in bottlenecks of manual processes.

Speed and Capability on the Ushur platform

The distinctive characteristics of Ushur’s AI-engine makes it easy to empower the full P&C lifecycle with speed and capability, spanning marketing, quote, policy, billing, and claims.

Carriers can enrich:

• Customer service delivery
• Grow their ROI
• Integrate essential security
• Speed up marketing outreach, processing quote submissions, policy transactions, billing activities and claims handling in real-time

Key Areas AI Technology Relates to Customer Inquiries

It’s time to debunk the myths of transforming P&C insurance. To fully understand what Ushur can do is to understand how Ushur’s AI technology can relate to customer inquiries in key areas.

Carriers can now:

• Outpace customer expectations by revolutionizing the customer, agent, broker, claimant and provider journey though Micro-Engagements™
• Anticipate high-volume customer inquiries with automated proactive outreach
• Reduce inefficiency in quotes, policies, billing, and claims through digital self-service enhanced with machine learning
• Provide customers, prospects, brokers and agents access to new products along with pricing awareness
• Offer a consistent customer experience by meeting the needs of customers through their preferred channel (online, voice, email, text, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc.), while future-proofing your investments in communications technology

Advancing the Post-Pandemic Customer Experience

The recent global pandemic has inspired business leaders in P&C insurance to reinvent the way they work with customers in crisis in order to retain their loyalty, highlighting the need to adopt innovation and automation for all areas of customer engagement in the post-pandemic world. And in a world where customers demand the utmost from their insurance carriers, Ushur prepares P&C for any conditions.

At Ushur, we know the importance of customer service, data, speed, and bias-free decisions. Enable and inspire your people to do more for their customers with intelligent automation designed for the next generation of customers’ digital experiences.

^[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/state-of-property-and-casualty-insurance-2020

^[2] Ibid

^[3] https://www.iii.org/sites/default/files/docs/pdf/insurance_factbook_2020.pdf

Insurance is a service industry, and the customer’s claim experience can drive their decision to renew or change carriers, including for workers’ compensation. The customer is entrusting their insurance carrier to both take care of their injured employee and protect their company from financial harm. The challenge is that each worker’s compensation claim is both unique and multi-dimensional. A claims adjuster can sometimes feel like they are expected to be a juggler or even a magician to always keep all the goals in view.

Service is the foundation of the claim process. Insurance carriers have core services to provide a consistent brand experience to all. But some customers may purchase additional special services, tailored to their unique claims handling needs. When a colleague recently asked me what’s most important to successfully manage a WC claim, some self-reflection was in order since the answer “Everything!” wasn’t all that helpful.

Compliance is both paramount and complicated when it comes to WC claims. Workers’ compensation in the United States is governed by state-specific regulations that vary across a myriad of dimensions, from the timing of the first indemnity benefit payment to injured worker communication. I won’t even try to describe the variability and quantity of WC forms each different state requires.

This blog post was originally published in the July 2nd, 2021 edition of P&C 360

Insurance is a service industry, and the customer’s claim experience can drive their decision to renew or change carriers, including for workers’ compensation. The customer is entrusting their insurance carrier to both take care of their injured employee and protect their company from financial harm. The challenge is that each worker’s compensation claim is both unique and multi-dimensional. A claims adjuster can sometimes feel like they are expected to be a juggler or even a magician to always keep all the goals in view.

Service is the foundation of the claim process. Insurance carriers have core services to provide a consistent brand experience to all. But some customers may purchase additional special services, tailored to their unique claims handling needs. When a colleague recently asked me what’s most important to successfully manage a WC claim, some self-reflection was in order since the answer “Everything!” wasn’t all that helpful.

Expense management is important for WC claims handling. Back in my day, we focused more on the indemnity expense versus medical spending, as we worked tirelessly to guide the injured employee to return to work. Medical expenses are now front and center with cost increases outpacing inflation. Litigation also contributes to WC claim expenses and does so not only when a dispute arises. When an injured worker obtains legal representation, the WC claims adjuster is barred from any direct communication and can no longer work with them on their return-to-work plan. Litigated WC claims cost 4 times more and can take twice as long to resolve with almost triple the number of lost time days.

A WC claims adjuster is relentlessly focused on achieving the best possible outcome from a service, compliance, and expense management perspective – for the customer (the employer) and for their injured employee. When a work accident occurs, the claims adjuster becomes the glue that keeps the injured worker and their manager focused on a common objective - for the employee to return to work both as quickly and safely as possible. The WC claims adjuster must be both compassionate and disciplined. They must make sure every compliance “i” is dotted, and every service “t” is crossed, keeping the channels of communication open with both the injured employee and their manager.

Since I joined Ushur last year, I have shared some of my own WC claim adjuster experiences with my colleagues and explained how I can empathize with our customers. In speaking with our customers, despite the passage of time and all that has changed in the world and industry, it’s clear the goals and experiences of a WC claims adjuster remain virtually the same. When one of our customers shared their pre-Ushur challenge of making 6 outbound phone calls to an employee, taking up to 3 weeks to make a connection for a return-to-work update, I thought to myself, “That was me – more than 30 years ago!” Except back in my day, there wasn’t any email or SMS, not to mention voicemail. I could send a letter, but that would take too long to make that first and immediate connection with an injured employee. So, I would get in my car and show up, unannounced, at their home. Regardless of my best of intentions, that could feel invasive and not conducive to getting a new relationship off to a great start. The last thing I wanted to do was trigger mistrust, not to mention make them feel they needed to retain an attorney. Distrust is the leading reason why an injured employee retains an attorney. For comparison, our customer now uses Ushur to reach out for disability updates using SMS and gets the necessary information on average within an hour, also reducing their inbound calls by 35%. That translates to significant operational efficiency, along with expense management and service gains, with claim overpayments avoided. And the injured employees signaled their satisfaction both by opting-in and providing an 85% CSAT response.

Today, the WC claims adjuster continues to wear many hats. Customers expect and trust their carrier to take the best care of their injured employees and their company. The claims adjuster is entrusted and expected to be sure the injured employee has access to the pertinent and best resources. The adjuster is acting on behalf of, if not as an extension, of the employer. When done well, the injured worker feels that connection through responsiveness and empathy. Not only is the WC claims adjuster an advocate of the employer with the injured employee, but they are also an advocate of the employee with their employer. The customer experiences the value of that advocacy from being continuously informed all along the way.

The quality of the WC claim experience influences achieving the earliest and safest return to work possible. The claim journey is a series of many critical and often predictable interactions, beginning with the report of the new claim. Some WC first reports of injury arrive as email attachments – either sent via email or being directed to an inbox through a fax server or being submitted by an agent’s system. At some point, assigning more employees to monitor those email boxes hits the law of diminishing returns. And that just covers the first step of identifying the new claim report. There is still review and data entry to get each new claim into the claim system and into the hands of the adjuster. Tick tock – the worried injured employee has no idea what to do, and the customer is counting on their carrier to begin handling the claim immediately.

A carrier can never move too quickly to get the employer’s report of a new injury into the claim system, and, in turn, into the hands of a claims adjuster and that’s not because of compliance. While that first pay due date is always important, what’s critical for a successful claim outcome is to reach out to the injured worker immediately to let them know their injury has been reported. There’s an injured employee out there, not only hurting but feeling like their world has been turned inside out. They may not understand who pays their medical bills, and they are even less likely to know the steps that need to be followed before indemnity benefits will be paid. Consider that they may not even know who the WC insurance company is, not to mention how to reach them, let alone when payments will begin and how they are calculated. I often say that no one understands the claims process except a claims professional.

if I were the injured employee, my anxiety level would drop substantially if, as soon as my manager reported my injury, I received an SMS from the insurance carrier saying, “We’re here; we’ve got you.” A spark of trust would emerge, through the transparency of the WC carrier explaining the claim process, timeline, and benefits calculation formula to me in layperson’s terms. My confidence in a wholly unfamiliar carrier (and my employer who selected them) would be improved with being offered access to resources, like a medical provider network or telemedicine provider. I would appreciate the speed and ease of e-signing a medical authorization. And I would feel the empathy of having the option to schedule a call with my claims adjuster. The carrier could wrap up their first proactive outreach with being sure I understand what happens next and when. And the carrier would only be a hashtag away for any questions I might have in the interim.

Through proactive digital outreach, instead of my manual outbound phone calls and impromptu house visits, an automated 2-way conversation makes that invaluable and immediate connection with the injured employee on their schedule. The carrier can provide the peace of mind that gets the new relationship with the WC claims adjuster off to a strong start.

The speed of interactions with the customer matters, too. From providing an automated acknowledgment of the new claim receipt to letting them know their injured employee has been contacted, it’s another moment to say, “We got this – you and your employee are in great hands.” A critical, predictable and automatable interaction for a WC claim is requesting the wage statement, and we can insert speed into this interaction. It can take time for the employer to compile a year of earning details, and without it, benefits are initially based on a wage estimate that excludes overtime pay. Any instance when you can avoid paying WC benefits based on an estimated average weekly wage, the better. I remember too many frustrated injured worker calls when I could hear doubt in their voice that their benefit rate would ever be corrected, let alone soon.

There are other key stakeholders with critical and predictable communications that are high-value candidates for automation to ensure they always happen as quickly and efficiently as possible. This could include sending an email to the treating physician, attaching the earlier e-signed medical authorization to obtain the ever-important confirmation of disability and any return-to-work target date.

By now you may be thinking about the lost time claims which unfortunately have an extended disability period. Critical, predictable and automatable proactive outreach opportunities include requesting updates from the employee on the timing of their next office visit, requesting a current office visit report from the doctor, and passing along any return-to-work timing to the employer.

We consistently discover that when a carrier examines the highest driver of inbound inquiries, claim status requests are at, or are near, the top. These inquiries can arrive via phone or email with the same request occasionally being submitted multiple times through different channels. As I mentioned earlier, once one of our customers began sending out regular proactive claim status updates via SMS, they saw their inbound call volume drop by 35% while their customer satisfaction level rose to 85%. Remember the regulatory compliance and service agreements that I mentioned earlier? Those too could include high-value interactions to automate – after all, they are critical and predictable.

With all of these opportunities to automate critical and predictable WC claim interactions, this is not about eliminating the person-to-person interactions that will always be needed and are highly valued. Rather, it’s about meeting the growing expectations of people of all generations, to provide the option of digital self-service. And with research showing that almost 2/3 of people will pick self-service first, automation creates capacity for claims adjusters to be more available for those interactions where the human touch is preferred and needed. Do not underestimate the value that the speed that automated 2-way communication enables. Think about the value in a service experience for customers and their employees when it takes minutes versus days to triage and process inbound email, and seconds to make that vital first injured worker connection.

And imagine the positive impact on the daily experience of your WC claims adjusters – who are no longer making those 6 outbound phone calls – or perhaps showing up at someone’s home, unannounced.

When people think of automation, and in particular the ROI of automation, they typically think that the return part of that equation is driven primarily by savings realized by cutting costs or faster processing times.

But really there is so much more. Cutting costs is only part of the story.

What people often miss when evaluating automation is its ability to drive customer loyalty. And what is overlooked completely is its impact on employee engagement. The true ROI of automation lies in creating an environment where employees are enabled to think outside the box to better meet customers’ wants and needs. What Customer Experience Automation™ truly delivers is satisfied customers who are more likely to remain loyal and employees who are more satisfied with their job and, therefore, less likely to leave.

Early in my career, I had the opportunity to manage a 250-seat contact center for a big telecom company. We had all the modern tools, including a brand new IVR and phone system, and the best trained professionals for our team.

But we still had a big problem. Despite paying very competitive hourly wages, we had high (voluntary) employee turnover.

44% to be precise.

Out of 250 agents, 110 chose to leave within a year.

We recruited terrific people who genuinely wanted to help our customers. But in exit-interview after exit-interview, we heard the same reasons for leaving; high call volume and rote, routine call types that led to frustrated customers and exasperated staff.

What if?

It had me wondering: what if organizations could provide ways to address customer issues and questions (both complex and simple) easily, even proactively?

What if we could reserve the interactions between front-line staff and customers to focus on high-value and truly service-oriented work? What if we could let our employees support customers and just automate the rest?

Fast forward to the present where I currently serve as VP of Product and Operations at Ushur, offering automation solutions that reduce costs and speed up processes but, more importantly, also improve customer and employee experiences. And what I’ve seen in practice is that the employee experience reflects and affects your customer experience.

Think about automation differently.

When people think of automation in organizations, they often think it only applies to back-office work. Technologies like robotic processing automation (RPA) are commonly used in the accounting or finance departments to simplify the automated copy/paste of routine tasks. Those tasks could be anything: like processing invoice information, such as payee and amount, to establishing due date and moving into a separate payment system. However, these are just the better-known use cases and benefits. They are not the only ones.

Actually, the ROI of intelligent automation, which goes way beyond RPA’s capabilities, is not just doing administrative work faster. With Customer Experience Automation™, you are delighting your customer because you meet their needs faster and you free up your people so that they aren’t burdened with the routine work that can be automated effectively.

Given my background in running contact centers, I not only value the ability to automate work that happens within the walls of big companies, but also the ability to automate the interaction between enterprises and their customers. I like to tell people that at Ushur we automate the communication between our customers and their customers. This is the next frontier for enterprises which can unlock huge value.

Customer Experience Automation™ (CXA) isn’t just leveraging technology for technology’s sake. It’s not just inserting technology into back office processes. CXA leverages technology to create better experiences for your employees, promote their day-to-day work, and as a result, it creates better experiences for your customers. Employees have less repetitive work, are able to get things done faster, and can convey their job satisfaction by delighting your customers.

Service-Oriented Work

Some people are passionate about providing the best customer service T, and by minimizing their routine work, they don’t have to compromise on their passions. While any large organization faces problems scaling their processes to address claims, sales, or customer service issues, automation means the people you choose for service-oriented work aren’t the ones who need to struggle. As a consequence, you don’t have to compromise in choosing your talent from the broader talent pool. You can eliminate churn caused by the dissatisfaction of employees’ time being consumed by repetitive and manual tasks. You can encourage service-oriented employees to do what they do best. You can boost end-to-end satisfaction for all parties.

By automating basic calls for information, you give your employees time to focus on the personal touch of working with customers who need the time and attention. When as much as 42% of your calls are automated, your employee experience improves. And satisfied, enabled employees provide excellent customer care.

The Human Touch, A Success Story

Let’s face it, automating repetitive processes and straightforward tasks frees valuable employees from manual roles. It gives the people who know the most about your product or service an opportunity to connect meaningfully with your customer.

Of course, this doesn’t mean removing that human touch from the process. Just the opposite-- automation lets you build and retain a better, more fulfilled talent force. It gives your people a chance to shine with the customer without bogging them down.2

One customer we worked with started using automation in their sales department with great results, and yet their best results happened when they automated their information gathering process for disability claims.

Originally, they were calling members over and over trying to get information. As the case study describes, by automating the process, not only was the client able to get the information they needed in minutes instead of days or weeks, but their customers also responded positively and requested more of the same type of automation in different areas of information gathering.

And the smaller percentage of customers who needed to speak to an actual human were able to receive the time and attention to answer their questions and improve their customer experience, too.

Employee satisfaction

Dissatisfied, unhappy employees are more likely to leave. As I mentioned before, 44% of our call center employees left because of high call volumes and routine work that took away from their ability to help customers.

I can say without a doubt from personal experience, automation can help reduce these types of tasks and studies show that when you reduce these tasks, employee satisfaction grows.

Customer engagement automation decreases the repetitive work for front line employees and frees them to focus on more complex activities and person-to-person interactions.³ When your employees feel like they are working towards a higher purpose, they are more satisfied.⁴ And according to The Smart Guide to Conversational AI for Insurers, employees who spend more time solving meaningful problems for customers and less time completing routine tasks are happier employees.

According to a McKinsey study, 60% of employees who are extremely satisfied with their job and company intend to remain at their job.5 And those are the employees who are experienced and happy to delight customers with their service and care.

Customer experiences for your front-line employees aren’t going to get simpler. But retaining a workforce that is not only knowledgeable but also happy to be there will only please your customers and give your company a better reputation.

1. https://www.mckinsey.com/pe/~/media/McKinsey/Business-20Functions/Operations/Our-20Insights/Boosting-20contact-20center-20performance-20through-20employee-20engagement/Boosting-contact-center-performance-through-employee-engagement.ashx
2. https://www.quadient.com/blog/why-insurance-companies-need-mind-gaps-when-it-comes-customer-experience
3. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/making-work-meaningful-a-leaders-guide
4. https://www.mckinsey.com/pe/~/media/McKinsey/Business-20Functions/Operations/Our-20Insights/Boosting-20contact-20center-20performance-20through-20employee-20engagement/Boosting-contact-center-performance-through-employee-engagement.ashx

The digital transformation of P&C insurance is crucial for its success in a world where customers are increasingly looking to their mobile, digital devices for products and services that meet their needs. Between the large numbers of new technologies that are being created and used daily and the growing number of new customers who unconsciously use these technologies in their daily lives, P&C insurance digital capabilities are growing in importance and viability.  Anyone who doubts the competitive pressure just needs to look at the pace of new insurtechs and other solution providers jumping into the race.

New technologies

New technologies that can reach customers both where they work and live, whether it’s for business or personal interactions, are increasing customer ease of use and experience. The retail world has picked up on this technology and is reaping the benefits as many industry experts talk about “the Amazon effect” on insurance customer expectations. Unfortunately, many P&C insurance companies are still struggling to incorporate these digital solutions and introduce them in a rapid and scalable way.

Digital capabilities like intelligent automation increases cost effectiveness, facilitates company growth and improves customer experience. P&C digital transformation is essential for established carriers to remain relevant in an ever-changing environment of customer expectations. New competitors are also changing the P&C industry as adjacent areas, like auto manufacturers, are beginning to sell insurance too.

New type of customers

Customers between the ages of 18 to 35 are changing the way business is carried out. Online shopping experiences have changed customer expectations. They want their products, their services and their communications to be instant, self-serviced and personalized. With the prevalence of digital devices, customers are used to receiving near instant responses to their inquiries. They are accustomed to making choices and finding information independently, on a screen of their choice and often only seek human intervention when there is no other option. Additionally, they look for products and services that meet their specific needs. The traditional methods of requesting insurance services are no longer enough.

In addition, older established customers’ practices of querying an agent for information are also altering to reflect their use of digital devices. Experiences ordering groceries and restaurant food online and refilling prescriptions from their phones have changed the way this demographic interacts with technology. The speed and efficiency of working on a digital platform is modifying their behavior to become more digitally savvy. Without digital transformation of your P&C insurance journey, your ability to meet your customers’ needs will be too slow and cumbersome to be effective.

What does digital transformation look like for P&C insurance?

P&C insurance technology trends are looking towards two vital areas: Telematics-driven Usage-based Insurance (UBI), and Conversational AI. Both have a strong presence in today’s digital environment but are underrepresented and underused in P&C insurance. But more importantly, both of these technologies enable insurance companies to customize and communicate with a growing number of customers in a digital era.

These two technologies are no longer considered optional within the customer experience. They are required to create a robust, self-served, and immediate positive encounter for current and prospective customers. Even if a customer won’t opt in to UBI, not offering it as an option can create a perception of a P&C carrier that is not on par with their competitors. And we all know the customer’s perception is their reality.

The digital technology transformation allows you to provide an excellent, competitive, if not differentiating, customer experience. Your P&C insurance offerings become more robust, more customer friendly and more cost effective.

Important Digital Transformation Trends for 2021

Telematics-driven UBI: The crossroad where communication drives customization

The technology behind telematics has developed incrementally since its inception more than 50 years ago. The tracking abilities of GPS have been refined both for vehicles and for property tracking, such as recording data from home security systems. More vehicles have telematics installed into their basic components and more customers are using their mobile devices within these vehicles.

In fact, telematics is so prevalent in modern technologies throughout vehicles and homes that UBI can be as customized as each company determines. With the automatic retrieval and reporting of data, companies can tailor their customer experience to a specific target market and can track customer behavior.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

A one-size-fits-all approach to insurance is no longer a viable option. Customers want insurance that is directed to their specific needs. UBI provides that competitive edge for carriers who can now interpret data on how customers use and interact with their property. As such, it is invaluable in calculating and deciphering customer requirements allowing you to provide a personalized experience.

Additionally, UBI allows for improved customer segmentation. Not only can you offer customers coverage that is based on their actual use, but you can also anticipate future needs. In fact, UBI gives you the ability to predict insurance trends and then develop and offer them in a timely manner to a specific customer base.

UBI provides you with data to better align insurance software requirements with actual risk, and it gives customers immediate feedback so that they can change their behavior to lower their insurance rates. While this is best illustrated with driver behavior, it can also be used for home security habits as well as property rental practices. Higher-risk customers carry the brunt of the cost while those who are more conscientious are rewarded…and remain loyal, long-lasting customers.

Conversational AI: Friendly FAQs

Conversational AI is a technology that uses artificial intelligence to create automated human-like dialogue. Conversational AI uses machine learning to intuitively answer questions online or via text in a seamless, human manner, giving the customer fast, detailed information they are asking for in a format they are familiar with.

The significant advantage of this technology lies in its ability to increase customer satisfaction and at the same time decrease operating costs.

AI technology is important in building a self-serviced, interactive, fast user experience for customers that will increase customer satisfaction. Use the capabilities of machine learning to answer simple requests and questions quickly and automatically on multiple channels. Conversational AI platforms take care of routine inquiries and basic messaging for you and speed up the query process for customers.

Further, automating basic requests with AI decreases incoming calls to your call centers and branch offices, so that your employees can focus on excellent customer service instead of predictable high volume inquiries. AI also helps identify areas where services are lagging or pieces of the process are slipping through the cracks, saving your employees time and increasing awareness of where you can improve customer satisfaction.

Digital Transformation: The Power of Change

The digital landscape is changing every day. New solutions are being developed that will have an increased impact on customers’ expectations, especially in the P&C insurance arena. More and more people prefer to search for information on their devices and screens. Fewer and fewer people will tolerate only having the option to obtain service by calling their insurance company.

And like their experience when they order food delivery, P&C insurance customers increasingly expect their carrier to proactively let them know where their service request is in its journey to completion.

Customers expect information at their fingertips. Literally. They demand their information quickly and want customized services that reflect the way they live. Without digital transformation, the ability and agility to change with the times is hampered. Ease of doing business can make all the difference in dissuading an existing customer from shopping for a less expensive policy.

Ushur enables digital that differentiates

Ushur’s intelligent insurance automation platform enables P&C insurance carriers to offer valuable omni-channel capabilities to provide their customers with a consistent superior experience regardless of their service interaction involving a policy, bill or claim.

Services like our Invisible App allow P&C insurers to create dynamic customer or claimant engagements in hours with no coding experience needed. Improve and automate the insurance customer experience, lower costs and give customers the attention they demand in today’s changing and increasingly competitive market. Our no-code platforms facilitate automation workflow development by business analysts, allowing IT teams to focus on complex technical projects also key to a carrier’s success.

Ushur is leading the insurance industry into the new digital age, one that benefits both insurers and their customers alike. We are on a mission to transform how insurance carriers do business. Our easy-to-use platform is the perfect match for any insurer in any segment: P&C, Life & Accident or Healthcare.

The future of the insurance industry is altering and developing into new digital territory every moment. Be a part of that future. Exceed expectations and act now. Click here to request a demo today!

When embarking on a digital transformation journey, insurance companies need to think, act, and expect differently than they have before, especially when we recognize the recent and ever increasing need to shift to digital. The days of choosing to create value in only one piece of the project management triangle, either customer experience, operational effectiveness, or employee engagement, are gone. Now, agility coupled with the right solution enables a carrier to improve all three critical parts of the whole.

In our first part of this series, Janeen Blanton shared the importance of a customer-first approach to truly elevate customer experience.

In the second part of our series, Meredith Barnes-Cook addressed how a carrier can avoid the illusion of self-service and realize operational effectiveness by identifying where and how to fulfill customer expectations.

And now, in this final post of our three-part series, I will be focusing on the employee experience. I want to show how digital transformation enhances your employee engagement alongside your customer’s positive experience so that as your employee turnover decreases, your employee satisfaction increases.

Employee experience, particularly in the area of call centers, determines how your employees perceive their job. In fact, 46% of employees feel that they are not satisfied at work.[1] In particular, employees in the insurance field get burned out faster.

One of the primary reasons for burnout is repetitive or monotonous work.^[2] In Janeen’s example, after expecting a seamless online process, she ended up having to talk to her insurance representative multiple times over the course of several weeks. She wanted email contact but was instead only contacted by phone. From the customer's perspective, she was frustrated, and at the end of the process, she felt unhappy enough to consider changing carriers, despite the fact that she was a long-term customer.

From an employee’s perspective, each interaction with a dissatisfied customer creates a renewed level of stress and dissatisfaction with their own job. The added layer of complexity in dealing with a customer’s simple request creates additional tasks and timelines. The employee can feel powerless, not being able to correct a customer experience failure while moving through the manual steps as quickly as they can. And as Meredith Barnes-Cook explained, the experience was “bogged down by a behind-the-scenes relay race.”

The repetitive employee tasks and contact points could have been easily automated with AI-driven processes that would have resolved the request before Janeen even spoke to a single employee. The customer contacting an employee would have become a choice versus an absolute necessity. Employee intervention becomes reserved for the most pressing customer needs and allows for personal care without the high volume of critical but manual, rote tasks.

While AI personalizes the customer experience, it also frees employees to focus on their true purpose, helping customers achieve their best experience. If the customer has an effortless, contactless front-end experience, they only need to contact the employee at their greatest need. And there is no shortage of complex decisions that insurance carriers need to make every day, from underwriting a unique new business opportunity to guiding a customer or claimant through a significant claim.

According to one study, employees in the insurance sector, “may derive additional gratification by helping customers through a challenging time, and their interactions may be more positive,” therefore increasing their job satisfaction.[3]

And with improved job satisfaction comes a rise in employee engagement and a more positive employee experience. And in an industry where employee turnover rates range between 35 to 40%,[4] improved employee experience ensures that your employees don’t want to leave.

Between the cost of hiring, training, and onboarding, the cost of employee turnover is high. But with a digital transformation ensuring employee engagement, you can reduce turnover within your workforce.

Long term employees are experienced employees. And with each additional year an employee remains in your employment, their knowledge of the company, its customers, products, services and mission increases. This deepening expertise empowers employees to further enhance the customer experience, becoming a competitive advantage for retention.

With digital transformation, experienced, savvy employees can focus on high-value touchpoints. They will have the ability and the information to automate customers’ touchpoints proactively, from noting policy renewals to warning customers about dangerous weather. Skilled employees will have more data to personalize their customer interactions and perform their tasks with greater ease.

The truth is that the core product that employees deliver is customer service. Automating your processes and making the best use of AI gives your employees the boost they need to deliver an excellent customer experience.

Your company’s digital transformation, incorporating intelligent automation and AI, allows you to improve the three pivotal areas for growth: customer experience, operational effectiveness, and employee experience.

1. https://www.gartner.com/en/human-resources/insights/employee-experience
2. https://crmgamified.com/turnover-in-call-centers-why-prioritize-employee-retention/
3. https://www.mckinsey.com/pe/~/media/McKinsey/Business%20Functions/Operations/Our%20Insights/Boosting%20contact%20center%20performance%20through%20employee%20engagement/Boosting-contact-center-performance-through-employee-engagement.ashx
4. http://qatc.org/winter-2015-connection/exploring-call-center-turnover-numbers/

When embarking on a digital transformation journey, insurance companies need to think, act, and expect differently than they have in the past. In this second edition of our three-part digital transformation blog series, we focus on how operational effectiveness gains are possible, while also improving customer experience and elevating employee engagement.

In our first part of this series, Janeen Blanton shared the importance of a customer-first approach to truly elevate customer experience. I’m going to follow her customer journey to point out the parallel operational effectiveness gains that can be realized when a carrier avoids the trap of creating an illusion of self-service.

Janeen’s disappointing, not to mention frustrating, experience with her insurance company is filled with the tell-tale signs of well-intended but hidden, people-driven activities. She logged into the customer portal to add her son to her auto policy. She expected it to be similar to an online shopping experience that would have immediately included the corresponding premium charge then finalizing the update to her policy. She anticipated both an on-screen confirmation along with an immediate email or SMS, depending on her established communication preferences. This would have included offering her the option to download a copy of her updated policy. And her son receiving an SMS or email to save an insurance ID card to his smartphone.

As you can imagine, the end-to-end process that Janeen expected should have taken her minutes from beginning to end with no need for people moving the ball across the field behind the scenes. However, her customer experience instead involved hours of her time spent over the period of a week tracking and fixing what should have been a relatively simple change. While I cannot say with certainty what was occurring within the walls of her insurance carrier, I can apply my own 30+ years of carrier experience to offer an informed guess. Especially because of the times that I had to design, implement and manage customer-facing solutions that implied automated self-service but were actually manually powered by the talent, perseverance and service dedication of incredible employees.

A study by Microsoft confirmed that customers believe getting their matters taken care of within a single interaction is the most important aspect of a good customer service experience. And while the companies surveyed believed 54% of the time that they were resolving their customers’ problems within 1-2 interactions, customers reported that that was their reality only 12% of the time. And most of the time, the customer experience required more than 6 attempts for their problem to be solved.

There are significant operational impacts to a Carrier when a customer’s need cannot be fully met within their first interaction. Gartner’s study on service channel hopping revealed that only 9%of customers could solve their problem through self-service.

Janeen’s experience aligns with 61% who had to jump over to a live agent channel for help. Just that first jump increases the carrier’s operational cost for that single customer by 82%.

The challenge with what I call “digital on the front end only” services is that they create a false customer expectation of speed, functionality and accuracy that can only be met through a fully automated process. The understandable response within the insurance carrier, to fulfill the customer expectation, is to apply as many people as possible to process each transaction. And to drive speed, an assembly line approach is created to decompose the multi-step back-office handling into several high volume, specialized tasks.

If I was drawing the resulting end-to-end manual workflow on a whiteboard, I’d be marking each task hand off as drivers of both service duration and operational effort. The journey resembles a relay race, except the passing of the baton isn’t immediate. When one task is complete, the hand off isn’t reaching the next person with them being immediately ready to complete their piece, and so on. Rather, there is always a pause since no employee ever sits idle waiting. And the movement from task to task includes the cost and time of process overhead. That overhead could be monitoring one or more email inboxes or workflow queues. Downloading or printing files may be involved. And each person with a discrete task within the overall service process has to spend time to confirm they received it in the intended sequence.

Each step within the manual relay race is a potential source of redundant activity and errors. Information is being manually moved across disconnected systems. At a minimum, this translates to data entry of the same information multiple times. People-driven data rekeying, mapping and sometimes even transforming, coupled with the pressures of volume and speed, open the door for human error. And some mistakes can be very hard to catch and could have serious consequences for a customer and in turn, the carrier. Imagine a numeric typo on a policy limit that isn’t discovered until a claim is filed. In addition to the customer retention risk and reputation hit, fixing the policy problem may require mobilizing a leadership fire drill, with another hit on operational effectiveness.

Why do some carriers introduce “digital on the front end only” solutions as part of their transformation approach? It’s with the best of intentions for customers but misses the mark in not being able to live up to the service expectations and lacking the transparency on how the transaction is actually being handled. An iterative, agile approach is a significant if not also uncomfortable mindset shift. It requires an insurance company to think about automating discrete steps within a process, and potentially out of sequence, versus starting at the beginning. It is a different way of setting priorities and delivering value, compared to a new core system which is often a large end-to-end implementation.

What might operational effectiveness have looked like if Janeen’s insurance company had offered a customer-first experience? It would not have been bogged down by a behind-the-scenes relay race. Mapping the customer journey – which is the full 360 degrees of adding a driver to her auto policy, not just what the customer touches – would have revealed what is most important, and the points of friction that impede meeting those needs. Let’s assume that speed and ease were highest on Janeen’s list – again, not just for her submitting the request but for completing the transaction. A back-office series of people-driven tasks erodes both speed and operational effectiveness. Ease goes out the window when the carrier’s process leaves the customer in the dark or dealing with hours of follow up if the workflow breaks.

If applying a customer-first, iterative approach with their first digital transformation step in place, Janeen might have been guided to call to process her request. She would be speaking with someone who could make change quickly and immediately in the policy system, including confirming the premium change. At the conclusion of that one call, Janeen would have had the peace of mind that the change was complete, when her son was soon able to show her his new digital insurance ID card. Her insurance company’s first digital transformation step in adding a new driver to a policy was not the customer request. Rather, it was automating the push of the SMS or email to the added driver, as soon as the policy change was made. With no relay race being run behind the scenes, the carrier avoids an operational effectiveness hit that also works against the customer’s definition of great service – speed and ease of doing business.

I hope this convinces you that customer experience and operational effectiveness can – and should – go hand-in-hand within your digital transformation. At the risk of sounding like an infomercial – there’s even more good news! Please don’t miss our third installment of this blog series where our colleague Maggie Parkhurst will look at employee experience.

When embarking on a digital transformation journey, insurance companies need to think, act, and expect differently than they have in the past. Otherwise, they will find themselves literally in an insanity loop, doing the same thing over and over and yet expecting a different outcome. Gone are the days where a project management triangle mindset requires choosing where to create value – customer experience or operational effectiveness or employee engagement. Agility coupled with the right solution enables a carrier to improve all three critical dimensions at the same time. How is that possible? Read on – this is the first edition of our three-part blog series – focused on customer experience.

In this installment we will talk about the customer experience leg of our digital transformation triangle. I’m a firm believer in taking a customer-first approach. If we address the customer needs first, operational effectiveness and employee experience will naturally be improved.

So, what does it actually mean to take a customer-first approach? It means to meet the customer where they are. To interact with them when they prefer and through the channel they prefer. You want your customers to walk away from every engagement feeling pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to do business with your organization.

We used to think of digital engagement as a millennial imperative, but a recent Gartner study showed that 85% of customers expect to manage their business relationships without interacting with a human. A report by Microsoft further tells us that 66% of customers will try to self-serve before engaging with a human – regardless of age.

And make no mistake, these preferences matter. I’m a Gen Xer and 9 times out of 10, I would prefer not to talk to a human. I’m too busy. I want quick, digital resolution of service issues. If I do interact with a person, I want it to be in a chat. I recently added my 16-year-old son to my auto policy. I tried to handle it via my insurer’s self-service portal. I entered the information and sent it off to be processed. It got so messed up through these “easy digital” channels that I literally ended up spending hours, yes HOURS, over a period of a week on the phone with my agent. I repeatedly asked him to email me, and he kept calling me. The experience was so painful that I almost changed carriers – after being a customer for over 20 years.

When we stick these digital front ends on top of our same old processes and problems, it is often akin to putting lipstick on a pig. It’s fantastic that I could submit a policy change online. But if it then goes into a black hole, or in this case gets messed up because we’re not collecting the right information, my customer experience was not really improved. In fact, it’s gotten worse – much worse.

So how do insurance companies avoid this trap? To truly transform a customer’s digital experience, you must first understand who your customers are. Most insurers will have several types of customers (including key stakeholders) – policyholders and sometimes their employees, brokers, agents, and providers to name a few – and they all have different needs. Then you must fully map out each customer’s journey. What are all the interaction points? Which ones have the most friction? What can you solve now? What can you do to improve areas you can’t solve now? And for each interaction, what does your customer need – what is their end goal? For example, in my recent experience it was not to submit a policy change – it was for the policy to be immediately and accurately endorsed and billed, to know that when my new driver inevitably dings someone’s fender – he is covered.

Once you’ve examined the entire customer journey and how you will transform it – you can start incrementally and iteratively improving as you reach toward the new ideal. Let’s look at the claims process to see how this could be put into practice. When my son inevitably dings someone’s fender, what would I want my experience to look like? There are some companies who allow claims to be submitted online. This may include being able to take photos of minor damage and for an adjuster to evaluate and resolve the claim virtually. Carriers may offer a customer portal, giving the option to login to see the status of a claim.

Ok that’s a great start, but it’s not transformational. What if instead of making the customer come to their carrier to request information, the company proactively sent them updates? Think about ordering a pizza (something I’ve done way too many times during the pandemic). It tells me that my order was received, when it’s cooking, when my driver picks it up, and when it’s on its way to me with an estimated arrival time. What if when I submitted a claim, I was shown all the steps it would need to go through, how long each step may take and where I was in the process? And even better – what if this tracker was sent to me each time the status of my claim changed? Arming me with that information up front proactively manages my expectations, and sending frequent, meaningful updates keeps me from having to chase down the status myself. Frankly, I think everything should have a pizza tracker.

Taking it one step further, if additional information was needed by my carrier to process my claim, what if I received a text interaction to provide that information? What if I was able to receive and sign any necessary documents electronically on my phone? What if I was even given a secure link to enter my banking information so my claim check could be automatically deposited?

That is a transformational customer experience. That is an experience that will keep me as a customer for another 20 years. And guess what? In the process we have improved operational effectiveness by reducing inbound calls and emails from customers wanting to know the status of their claim.  And made claims employees happier by freeing them up from endless games of phone tag. But I won’t go too far into that as I don’t want to spoil Meredith Barnes-Cook’s next installment on operational effectiveness.

Health plan member expectations are changing, and members demand more. They want better communication from their health insurance payer, timely answers to their questions, and seamless engagement through digital channels. Members are consumers whose service expectations have been dramatically shifted by the likes of Amazon, Netflix and Amazon. Gone are the days of expecting members to communicate through snail mail or endure long hold times on the phone. Members expect options and self-service, and health plans can exceed those expectations with the digital customer engagement solution.

We’re all growing accustomed to an effortless and omnichannel user experience that we control. Texting has replaced phone conversations for all ages because it’s an easier and faster way to communicate. Our phones ping throughout the day reminding us of our upcoming deliveries, from the moment items are ordered to the moment they arrive on our doorsteps. There’s no denying we are in the digital age, and there is no turning back. Consumers expect access to information instantly, and there’s no better time to offer this than when delivering critical information to help members manage their health.

Change often comes with a myriad of challenges, especially in healthcare. But it doesn’t have to be that way. There are simple automation solutions that health plans can implement to quickly and effectively enhance relationships with members. Not only do these solutions improve customer satisfaction, but they also streamline a health plan’s overall business. Offering 2-way digital communication leads to reduction in costs and increases in operational efficiency.

Here are 5 ways health insurance payers can automate customer interactions to improve member relations, their bottom line along with their employee engagement.

1. Coordination of Benefits

Coordination of Benefits is an aggravating process for everyone involved. It’s difficult for payers to keep track of the ever-changing secondary eligibility of all members and it’s time consuming to uncover other responsible parties. Plus, it consumes a lot of resources to track down that responsible party, and it’s even more costly if a health plan has to recoup payments.

On the other hand, members get frustrated when asked to fill out and return printed forms. They are focused on their health, don’t understand why they have to provide more details, and are expecting something easier and faster than antiquated snail mail communication.

An integrated intelligent automation solution can maximize cost savings and speed by digitizing the Coordination of Benefits process. Ushur’s secure conversational AI platform automates the communication through personalized texts or emails to members. The technology can quickly discover critical health plan information, verify additional responsible parties, extract data from photos of member I.D. cards, and seamlessly update member eligibility details within the health plan’s core systems.

2. Prior Authorization Communication

Obtaining prior authorization is an essential component of the healthcare process, yet it’s also one of the most frustrating. Member services representatives are inundated by high volumes of inbound calls. Members may have previously been unaware of prior authorization, and then feel blindsided while their treatment remains on hold until approved. Then they are discouraged because they lack timely information about the status of the prior authorization request. They want information and they want it now.

Payers can reduce costs while proactively keeping members informed by implementing a conversational AI solution. Ushur’s platform helps streamline the entire process, allowing members to use their preferred digital channel, whether it’s SMS or email, to easily and securely communicate with their health plan. Ushur’s machine learning engine understands what members want, including the intent and context of healthcare terminology, and it easily integrates with payers’ existing systems.

The platform enables health plans to automatically notify members of a new prior authorization request received on their behalf. And then Ushur can update members on the progress and outcome of their prior authorization, be it approved, rejected or denied. This will reduce the number of inbound calls and create member service representative capacity. Appreciating sometimes members prefer to speak with a person, Ushur’s platform can offer members the option to schedule a call with a service representative. Better yet, members can continue interacting with Ushur’s technology to find a doctor, schedule appointments or ask additional health insurance questions.

3. Appointment Reminders

When members miss their appointments, it hurts everyone. Members experience delays in care and potentially compounding comorbidities. These health complications equate to more costly care.

Payers can improve member engagement with the adoption of technology. Ushur’s conversational AI platform enhances the overall member experience by automating the entire appointment process. Members receive digital appointment reminders via text or email, and can continue interacting with their health plan to receive reminders and reschedule appointments. Ushur’s solution integrates with existing Customer Relationship Management Systems and Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems through a secure, no-code application This enhances a health plan’s relationship with members by simplifying the communication process and coordination of care along the healthcare journey.

4. Member Medication Adherence

There are many reasons in which members may not take their medication as prescribed. Some may not be able to afford the medicine. Others may struggle to follow complex dosing schedules. Some may even forget to refill their medication altogether. Regardless of the reason, health insurers are losing money and members’ well-being can be compromised.

Ushur’s secure conversational AI platform can improve this process, helping members stick to their medication regimen through automated communication. Members can receive real-time information via a text or email to their phone, tablet or computer for refill reminders and to request refills. Plus, members can use this same preferred method of communication to inquire about side effects and schedule a call to ask follow-up questions about their medication.

5. Appeals and Grievance Processes

Payers get bogged down in the appeals and grievance process. From adhering to regulatory requirements to relying on manual workflows, the entire process can be costly. Often, payers are slow to communicate with members, leaving them frustrated and wanting more out of the experience.

Ushur’s conversational AI capabilities and SmartMail intelligent email automation can help by eliminating time-consuming interactions and centralizing important data in a single, secure and user-friendly platform. With the power of machine learning, the technology understands the intent and context of healthcare terminology and quickly scans emails and attached documents to capture necessary member information. Ushur accurately categorizes member inquiries and automates email responses, making the entire appeals and grievance process smoother. Members receive real-time status updates through SMS or email, reducing the inefficient back-and-forth process between a health plan and their members.

When members want information that impacts their healthcare, they’re frustrated if they’re forced to use slow processes dependent on legacy systems. That’s where automation comes in, and it benefits both a health plan’s members and their operating costs in substantial ways. Transformation doesn’t have to be scary. Implementing digital solutions is easier than ever and is becoming more critical due to consumer demands. These solutions improve a company’s bottom line, enhance their relationship with their members, and will give health plans a competitive edge by supporting their members throughout their healthcare journey.

Have you ever wished that it was easier to interact with an insurance carrier? We all know that waiting on hold for what can feel like forever and scouring the Internet for answers to seemingly basic questions are major hurdles that can cause most customers to approach simple tasks, such as filing an insurance claim, with caution and dread. With Ushur’s omni-channel Virtual Customer Assistant (VCA) powered by Conversational AI, insurance carriers can automate servicing for their end users in their channel of preference. That’s why Ushur has added WhatsApp, a popular communication tool used by 2 billion people worldwide, as a communication channel.

Why is WhatsApp the perfect channel for this integration? Well, it's the most popular messaging platform in the world; every day, WhatsApp users exchange over 65 billion messages. It's free of ads and fees and is easy to use, which has made it enormously popular all over the world — and thus means that the odds are high that your customers either already have WhatsApp or can easily download it to get started. It's why we at Ushur chose to integrate with WhatsApp, and it's why WhatsApp is the perfect tool for this new function.

So how does it work?

The process is simple. Let's go on a journey of what a customer might experience when trying to file a disability claim through WhatsApp.

First, your customer — let's call her Laura — opens WhatsApp and clicks on her insurance company’s name. To start the process, all Laura needs to do is text her carrier a simple hashtag based on her needs. In this case, Laura sends her insurance company "#claim" to get started on filing a new claim.

Sending this simple message is all that's needed to initiate an Ushur workflow. Our intelligent automation tools will kick into gear and begin asking Laura a series of questions about her claim. Instead of needing to stay on hold to speak to a representative or spending time navigating a complex website, Laura can simply message her answers to her insurance company quickly, easily, and on her own schedule. Ushur automatically presents our secure Invisible App to Laura to send any confidential data and supporting documents to her insurance company.

Once Laura is done providing information, she can go relax while Ushur helps take care of the rest. Laura's newly filed claim is safely in the hands of her insurance carrier, where it will be processed just like a normal claim.

But the process doesn't stop there. When Laura wants to check on the status of her claim to see where it's at in its approval process journey, all she needs to do is text "#claimstatus" in WhatsApp to learn more about how her claim is being processed. Again, it's an easy way to check on an important claim when it’s convenient for the customer and remove the hassle that comes with waiting on hold or trying to get in touch with a claims adjuster.

Now, Laura can get the answers she needs in real time and go on with her day, having filed her claim quickly and easily and feeling satisfied with the customer service she's received. It's a win-win for both you and your customers.

See it all in Action

Ushur's integration with WhatsApp is a game-changer when it comes to providing frictionless customer relationships in the insurance industry. This new capability makes it possible for customers and enterprises to communicate and work together easily and efficiently to make stress and hassle a thing of the past.

Your next best step is to see it all in action through a free demo. Drop us a line and we’ll get you scheduled for a personalized, free demo in minutes.

The Context of a Claim

The insurance policy is a contractual agreement that stipulates, in exchange for payment, a person or business will receive reimbursement or financial protection against losses from an insurance company. In other words, if the required premium is paid, a customer will be paid for covered damage, injury, illness or loss.

The insurance claim is the formal request for coverage for a loss or event.

The Claim Process

For as many kinds of insurance that exist (from workers compensation to travel to life), there is the potential of there being a corresponding type of claim. And while the details of a claim for short-term disability benefits and a claim for auto damage following an accident are different, you might be surprised to hear that the overall process flow is similar.

When thinking about customer interactions and processes, we find it helpful to first think about claims as either those that physically affect people (i.e., injury, illness or end of life), those that impact physical property (e.g. vehicles, buildings, equipment) or those that involve service (e.g. travel, events).

For any claim, there is a claim intake process, where the customer makes their formal request for coverage under their policy. Insurance carriers have different terms for this step, including First Notice of Loss (FNOL), or Filing A Claim. Sometimes a claim will be reported by someone other than the policyholder – for example, the owner of a car that was damaged in an accident where they believe the policyholder is responsible.

Policy verification involves confirming that there is a policy in effect that matches the facts within the claim. That the customer has a policy in effect on the date of event or loss is key. Other elements of policy verification will vary based on the type of claim. For example, for a short-term disability claim against a group benefits policy, the injured party needs to be verified as being a member of the group. For a personal auto claim, the car needs to match what is shown on the policy.

Claim assignment needs to happen both as quickly and accurately as possible. Claims adjusters may specialize not only on a specific line of business (say, workers compensation) but may even be focused on specific industries or jurisdictions. Business customers may have dedicated claims handling teams. Sometimes claim specialist assignments are based on reported loss severity. Regardless of the claim assignment rules in play, the insurance company wants every claim to get into the right hands to provide the best and right-fit service immediately.

During the claim investigation the claims adjuster obtains the facts needed to confirm coverage – that the claim is in fact covered under the terms of the policy. Policies have exclusions that limit what is covered. This can be to prevent overlaps between types of insurance, like homeowners and flood or workers compensation and disability. The claims adjuster also confirms the cause and extent of the damage or injury, where there may be applicable terms in the policy. This could involve obtaining a report from a doctor or obtaining a repair estimate from a contractor. The claims adjuster looks for other responsible parties, like the manufacturer of a defective part that caused a machine to malfunction, should there be a reimbursement claim to pursue, referred to as subrogation.

Some claims will have a longer duration, including significant building losses or injuries. During the claim management process, the claims adjuster is in regular contact with the customer or injured employee. For disability or workers compensation claims, the adjuster monitors medical treatment and return to work readiness. For a larger property loss, the adjuster is following the progress of repairs. And in all instances, the claims adjuster is ensuring any payments due are being made timely.

Claims eventually reach the point of claim resolution, where all payments have been issued. At that point the claim file is closed or moved into a recovery process if there is subrogation potential.

The Claims Process, Transformed by AI

The claim journey is highly interactive, from intake through resolution. As outlined above, most claims follow a similar flow of information received, processed and requested. This creates many opportunities to leverage AI to automate and accelerate these anticipated touchpoints. Each discreet customer, agent, broker, member, claimant and even provider interaction that is automated, can simultaneously improve customer experience, operational efficiency and employee engagement.

We offer just a few transformation possibilities here with the hope they will inspire you to reflect on your own high value opportunities.

The claim intake process sometimes begins with a customer or their agent emailing a form to their insurance company. An integrated AI platform that includes machine learning and email automation can rapidly recognize new claim forms as they land, extracting the data and moving it into the core claims system in minutes. This eliminates hours – if not days – of delays in policy verification and claim assignment, and in turn, customer service. Absent that automation, carriers have to deploy vital employee resources to monitor email boxes to rekey each new claim, which can hinder the claims adjuster’s ability to manage each claim to its best outcome.

During the claim intake process, AI can anticipate – and ask for - the information that will be needed from the customer as part of the claim investigation. This could include facilitating the e-sign of a medical authorization and introducing them to in-network medical providers specializing in their type of injury. Or AI can enable them to schedule an appointment at a preferred repair facility nearby. A health plan’s need to coordinate benefits before being able to pay a claim can be easily addressed by a member uploading a photo of another secondary plan card.

Throughout the claim investigation, management and resolution phases, AI empowers carriers to be proactive, automating the answering of customer questions before they are even asked. Claim status is a high-volume driver of inbound customer calls and emails for most carriers. The customer, member or claimant experience is transformed when they automatically receive regular updates, from the progress of their appraisal, to the timing of their next benefit payment or confirmation their medical bill has been paid.

Insurance companies can also leverage AI to automate reaching out when information is needed, be it asking the customer for the location of a vehicle to be appraised, checking in with a member for the timing of their next doctor’s appointment or confirming the desired payment process for a life insurance claim.

The Power of Data within Claims

Insurance carriers formed data analytics teams several years ago, to tap into the power of decades of loss data using modern desktop business intelligence tools. This enabled carriers to gain new insights, including patterns of claim outcomes. Predictive models followed, where insurance companies used historical trends to predict new claim outcomes. This not only improved the accuracy of loss reserves (think claim payout budget), but it also helped carriers to see early indicators of initially simple claims that historically became complex. However, it wasn’t an integrated process – claims handlers were provided lists of claims where intervention was needed.

Machine learning within an integrated AI platform enables carriers to insert the power of data analytics into the claim process to automate both predictions and decisions. Utilizing historical claim data, ML can find the early indicators of fraud and automatically notify a Special Investigation Unit. Injuries and illnesses that have a strong likelihood of worsening could be routed to a nurse to arrange a medical second opinion. Losses identified as high contenders for future litigation might be elevated for manager review and reserves adjustment. These are just a few examples of proactive automation that can both effectively and efficiently improve claim outcomes.

AI is Transforming Insurance

Insurance customers are also consumers whose automation expectations have been heavily influenced by digital leaders like Amazon, Netflix and Facebook. Gartner’s research indicates customers expect to manage 85% of their relationships with businesses without interacting with a human. According to Microsoft, most customers of any age will select a self-service channel first.

Integrated conversational AI platforms enable carriers to meet their customers where they are, in their digital channel of choice or to connect them to the right person. This not only positions carriers to offer the self-service options customers expect. It also enables carriers to automate high volume customer outreach, including differentiating touchpoints beyond the traditional policy, billing and claims process.

No-code platforms put creating new workflow automations in the hands of business analysts. These “citizen developers” position carriers to continuously introduce new solutions to respond to an increasingly digital world.

The Future of AI in Insurance

Connected devices including wearables are already used by almost 40% of insurance customers today and more than 70% expect to be users in the future, according to Bain & Company. McKinsey estimates there will be up to one trillion connected devices by 2025. Connected devices create customer value in preventing claims and can offer an insurance carrier valuable data for underwriting. A surprising benefit identified by Bain & Company is that connected devices drive customer loyalty, increasing customer-carrier interactions five-fold, in an industry where 1/3 of consumers have no interaction with their insurance company or health plan throughout the year.

Robotics will continue to permeate our everyday lives. There will be more use of 3-D printing in manufacturing and construction. Not only will more cars gain autonomous capabilities, like self-driving. Similar growth will occur with farm equipment, programmable drones and surgical equipment. These waves of change will require insurance products to keep pace, including designing different ways to understand and price new risks. Claims handling will require new capabilities and resources to appraise damage, determine coverage and liability. When a car is involved in an accident while operating in full-autonomous mode, a software engineer may need to be on call to evaluate computer code to determine responsibility.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA), as a category, has been on a tear lately. Gartner, after its initial reluctance to even recognize RPA as a category, has now ranked it as the fastest growing segment of the technology sector for the past couple of years. Astronomical valuations, record-breaking funding rounds and indeed some slick marketing by leading RPA vendors have done a great job obscuring some of the cautionary tales, especially for insurance carriers to hear before they jump headfirst into implementing RPA within their organization. Carriers who fail to fully understand what RPA is and, more importantly, what RPA is not, may find themselves creating new problems of greater consequence. This includes surprises about the gaps in the perceived intelligent automation capability of RPA that can only be addressed by finding and introducing additional solutions.

The initial appeal of RPA to insurance companies was also understandable, based on their historical expectations of cost and technical complexity. Carriers are well-accustomed to multi-year and multi-million-dollar marathons to upgrade or replace just one of their core systems. It can feel far more like a relay race - once the loop of policy, underwriting, claims and billing applications have been modernized, it may be time to begin the cycle again. Enter RPA: with its promise of deploying bots in weeks to automate typically low-hanging tasks swiftly and delivering return on investment (ROI) in months. It’s no wonder that insurance carriers have been some of the earliest adopters of RPA.

Just because RPA can be less expensive and less complex to introduce, compared to an entirely new core system, it does not diminish the due diligence to ensure an insurance carrier selects the right, and more importantly an intelligent automation solution to address their needs. Not only does that warrant a complete understanding of the problems to be solved, but also it  requires diving deep enough to identify all of the people, processes, and technology changes that will be involved. Both of these dimensions have an important duration component to define up front - how long will the RPA solution need to be sustainable and in turn, how much will it need to be able to scale as the carrier grows. When any technology solution is not taken seriously enough during the assessment and selection process, it is prone to also have shortcomings in its implementation, usage, expansion and support.

Understanding RPA

RPA is a software technology that allows companies to create robots (“bots”) to automate rules-based, high-volume, repetitive tasks. These “bots” are not real robots but are a form of software code (scripts), which can replicate or mimic how humans interact with various applications on a computer. RPA is designed to automate a discreet activity that never varies. One way to help understand RPA’s fit is to imagine having two spreadsheets, where you always need to copy the contents from column A in the first sheet and paste it into column C in the second spreadsheet. The process never varies, and there is no requirement to check for accuracy or completeness.

RPA’s static approach to automation means it does not learn. Rather, each discrete task automation is its own bot to build, test and then support. To illustrate what can constitute a discrete task in insurance, think about our prolific use of forms. For example, some agents use an ACORD form to report a customer’s auto claim to the insurance carrier. ACORD updates their forms periodically, which means carriers are receiving multiple versions of just this one type of form. Then, layer in jurisdictional car accident forms, like those created by each U.S. state, which also change over time, and you can imagine the large number of formats in play for the exact same event.  And we haven’t even touched on other lines of business, from Group Benefits, to Property, General Liability, and Worker’s Compensation, where the same scenario of multiples exists. Other examples include the many formats that agents or brokers may use for quote submissions or policy change requests.

For RPA to move the data from each unique form into a claim or policy system requires its own bot. This means not only quantity at initial implementation but a continuous process to address new forms, where another new bot must be created. And as new forms or form versions continue to emerge, operationally a carrier has to plan for initial manual processing until the new bot is ready. Over time the carrier must also plan for an increase of RPA bots that must be monitored and supported. This means the initial business case to spend on RPA erodes over time. The total cost of ownership (TCO) balloons as a carrier has to both build and maintain more and more bots over time. Insurance companies that mistake the initial ease of creating one bot to mean that RPA’s usage and expansion does not need governance will see the cost over time outweigh its value. And the scope of the resulting automations could be cementing a carrier into legacy processes that contend with their strategic objectives.

How is Artificial Intelligence (AI) Different from RPA?

AI focuses on technology designed to simulate human intelligence in being able to understand, react and learn. Think about the advances in cars, like parking assist and lane departure warnings, as examples of AI that are improving our daily lives.

Some AI platforms incorporate Machine Learning (ML) that is able to study large data sets and learn, creating an understanding of words, including when word combinations indicate intent. This ability to learn also means that ML gets smarter over time, as it continues to see more and different data. If you were wondering how Netflix and Prime Video remain on-point with their movie recommendations - that’s ML in action, continuously learning from your viewing choices to become smarter over time about your unique preferences.

Reflecting back on the RPA in the context of the example of form processing automation, ML makes this an entirely different experience to both implement and maintain. Compared with the “automated copy-paste” capability of RPA that is built and maintained one document type and version at a time, ML is trained up front by being given a high volume (thousands) of examples, spanning multiple form types and various versions.

ML learns from the example data set how to recognize different forms that have the same purpose (say, to report an auto claim) but may be different form editions (2018 versus 2021). And ML’s training enables it to distinguish an auto claim form from a property or a general liability one. As time moves on and more forms are received by an insurance company, ML continues to learn through its own processing. While different editions of the same form would require a net-new RPA bot even with minimal differences in the new form, ML is positioned to understand and automate without intervention.

Beyond Process Automation - Conversational Automation

The automation of 2-way conversations with a human-like dialogue is an area where RPA cannot venture. Think Amazon Echo, Siri and Google Assistant. This is where conversational AI platforms enable insurance carriers to transform their customer experience. Conversational AI uses ML, along with Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG). Conversational AI is omnichannel, enabling you to begin a conversation through a text chat and continue it later, say, via email.

The Best of All Worlds for Insurance Experience Transformation - Intelligent Automation

Insurance Automation platforms empower insurance carriers to meet their customers, agents, brokers, members and claimants wherever they are - phone, text, web or email. And IA platforms can bring the right level of automation to the complexity of each task. This includes the power of being able to learn, analyze and make decisions to respond to customer needs in real-time.

No company sets out to have a boring, tedious, or worst, toxic environment. Yet we see and experience these workplaces all around us. Why? Because building a great workplace culture is hard! At Ushur, we don't claim to have cracked the code on how to build the best possible workplace culture, but we do have something special going on here. From intellectually stimulating research work at the bleeding edge of conversational AI to go-to-market campaigns that are focused on blitzscaling...and everything in between, Ushur is taking a decidedly unique approach to building a successful, high growth business where people are valued for not just their work, but also who they are.

🚀 Cool Projects

Did you know that Ushur recently raised $25M in Series B funding from some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley? The work we're doing isn't just for fun. It's getting noticed all over the world. At Ushur, we work with a diverse team of talented superstars. We will help you provide technical solutions as a Big Data Engineer, work to establish as well as grow our brand identity as a Graphic Designer, or keep operations running smoothly as an Office Manager. Whatever you do, you'll be doing it as part of a close-knit team doing groundbreaking work.

💪 Career Development

We take career development seriously at Ushur. That's why we offer an internship program to help give a diverse range of students a chance to start working with us. And it's why we foster a culture of learning by offering activities such as Hackathons that grant our employees fun opportunities to continue sharpening their skills. It's also why we make it a point to promote from within the company. The way we see it, no one knows what we do as well as how we do it better than our employees. Why mess with success?

💻 Plenty of Perks

At Ushur, we make it a priority to keep our employees happy, healthy, as well as excited to work for us. That's why we offer our employees the ability to work remotely. When it is safe to do so, employees also have the flexibility to work at our offices in Santa Clara or Bengaluru. All of our employees are covered by top-of-the-line health benefits as well as allowed to work flexible hours. In addition to great PTO and holiday benefits we request everyone take the last Friday of the month off for a mental health day to ensure the well-being of our employees is a priority. And our in-office employees can enjoy free snacks, drinks, and an on-site gym. Overall, we pride ourselves on maintaining a collaborative, supportive work environment. Everyone is given the tools they need to work hard as well as feel their best.

✨ Employee Satisfaction

Our employees love what they do, and they love working for Ushur. But don't just take our word for it! Read what two of our employees had to say about their experience during the hiring process at Ushur:

I recently joined Ushur as a Data Analyst Intern. And I had a super fun interview as well as an onboarding experience. Unlike other companies, I was constantly updated about what step of the recruiting process I am in and was provided with enough information to help me prepare for my interviews. - Suchit Sanghvi
 The recruiting process was a very genuine and pleasant experience. I really got a great feel for the culture, belief in the product, and single vision to succeed! - Satyan Patel

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There are plenty of opportunities for jobs at Ushur. We're currently looking to fill positions in the Engineering, Sales, Administration, Design, Marketing, as well as Customer Success departments. Regardless of your area of expertise, there's a place for you on the Ushur team. And we're excited to see what you bring to the table.

Are you ready to work for an up-and-coming company that's revolutionizing the way companies do business with their customers? We'd love to hear from you. Take a look at our list of open positions and feel free to contact us with any questions. We're looking forward to helping you learn more about joining the Ushur team!

Truth be told, the insurance customer experience has probably been in a state of transformation for as long as the insurance industry has existed. Transformation by definition is “a thorough or dramatic change”. And change is driven by – one, some or all – shifts in consumer preferences, marketplace competition, demographics, legislation, economic trends, and technology.

What else was going on back in 1752 when the first insurance company in the U.S., The Philadelphia Contributionship, was co-founded by Benjamin Franklin? The beginning of the Industrial Revolution, for starters, as hand production shifted to machines, machine tools were developed, and new chemical and iron production processes rapidly increased productivity. Unprecedented growth in population offered another impactful change curve. There were probably more distinct disruptors emerging at the same time than I could count on both hands.

I began my insurance career in the mid-1980s working at an agency during my college breaks, where I had the opportunity to learn about many of the facets of the customer experience, from policy applications, to reporting new claims, to billing and payments. What I quickly realized is insurance is all about service and change – because it’s all about the customer, and no two customers (or customer interactions) are the same. Great service meant the ability to consistently provide each customer with whatever they needed and valued, at any point in time. This could have meant waiting in line at the RMV (for hours) to get the plates for their new car, explaining (again) the difference between Underinsured and Uninsured Motorist coverage (and why they needed both), or guaranteeing that the water restoration company (by calling them over and over) would be at their home immediately after a pipe burst.

Today, the ways that customers and their insurance carriers interact continues to change. For example, we see businesses using what began as personal chat tools, like WhatsApp, for work communication. But one thing that has not changed is what constitutes great service – meeting each customer wherever they are, and making it quick and easy to get whatever they need.

Insurance companies have also been in a constant state of change since the days of Ben Franklin, as they strive to respond to, if not anticipate, the shifting needs of their customers, and address other forces including the economy, competitors, regulation and world events. During the more than 30 years that I worked at the same insurance company there was continuous growth and change, including several end-to-end restructures, some coupled with acquisitions or divestitures. In hindsight, I wish I had held onto organization charts to fully appreciate the breadth and depth of the company’s transformation over time.

My own career path far more resembled a jungle gym – unpredictable, but also exciting. I worked in 12 different offices and held about as many distinct roles, not only encompassing the full insurance lifecycle, but also spanning service, operations, and technology. Many times, I was leaping into entirely new positions and building new teams, driven by the pace of change within the organization, the industry, and the world at-large. As I continued to flex and pivot to where I could next add the most value to a changing company and its customers, I realized I had become a change agent. That might answer your question about why I recently jumped at the chance to join a software startup.

Flash forward to this past month, when I was given the privilege and gift of planning a webinar with three insurance industry icons and change leadership experts to talk about the transformation of the insurance customer experience. Needless to say, much of what we’ve been talking about is digital transformation.

I won’t spoil the punchline with the hope that if you’re reading this blog, you will join the live webinar, or watch the replay later. It’s going to be a great conversation from the front lines of the insurance industry’s digital transformation, where we will share what we have learned about what it takes to be a change agent, how to understand what customers value, and proven ways to explore, experiment, and deliver game-changing experiences.

Software plays an important and ever increasing role in our daily lives and we do not even realize it most of the time. You may be surprised to learn that it took less code to send a person to the moon than it does to power the smartphones we use every day. Designing and writing the code that creates software is more than a discipline - it is a difficult skill that a small percentage of the population have mastered with great success. As programming has evolved, technology companies have introduced platforms that have made it easier for both developers and non-developers to create tailored solutions. You have probably heard about these platforms, referred to as “low-code” and “no-code”, but may not know what makes them different.

Coding 101

Coding is the process of creating software, by writing instructions for a computer to execute commands. Code is not written in natural language - there are dozens of programming languages, like Python, Java, Ruby, HTML, Javascript, C++, C#, SQL and PHP. You may have also heard mention of various types of coding languages, including scripted, compiled and object-oriented. Each coding language has its usage scenarios where it is a stronger fit, based on the capabilities needed of the software. A developer working at a large insurance company may need to know many distinct coding languages and types, even if to support and maintain older applications while also working on newer systems.

What is Low-Code?

Low-code refers to a more modern way of developing applications, where less programming expertise is needed. A low-code platform has pre-built blocks of coded commands that can be organized and then connected via programming into larger workflows. Low-code platforms are targeted to IT users but complex technical skills are not required to develop applications. Examples of low-code platforms include Appian, Mendix, OutSystems, Quick Flow and ServiceNow. Digital portals for customers and brokers that facilitate transactions through connections with backend core policy, claims and billing systems have been successfully built using low-code platforms. But just like each programming language having its place in terms of fit, low-code platforms will not always be the best option. This includes when meeting the business needs cannot be met through the platform’s pre-built templates, widgets, and UI components.

Low-code platforms offer speed, encourage agility and foster collaboration, as developers work together to deliver impactful solutions.

What is No-Code?

No-code is similar to low-code but has some specific differences. No-code platforms have a drag-and-drop visual interface, similar to some low-code solutions. However, no-code platforms do not require programming to connect the pre-built components. They are designed for non-developer users with no coding experience required. These non-technical professionals, also referred to as citizen developers, have the ability to create complete applications. No-code platforms require minimal training, resulting in a quick ramp-up, contributing to speed to market.

While IT skills are not required to create applications using no-code platforms, IT plays an essential role in establishing the compliance and security governance structure, along with the sandbox (test environment) for the citizen developers. Developers will also assist if there is the need to integrate a no-code system with an enterprise application. But otherwise by design, the citizen developer builds solutions autonomously. This can reduce the contention of demand for IT talent, a challenge for many insurance companies.

The benefits of a no-code platform include agility and speed. Workflow automation is a strong use-case for no-code, where a business analyst at an insurance carrier can introduce new capabilities in less than an hour. Collaboration and the voice of the customer are amplified with no-code, with the application being built by teams that are closer to the business operations and end users. The return on investment (ROI) will be greater, with fewer resources and hand-offs between teams reducing both cost and duration, compared to development where coding is required.

Ushur’s No-Code Solutions

Ushur has created a no-code platform for insurance carriers to better serve customers, agents, brokers, members and claimants through automation. Employees are empowered to create, deploy and track two-way communications and workflows across multiple digital channels. Ushur enables digital transformation through its complete solution for intelligent automation, powered by advanced conversational AI and intuitive process automation workflows.

Today is another milestone for all of us at Ushur, for our customers and for our partners. I’m thrilled to announce that just three months after our over-subscribed $25M Series B round, led by Third Point Ventures, 8VC and Pentland Ventures, we have extended our Series B investment by securing another $5M in funding. More importantly, we now have two more stalwarts of the investment world as partners in this journey of ours: Aflac Ventures joins us as a strategic investor and Iron Pillar will help us accelerate our customer and talent acquisition.

This latest round of funding builds on an exceptional year for Ushur:

• Ushur's no-code, AI-powered, born-in-the-cloud intelligent automation platform gained rapid adoption with deployments across 4 continents,
• Industry veterans joined our leadership team to scale up our go-to-market functions,
• and, most importantly, a growing list of Fortune 500 companies became Ushur customers, including Unum, Aetna, Irish Life, Cigna, Tower and many more

Our partnership with Iron Pillar enables us to tap into their fast growing international network in Europe and emerging markets and gives us access to customers, partners and talent pool.

Ushur is one of a small handful of innovative startups actually driving innovation and transformation in the insurance sector,” said Mohanjit Jolly, Partner at Iron Pillar. “They not only have the conversational AI that can streamline customer interactions, but can deliver it in a no-code platform for rapid deployment. That combination of no-code and proven AI models is what’s behind their traction, and we’re looking forward to helping them expand their team and global customer base to meet the clear demand.

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I’m humbled by all the support and the trust our customers, our partners and our investors have put in us, best manifested in the words of Nadeem Khan, President of Aflac Global Ventures: “Ushur’s ability to deliver on a truly omnichannel customer experience will make a tremendous impact across the entire industry: improving member satisfaction, opening new markets for providers and helping agents and brokers gain efficiency.”

On behalf of everyone at Ushur, Thank You.

Why extend the Series B investment?

This extension to our Series B round serves two key goals: growing our go-to-market function to better serve our customers and gaining strategic partners for our target markets.

When we first announced our Series B, I wrote in a blog post that we’ve heard the signal from the market loud and clear: high-contact businesses, such as insurance providers, are looking to digitally transform their customer engagement, across all channels, keeping costs low while raising NPS scores. If you can help achieve one or two of these metrics, it is a win. If you can help them achieve all three, that’s a big deal.

Ushur has done just that.

In the words of Ken Lynch, Head of Information Services at Irish Life: “The results we got were phenomenal, and we hadn’t written a line of code. We’d never seen anyone who could do that. From our standpoint, Ushur were the only ones out there truly doing something different.”

These testaments represent our plan in action. Ushur’s Series B extension will help us continue to execute this plan – on a global scale, with the help of our new strategic partners.

In addition to expanding our leadership team, we plan to invest heavily in our R&D, engineering and customer success teams. Our go-to-market teams will continue to grow rapidly along with our partner network, meeting our goal to be where our customers are – no matter where they are in the world.

Transforming Insurance with Aflac

In Aflac Ventures, Ushur has gained not only a strategic partner, but a key advisor as we continue to make deep inroads into the world of insurance.

It is well established now that intelligent automation has a transformational impact on traditional insurers. For instance, in the words of our customer, Irish Life, their first Ushur project made them rethink their entire approach to customer engagement.

We are transforming an industry that has historically delegated the relationship with the end-customers to brokers and third parties and we are enabling them to learn how to deliver the best customer experience. We are doing this with an AI-powered platform that drops in and works with minimal effort, and a team of experts who understand how to build and deliver these great experiences. Afterall, digital transformation survivors know that modernization has a ripple effect far beyond just product deployment. It’s up to us to make sure our customers get the most value out of Ushur — and we can do that by giving them the technical and cultural blueprints for success that we have mastered.

Lastly, with a rapidly growing customer base, we now have insurers across the globe using Ushur to tackle their own set of challenges that are unique to their regional market environments. As we expand our footprint, Ushur is cognizant that we’re creating products with a global reach, and our workforce, our outreach and our ecosystems need to reflect that.

For all of these reasons, Aflac Ventures is an ideal partner and advisor for Ushur, passing on decades of industry knowledge, trust and credibility that are critical to a fast-growing startup like Ushur as we continue to transform the world of insurance.

The road ahead

In the world of startups, we often hear about blitzscaling and categories turning into rocket ships. At Ushur, while we remain humble yet passionate, our drive to growth and success remains forever grounded in our core vision: a relentless focus on developing and delivering world-class intelligent automation solutions that drive every single customer engagement into a transformative experience.

If the past year has taught me anything, it’s that as long we stay true to our vision, there is plenty of room at the top.

Insurance is purchased with the carrier promising to pay should a covered loss occur. Claims service is core to an insurance company keeping their promise, being there when their customers need them most. Yet ValuePenguin’s study reveals that among the top four U.S. insurance carriers, over 50% of all complaints focused on claims. This confirms that despite the steady advancement of technology intended to improve the claim process, consistently meeting customer expectations remains a challenge.

Ease of interactions, clear expectations, responsiveness plus full and fair resolution contribute to a customer being satisfied with their claim experience. Their journey begins with their first outreach to their insurance company to report a loss, injury or other covered event. Referred to as filing a claim, claim intake or First Notice of Loss (FNOL), that initial interaction can set the tone for the customer’s experience through investigation, settlement and payment for their loss. As the expression goes, there is no second chance to create a great first impression.

Whether it be for an auto accident, submitting a parental leave claim, or a building fire, both the information gathered and process involved at claim intake is crucial to ensure a smooth and empathetic claims experience. If you have ever reported a claim, you may have found that the initial call into your insurance company was frustrating, potentially adding to the stress of the loss itself. You may have had to hold for an available service representative for what felt like a lifetime. And then the breadth and depth of questions you needed to answer, could have felt more like an interrogation than a conversation. Automation solutions can improve customer satisfaction while meeting the increasing demand for self-service options.

Multiple claim intake channels

The First Notice of Loss is the beginning of a customer’s claim journey when the initial report is communicated to their insurance carrier after a loss or covered life event, injury or illness has occurred. The overall goal of the FNOL process is to gather the information needed to take the appropriate next steps to resolve the claim accurately and as quickly as possible. Insurance companies need to support multiple claim intake channels. This includes telephonic, often through centralized call centers that provide 24 x 7 x 365 availability.

Paper reports can be received through traditional mail, including state-specific accident and workplace injury forms, and ACORD documents completed by insurance agents on behalf of their customers. New claim reports can also be received as email attachments or through inbound fax transmissions. Some insurance carriers have created web-based customer portals, mobile applications and/or chatbots to facilitate customer interactions including FNOL.

The FNOL process

The FNOL process needs to optimize getting enough information from the customer at the first point of interaction, provide the customer with insight on what to expect next and when, and with empathy.

Identifying the customer during the claim intake process is important. The insurance policy is a contract, and can have customer-specific terms on what is covered. Some customers may have special services they have purchased, that can include dedicated claims adjuster teams, customized service provider networks or the types of losses when emergency resources are dispatched to the scene of an accident.

During the FNOL process, the insurance company needs to know not only the extent of the loss, if possible, the cause. The extent of the loss enables the insurance company to apply its expertise in terms of guidance on next steps. If a delivery truck filled with perishables isn’t driveable, a salvage company may be in order to avoid a total loss of the product.

How the loss occurred positions the claims adjuster to rule out any insurance policy exclusions, or begin looking into other responsible parties involved.

The nature and extent of the loss can influence which claims office or claims adjuster will be assigned a newly reported claim. Some insurance companies have specialized teams based on customer, industry or types of events.

Customer experience first

While facilitating the capture of the needed information and offering guidance on next steps, any claim intake process needs to remember the customer is not a claims professional. This loss could be their first experience reporting a claim. Regardless of its actual severity, assume it is of great significance to the customer, not to mention a source of distress. Hence the importance of the FNOL experience being an empathic one.

Testing to balance customer experience with FNOL process needs It’s essential for insurance companies to adopt an “outside-in” approach to their FNOL process. Consider some experiments where you test out your company’s various claim intake channels across several dimensions:

• Were you able to select the path to report your claim that you preferred?  Call centers are a key provider of FNOL services but odds are not every customer’s preferred path. Does your call center phone system offer the option to switch to a text-based process? Or schedule a call back if there’s a hold queue?
• Did you feel like a customer or a stranger? Not all insurance companies have integrated their policy data to their claims process. But when a customer feels frustrated by having to convey information that their insurance company already has, the claim journey has started off at a deficit. While you may not be able to solve for an integration gap, you can explore automation solutions to personalize and streamline your customer’s experience.
• Does the flow of information requested make sense? Take a moment to gauge the sequence of information requested - does it feel like how the average person would describe, say, a car accident?
• Were the questions reasonable to ask and not hard to answer? The FNOL process is not intended to eliminate the need for subsequent interactions between the customer and the claims adjuster.Be careful to not push the downstream claim system data requirements onto the customer, if that information is not absolutely needed at the point of intake.

Use these survey results to create a scorecard. And from there a prioritized backlog of problems to solve or opportunities to improve. Your customers will notice and appreciate it.

Technology impact on FNOL

Technology continues to influence customer expectations for the claim intake process. Gartner predicts that customers expect to manage 85% of their relationships with enterprises without interacting with a human. And that by 2025, 80% of customer service organizations will have abandoned native mobile apps in favor of messaging for a better customer experience. According to AARP Research, the generation gap on smartphone usage and texting is narrowing. Smartphone adoption is 86% among Americans age 50-59, 81% percent for those 60-69, and 62% of those 70 and older. And 95% of seniors age 65+ send text messages weekly.

Ushur is staying ahead of the technology needs of insurance carriers when it comes to the FNOL process. Ushur’s ability to automate the FNOL process provides carriers with reduced processing times and operating costs. The customer experience can be improved through an 8x reduction in claim intake processing time no matter the time of day. Furthermore, Ushur’s Invisible App, powered by advanced AI delivers a strong FNOL automation solution at a 90% cost reduction. Combining improving customer experience with lowered operational costs is a win-win for any insurance carrier.

Ushur Closes $5M Series B Extension from Aflac Ventures and Iron Pillar

Sometimes what was thought to be old can be new again—or at least extendable and reusable. MVP can be realized by resurfacing your “legacy” POC experience.

An insurance professional probably does not go through a day without digital transformation being part of a conversation, or referenced in an email or an article. While newer members of the industry might believe the importance and impact of technology on the insurance journey is more recent, it’s actually been a critical component all along. Even the Agile concept of Minimum Viable Product—or—MVP isn’t as entirely new as some might think at first glance.

I began my claims adjuster journey in the 1980s using a then recently introduced mainframe system, and it was then several years between its first and second release. Needless to say, the breadth and depth of the process and operational impact was massive with each implementation. But by design, there weren’t activities or avenues for incremental user previews and feedback.

Over the subsequent decades, there were leapfrogs of new coding languages and architectures, each one enabling more opportunities to automate. While carriers were able to achieve monthly or even weekly maintenance releases following the initial implementation of a new core policy, claims, or billing system, major releases could still be two or three years (or more) in the making. And true to our waterfall approach at the time, the scope was based on documented (and aging) requirements versus continuous (and current) user input.

Today the focus is all about customer experience, inclusive of every interaction they have with an employee, along with any and all digital and paper touchpoints that they have with their insurance company. The appeal of agile development practices is obvious—what is not to love about the Principles behind the Agile Manifesto? But for many, achieving rapid and continuous delivery of solutions intently focused on customer value, while keeping pace with massive industry change, is a steep hill to climb.

Key to delivering customer value early and often is the agile concept of MVP. Anyone who has been part of making that initial scope decision can attest to there being about as many interpretations of both what is minimum and viable as there are people participating in the conversation. Why? Because we are more familiar with delivering nothing until being ready to deliver everything.

Having journeyed through my own MVP learning curve, I’ve realized it wasn’t an entirely new concept after all. Long before beginning an agile transformation, I had been part of many proofs of concept as my company strived to learn how to best leverage new technologies and introduce wholly unfamiliar automation scenarios. The concept of a POC emerged in the 1960s with the goal to test the feasibility of an idea that could be small, if not incomplete.

I will date myself by confessing my POC journey includes leading a carrier’s first customer-facing capability using the internet. Our market leaders found us the perfect policyholder to partner with, to design and implement our first run at web-based reporting of worker’s compensation claims. Our developers and business systems analysts often worked at our customer’s office, so they could give us real-time feedback on flows and features through hands-on use in our test environment. Our team was commissioned in September of 1998 and the first claim was successfully reported online, in production, in February of 1999.

I hope that timeline makes a few pause—five months to deliver a brand new, customer-facing capability—more than twenty years ago. And by the way, that included the designing and implementing the technical and operational infrastructure, from security to support.

As we forge ahead, leveraging Agile methodologies to drive digital transformation, some of the terms and concepts may sound new or unfamiliar but don’t let this frustrate your efforts.

Sometimes what was thought to be old can be new again—or at least extendable and reusable. MVP can be realized by resurfacing your “legacy” POC experience.

Insurtech continues to be an emerging market and one investors are pouring money into, based on both its impact and potential.  Across the first three quarters of 2020 there were 274 insurtech deals globally totalling $5.1B.  These companies are on a mission to inject innovation and advanced technology into an industry ripe for a change from its traditional ways of doing business. Technology has been deployed into every stage of the insurance lifecycle.  From getting quotes to filing claims, technology such as artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way insurance carriers, brokers, companies, and consumers do business. This blog will look into some of the ways insurance companies are using technology to add value for their customers and distribution partners, and explore some of the ways technology is set to reshape the insurance industry in 2021.

The following questions will be explored to see how technology will continue to change a conservative industry for the better:

How Do Insurance Companies Use Technology?

The insurance industry had lagged behind other service industries like retail when it came to embracing the most recent technological revolution. But this is changing as business and technology leaders are embracing how innovative technologies can transform their products, services, and internal operational efficiency. Technology is also being leveraged heavily to improve the customer experience (CX) for an industry where the buyer comes to the table not always by choice, with insurance often being required versus otherwise desired. A few ways insurance carriers are embracing technology include:

• Predictive Analytics – More insurers are leveraging the evolution of computing power to better serve customers through increased automation and greater precision in product pricing. Aggregating and analyzing internally and externally available data allows carriers to better predict loss outcomes, to be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to triaging claim complexity, identify fraud indicators, recognizing emerging trends, and strengthening risk selection.

• Telematics – Increased availability and adoption of telematics can offer a win-win for customers and their insurance carrier. Policyholders gain transparency into how their driving behaviors affect their risk, and in turn they can directly influence their premium.  The carrier has increased confidence that they are charging the right amount, to be both competitive and profitable.  And the carrier gains invaluable data to incorporate into their predictive analytics. As insurance companies create incentives for safer driving practices, they are also having a larger positive impact on society.

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Many industries are embracing the power AI delivers to improve internal processes and the overall customer experience. Healthcare, e-commerce, and banking have all integrated AI solutions to help transform how they do business. The insurance industry is also embracing AI to transform workflows within underwriting, policy administration, loss prevention, billing, payments, claims, marketing and even fraud detection. To show how important AI is to the insurance industry, Accenture reported that 81% of surveyed insurers acknowledge that technology has become an inseparable part of the human experience. This means insurers must prioritize offering digital experiences that meet if not exceed their customers’ expectations of both automation and empathy.

How is Technology Helping the Insurance Industry?

Advanced technology is helping the insurance industry in all areas of the business, from marketing to claims. Modern solutions provide carriers with more modular replacements of their legacy core systems. Newer systems not only enable the current customer experience, workflow and product demands. They offer carriers faster speed to market and the ability to layer in capabilities over time. Partnerships are on the rise, giving insurance companies more “plug and play” options to introduce new functionality. Digital outreach is an enhancement that gives insurance companies the ability to initiate meaningful customer interactions throughout the year, to establish a differentiating relationship versus simply having an annual transactional connection. Lowering costs and improving customer satisfaction are two of the main ways technology is helping the insurance industry. Below are a few benefits technology can provides to help insurance carriers in 2021 and beyond:

• Product & Service Innovation - Both insurtechs and experienced core system providers, sometimes through partnerships, are enabling carriers to bring new insurance products to market. Speed to value is increasing and the expense is lessening through technology designed for agile delivery, low/no-code frameworks and SaaS options.
• Lowering Operating Expense – Offering customers, claimants, and members digital self-service options reduces the inbound and outbound interactions otherwise handled by employees. Taking maximum advantage of the data a carrier accumulates daily can be used to continuously improve the accuracy of machine learning and expand successful process automation.  No-code platforms enable automation design to move closer to the actual business user, reducing the cost and time of hand-offs to more constrained IT talent.  Expense reduction can give carriers greater pricing flexibility, to avoid losing business solely based on price.

• Customer Experience – Businesses know that customer experience matters and as the expression goes, there are no second chances to create a great first impression. More and more people of all ages are becoming digital natives, even those who a year ago may have been digital-tolerant or even digital-adverse.  With that evolution, the expectation that service providers offer the customer the choice on how to engage is shifting from differentiator to commodity.  Technology like SMS texting, next-generation chatbots and mobile browser interfaces are providing modern communication options to customers.  And they are building two-way connections that insurance carriers can utilize for meaningful conversations with their customers throughout the year, not just when a bill is due or a claim is filed.

• Fraud Prevention – Insurance fraud is big business, and hurts everyone as the costs chip away at household budgets and company profits. It is not a victimless crime - the FBI estimates that the total cost of insurance fraud (not including health insurance) exceeds $40 billion annually and costs the average U.S. family between $400 and $700 per year. Technology coupled with data can enable insurance companies to detect the warning signs of potential fraud earlier and earlier in the life of a claim.  And when multiple carriers’ Special Investigation Units compare and share their insights, the power of the many is realized.

In What Ways is Technology Set to Reshape the Insurance Industry in 2021?

With the technological disruption of the insurance industry well underway, it is time to look forward to seeing what the future holds. As the industry continues to embrace innovation, here are a few hot technology trends to watch out for in 2021:

• Automation Platforms - Automating the full insurance customer experience and internal processes cannot be solved by a single technology. Robotics Process Automation (RPA), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are complimentary but not interchangeable.  RPA automates repeatable, predictable tasks without interpretation. It can help process claims 75% faster by easily collecting data from various sources without the need for human touch and improves data quality.  AI simulates the human ability to understand each unique interaction and respond appropriately, as we experience with (effective) chatbots.  ML (a subset of AI) automates processes based on learning from data - and it gets more accurate over time as it has access to more data to learn more.  Carriers can use ML offer tailored product offerings and optimized pricing without requiring the human expertise of an underwriter.  Carriers who understand their full span of automation needs will avoid the disappointment of discovering that one-size automation solution does not fill all.
• SaaS + Cloud – As insurance carriers replace or modernize their legacy core systems, they need to journey through the build, buy, or lease decision, along with taking a fresh look at their hosting strategy. Many legacy core systems still in use were created by carriers when there were few vendor options to consider purchasing, and those available couldn’t stretch to meet the carrier’s functional needs without significant customization.  Today the core system options are many, with extensive capabilities including configuration plus an ever-growing inventory of vetted partner component solutions available.  And the core providers that offer Software as a Service (SaaS) give insurance companies the benefits of cloud computing to lower costs, improve agility, and deliver new business services. According to IBM, cloud computing offers insurers the ability to scale existing IT services such as storage and computing power to keep processing times low while optimizing service levels. And the cloud is not only an option when introducing a net-new core system.  Some carriers are evaluating their entire application portfolio for cloud migration opportunities, regardless of a system’s age or origin.  Even partial cloud migrations can offer a positive return on investment.
• Blockchain – Claims fraud is not just a multi-billion dollar insurance industry problem, it’s a societal issue. As carriers look for better ways to predict fraud through AI, blockchain could be another part of their fraud-fighting solution. Blockchain creates a digital ledger that is visible by all in the transaction chain, bringing fraud activity out of the shadows and into the open. Blockchain also has the power to revolutionize claims processes, making them three times faster and fives times less expensive. Using shared ledgers plus smart contracts that turn paper insurance policies into programmable code, claim payments can be automated creating more efficiency and accuracy. Digital ledgers can help automate legacy processes, eliminating hours of paperwork.  The risk of human error is reduced since all forms and data are safely stored along the blockchain. This security and transparency is appealing to insurance carriers who process sensitive data frequently every day.

What are the Most Interesting Innovations in the Insurance Industry?

It is an exciting time for technology in the insurance industry. Perhaps the most interesting innovation is how the participants are changing. Carriers are embracing insurtech more than ever with more insurers investing in, acquiring or partnering with startups to help innovate their current business models. Digital-first companies like Uber, Tesla, and Amazon have expanded into the insurance space. Car manufacturers are partnering with insurance companies for their dealerships to become points of sale. Insurers are looking to improve the customer experience, lower costs, and more accurately assess and price risks in an increasingly diverse and competitive marketplace. With these goals in focus, technology will be an essential and strategic partner to help achieve insurance carriers’ goals for this year and for many more years to come.

See How Ushur Has Been at the Forefront of Technology in the Insurance Industry

Ushur’s technology is helping take insurance into 2021 and further. With services like the Invisible App which allows insurers to create a dynamic customer engagement with no coding experience needed, the future is here for improving and automating the insurance customer experience. Ushur also has solutions that assist with claims triaging, call deflection and email processing automation, lowering costs while giving customers the attention they demand in today’s changing market. Our no-code platforms allow automation workflow development by business analysts, freeing up IT groups to work on complex technical projects while increasing speed of rollout of new business solutions. These are just a few ways Ushur is leading the insurance industry into the new digital age, one that benefits both insurers and their customers alike.

Ushur is on a mission to transform how insurance carriers do business. From process automation to claims optimization, our easy-to-use platforms are the perfect match for any insurer whether in the P&C or LA&H space. The future is happening right before our eyes in the insurance industry, it is no time for insurers to sit back, it is time to act. Click here to request a demo today!

Insurance is one sector of the financial services industry which has faced challenges as it embraced the digital revolution - first by choice and then by necessity following the pandemic lockdown. Cloud computing has taken hold, but some carriers are early in exploring solutions like artificial intelligence and machine learning.Insurance companies are eager to find technologies that cannot just improve but differentiate their overall customer experience, ideally while also reducing operational expense. One specific area insurance companies are looking at closely is claims service and process automation or as Ushur likes to call it, the future of insurance.

With claims experience being a critical factor in determining customer loyalty, insurance companies are figuring out ways to implement data science concepts to better serve their customers when they need them most. As proof of how valuable the claims experience is to customer retention, an Accenture study found of those customers who were dissatisfied with their claims experience, 29% said they had already moved to a new insurance carrier, and 54% said they planned to switch in the next 12 months. In other words, 4 out of 5 dissatisfied claim customers are likely to leave after a poor claims experience. From the first notice of loss to the claim payment, many key service touchpoints and processes can be fully automated to at least match customer expectations, accelerate handling while reducing operational costs. Customer and claimant interactions during a claim are key to providing superior service and automating claims processes is the new frontier to help carriers gain an advantage in a fiercely competitive market.

What is Automated Claims Service & Process?

Recent advancements in technology are allowing insurance carriers to decrease touchpoints between claims staff and customers, creating lower touch, or even touchless experience from claim intake to settlement, by design. For example, an Intelligent Insurer’s Claims 2020 Survey found that 58% of respondents felt that touchless claims had the greatest potential to drive efficiency. Automated claims processing not only takes the customer experience to a new level but also lowers operational costs at the same time. By automating routine tasks, adjusters have additional time to focus on more complex claim issues and to provide the human touch when and where the customer expects it.

Ushur is helping revolutionize claims service and process automation, from initial claim intake to automating two-way interactions for status and payments. For customers this means faster service across the life of their claim, helping accelerate carrier responsiveness from days (or weeks) to hours (if not minutes). No matter the type of claim, from short-term disability to an automobile accident, Ushur’s platform turns data into actionable customer engagements to elevate the customer experience across the Life, Accident and Health (LA&H) and Property and Casualty (P&C) lines of business.

For example, a customer is driving down the road in the middle of the night and collides with an object. Using Ushur’s platform the customer would be able to text with a chatbot in the middle of the night reporting the accident and getting information on what steps to take next. Or as soon as an employer notifies their carrier about a workplace injury, the injured employee could receive a reassuring note that their workers compensation claim is in progress. With current legacy insurance systems this customer or injured worker may have to wait a few days to reach someone on the phone to find out what to do with their damaged vehicle, or when their first benefit check will be issued. Ease of customer interaction and responsive service drive customer satisfaction, it is that simple.

Claims Management Volatility

In an uncertain world, it is never 110% known when an adverse event will necessitate a customer to file a claim. However, insurance companies over the years have collected enough data that enables them to anticipate seasonal peaks and valleys in claim frequency and severity. For example, in the United States, natural perils can be timed based on historical data. Hurricanes are more common in between August and October while wildfires in the western United States are more prominent in the months of May through October. These data insights allow claims departments to ramp up their workforce before these forecasted periods of high claims volume become reality. Some carriers may solve for temporary capacity shortfalls during predicted periods of high claim frequency through temporary resources or contracting with a claims outsourcing company. Historical data reveals similar claims peaks in the LA&H segment, where disability claim frequency increases during periods of economic recession. The seasonality of claim volumes provides a perfect environment for claims automation processes to take the reins of to offer scalable and responsive service interactions that are better solved by insurance-savvy artificial intelligence. When claims processes can be automated this helps remove bottlenecks that otherwise develop due to large volumes of new losses being reported to an insurance company after a significant event. With current insurance knowledge on the timing of peak claims volumes, automation can also proactively send valuable information to customers on how to mitigate damage from an upcoming event. Carriers can reach out to their customers to provide guidance on what process to follow if something bad does occur, and even offer access to service providers to assist with immediate repairs. These communications can be pushed out automatically through Ushur’s platform, reaching customers through text or email, based on their digital channel preference. While offering valuable service both pre- and post-loss, claims adjuster capacity is protected to focus on the hands-on help some customers need during a catastrophic event.

Why is Managing Your Insurance Claims With Automation Important?

Being an insurance adjuster can be a stressful job to say the least and these professionals sometimes resemble first responders following a significant event, ranging from a weather catastrophe or a serious injury. In times of crisis, a human touch is needed to support customers, guide them through the unfamiliar claim process and offer them peace of mind. This is where the value of claims service and process automation adds infinite value for insurance companies, their customers, members, and claimants. Communication and empathy are the two main components of a successful claims experience. Lack either of these and your customer will be shopping for a new carrier before the adjuster’s phone call ends. Through automation of predicted activities (like following up for an update after a recent doctor’s visit, or offering digital payment enrollment), adjusters can focus on the human touch, providing a hand to hold in time of need to ensure normal life is closer than the customer thinks.

Claims service automation not only increases responsiveness to customer inquiries but also lowers operational costs at the same time. With adjusters handing routine tasks off for artificial intelligence to automate, claims resources can be made more efficient. Arming claims adjusters with automation support allows them to focus on complex losses that need more human interaction, analysis and decision making. Ushur’s ability to automate claims service and processes is the future of insurance, elevating the customer experience leading to increased revenues, lower costs, and positive brand reputation. Ushur offers insurance companies the recipe of success as they compete within the rapidly expanding digital frontier.

Getting the Most out of Claims Service Automation

Ushur’s intelligent automation platform provides flexible customer engagements where the customer is in control of their claim experience from start to finish. The platform is omni-channel, empowering customers with multiple ways from email, to text to mobile apps and chatbots to directly engage with their insurance company at anytime from anywhere. These customer micro-engagements™ are data mines for continuous carrier learning, meaning the platform is enabling carriers to elevate how to best serve their customers with every interaction.

Ushur’s No-Code FlowBuilder enables business analysts to create automated workflows making it easier on claims staff to focus on complex issues while routine tasks are being taken care of by automated processes driven by artificial intelligence. Implementation is made even easier as customer workflows can be customized without a need for coding skills, giving insurance companies greater control on how they engage with customers throughout the claims process. Ushur customers are creating and deploying new, high value automations in hours or days. They are seeing significant inbound call volume reductions and elevated customer satisfaction scores through proactive claim status updates. This allows insurers to build great customer experience when customers need them the most.

Let Ushur help automate your company’s business processes to lower costs and improve customer satisfaction. It has been proven that customers whose claims experience exceeds their expectations are more likely to stay with their current insurance company even when product pricing is taken into consideration. Let go of the constraints of legacy systems and allow smart technology to take your claims organization to the next level.

Today when we speak about digital transformation within insurance, it can sound like it is something relatively new.  In actuality, technology has been playing a pivotal role in the insurance industry for decades. I can still remember the shift from processing claims entirely on paper to using mainframe applications.  Seemingly overnight we redesigned our processes, organizations, and evolved how we interacted with our customers.

There is a school of thought that incumbent carriers, even those that are industry leaders, are at a disadvantage to be digital innovation leaders, because people with more time spent within the industry are less inclined to see the opportunities for change. Yet what I have learned from my own insurance journey, is that success and longevity in the industry requires change to be foundational in the company culture.

A day in the life at an insurance company includes providing service, while designing new products to address emerging demands, pivoting too rapidly to respond to another unanticipated, if not catastrophic event, while rallying to adopt a regulatory change that arrived with a retroactive effective date. And that’s before the announcement later in the day of a new VIP account just landed that will include forming dedicated teams and a massive data conversion.

When it comes to driving digital transformation, incumbent insurance companies have a compelling advantage over their newer digital competitors – the highly tenured expertise and customer insight of its employees, who thrive in a fast-paced environment where change is a constant.

What do the successful digital transformers have in common? They embrace agility as a state of mind across their entire organization.  While they may call it their “agile transformation”, it is introduced, implemented and sustained to be “how we work.” The shift to agile is co-owned by all leaders, not solely resting on the shoulders of the CIO. Changes are made across the spectrum of people, process, and technology to leverage all of those assets to their best potential, albeit differently than they did before. Business and IT teams converge easily as they support each other during a shared change journey, where concepts like “MVP” and “Backlogs” and “Sprints” do not only apply to systems work.

Tower Insurance is proof of what’s possible when a highly successful and seasoned (in business for over 150 years) P&C insurance carrier takes an agile approach while going all-in to become a digital challenger. They were well on their way when they selected Ushur to create a closer, differentiating omnichannel digital connection with their customers. I won’t spoil the exciting story that is told in Ushur’s case study of Tower Insurance.  But I will offer a few teasers of what Tower accomplished early in their Ushur journey – their first solution was up and running in less than a month. And they didn’t even need an hour to have a storm warning ready to send to thousands of customers.

Tower Insurance’s agile, collaborative and innovative approach combined with Ushur’s modern, no-code, artificial intelligence enables them to continuously solve for every insurance company’s reality - that their next #1 customer experience priority could be 5 minutes away from someone’s inbox.

Insurance companies are focused more than ever on optimizing the experience they provide to customers. And if digital interactions were not at the top of the list of capabilities needed at the beginning of 2020, it became everyone’s #1 priority when the worldwide pandemic shutdown began. As this year draws to a close, we can all see that customer expectations have permanently shifted, with an Amazon-like experience quickly becoming table stakes for the insurance industry.

With a variety of insurance automation solutions available, how does an insurance company, keenly focused on managing its customers’ risks, also embrace the agile mindset of experimentation and failing fast, to as quickly as practical find the tools and vendor expertise that best meet their needs? While it’s enticing to say “go!” based on some impressive demonstrations, it is likely to put your organization on a path toward disappointment, surprises, and compromises when the chosen solution comes up short in solving your problems. After all, there are many types of automation, from RPA (robotics process automation) to AI (artificial intelligence) to ML (machine learning), to just name a few. Also not all solution providers are the same, in terms of their services, expertise and insurance industry experience, in addition to being a good cultural fit with your team.

The first step to making an informed selection is a proof of concept, as a test of feasibility and viability. Unlike a pilot, which runs in a production environment as a precursor to a full-scale implementation, a proof of concept might never move past a test environment.

A proof of concept not only enables an insurance company to test the technology from a feature perspective, but is also where the corresponding changes to roles and workflow are part of the experiment. Absent testing from the people-process-technology lens, jumping directly into a pilot increases the likelihood of using a modern solution in a tenured construct of work alignment and overhead. Utilizing the new technology to its fullest potential probably requires changes in roles and processes. Modern automation solutions often target business systems analysts as their primary users, versus older tools that require developer coding expertise for everything. And new products are prone to embrace agile practices, focusing on continuous delivery over documentation.

Ushur has created a proof of concept guide to share our expertise on what goes into a successful proof of concept for automation.

From how to build a cross-functional team, to having metrics up front to measure the impact, to how to progress from walk to jog to run, this guide offers the recipe to a successful automation proof of concept.

Throughout the guide, Ushur also includes insight on what an insurance company should expect from an automation vendor during this test-and-learn phase. Remember, a proof of concept not only experiments with the solution and your own organization – it also determines if the provider brings the right thought leadership, skills, and services to the table.

I’m thrilled to share that Ushur has secured $25 million in Series B funding! Today, we welcomed new partners to our team led by Third Point Ventures, with our friends at 8VC joining as well.

This new investment is more than just a vote of confidence. It’s a testament to the talented team we have assembled, the excellence of the technology platform we’ve created, and our dedication to our happy customers.

It’s also further validation that we’re onto something big.

The early years of a startup are about scanning for signal. You’re constantly searching for product-market fit. You may have great technology, but you’re discovering who needs it and why. Or you are figuring out how to sell it.

Those days are behind us. We hear our signal loud and clear. We’ve created the most complete, easiest-to-use, AI and cloud-native automation platform. It’s a compelling proposition for any industry. But for our Fortune 500 customers in the insurance industry, it’s more than that. It’s transformational.

Insurance companies are remarkable institutions. The most successful have survived more than a hundred years, the oldest more than 200. You don’t weather war, depression, and profound societal change by making reckless decisions. You exercise caution. You take care of your customers, building trust and loyalty. You make prudent, deliberative choices so you can pass the business along to the next generation, and the next after that.

But today, even insurance companies are subject to the tempo of modern business. They face competition from digital-native startups. They see their customers’ habits and expectations evolving. People text more and talk less on the phone. Customers believe — rightly — that they call the shots in their business relationships. The consumer has gotten used to serving themselves at their own pace, on their own schedule, on their own terms.

Insurance companies, for their part, are “high-contact” businesses. They have to process a tremendous volume of customer, broker, and agent interactions every day. They want to get closer to their constituents and communicate with them more effectively. They want to steer email questions to the right subject matter experts, and send relevant and effective product offers to brokers, agents, and customers who actually need them rather than blasting out mailers that just get tossed in the recycling.

The question they all have is: “How do we do that?”

Ushur is the answer. We give insurers a way to dramatically streamline and update how they engage with consumers without sacrificing their core, tried-and-true values . And it’s a way that actually works. By combining conversation as a service with process automation, and delivering this through a Cloud-native, No-Code builder, we enable our insurance customers to quickly deploy and see value. That value is realized in the form of servicing customer workflows rapidly, reducing expense ratios by automating manual tasks, and enhancing the customer experience that is measured through a significant increase in NPS and customer satisfaction scores.

If you can help insurers achieve one or two of these metrics, it is a win. If you can help them with all three, that’s a big deal.

Take the experience of Ken Lynch, Head of Information Services at Irish Life, Ireland’s leading life insurer, realizing how quickly the company saw returns from Ushur’s AI:

“The results we got were phenomenal, and we hadn't written a line of code. We’d never seen anyone who could do that. From our standpoint, Ushur were the only ones out there truly doing something different.”

But the complete Ushur package is more than just AI and workflows. It’s in our ability to execute. We’ve learned a lot over the past year. We’ve become very good—and very fast—at getting insurers up and running, to the point where we’re now measuring Time to Value in mere weeks. Not months or years, but weeks, during a global pandemic, at some of the largest companies in the world.

Which speaks to the observation from Mike Simonds, COO Unum Group: “As impressive as their technology is, the quality of the Ushur team may be what sets them apart. They really care about our success.”

It’s true -- we do care. And more than that, we’re dialed in. Over the next year, we’re going to take our technology and everything we’ve learned about putting Ushur to work, and go to market with even greater intensity, a faster cadence, and a vastly expanded scope.

It’s an exciting moment, and one we could have only reached through the hard and skilled work of our team and the faith of our investors and customers. Completing this fundraising round in the middle of a pandemic was a humbling experience, to say the least. We will continue to increase our differentiation by investing in our product and people, as we accelerate our customer acquisition.

It’s a good day to look forward, and we have a lot to look forward to.

10 months into the longest year on record, and you’ve probably learned a thing or two about Zoom calls. Mute yourself so your colleagues can’t hear the tantrum your sequestered child is throwing. Unmute yourself so your two minutes of pithy analysis don’t accidentally go straight to your cat.

But as much as you may have developed a healthy aversion to that 20-person meeting where either no one or everyone is speaking, there is no denying that virtual events come with a few built-in advantages - convenience, effortless mobility, emoticons, and the opportunity to interface with brilliant minds and ideas around the world at the click of a button.

As you gear up for a virtual InsureTech Connect 2020 (ITC 2020), it’s tempting to rue the lack of conference buzz (the conversations and the champagne), the casual encounters with colleagues across the industry, and the ability to explore without a set agenda.

But ITC 2020 has been hard at work to recreate and reinvent some of the best aspects of a real-world conference, while eliminating many of the headaches and inefficiencies along the way.

A few proactive steps could make this your most rewarding, frictionless conference yet, virtual or not.
Here’s why:

• Make more meaningful connections with insurance executives and technologists around the world, unbounded by geography and attendance constraints.
• Cut through the clunkiness of booking in-person meetings by going online. And whether you’re a large enterprise customer or a spunky technology startup, the virtual conference is a great equalizer.
• Pack in the AMA (Ask Me Anything) roundtables, workshops, and seminars that are relevant to your line of business. Instead of sprinting across a packed conference floor, pre-select the juicy-sounding sessions.

As a gold-level sponsor (come say hi to us at Booth 435 at the Expo show!), Ushur believes that ITC 2020 may prove to be the best one yet!

Here are Ushur’s top 5 recommendations for proactively maximizing your ITC 2020 attendee experience.

Register early.

It’s like voting - the sooner you do it, the less headache down the road. Registering early gives you the opportunity to explore the ITC 2020 portal and gain familiarity with various tools and channels. With dedicated resources for Agenda-creation, Meeting Rooms, Expo, and Networking, you have limitless opportunities to create strong connections, collect business intelligence, and communicate your professional and/or corporate USP. Become the expert on how various conference tools work so you can take complete advantage of them and support less-savvy colleagues. Early exploration will also help you in terms of building out your online profile, individual or exhibitor, as you glean best practices from other attendees.

Create an agenda beforehand.

Unlike a real-world conference, the process to identify the topics, sessions, and connections that matter to you is extremely streamlined. Leverage the ITC 2020 search engine to hone in on the right companies and partners. With filters that allow you to select for specific days, regions, industries, session formats, and communication channels, keep yourself organized with an intuitive, drag and drop agenda tool. You can update this agenda as you go, adding and subtracting sessions as the conference progresses.

Research your connections and competition.

It’s never been easier to see who else is attending a conference. Clearly published attendee and speaker bios on the ITC site allow you to read up about presenters and potential partners. Scan LinkedIn and other professional networking forums to gather insights into what competitors and partners are seeking to accomplish. Search insurance and ITC-specific hashtags to get the early-bird scoop.

Sort and set meetings aka network like crazy.

With an all-inclusive meetings-tool at your disposal, you can suggest meetings and chat with the attendees you’ve (p)researched with ease, without resorting to clunky and time-consuming email exchanges. Online meeting etiquette is more democratic, and you now have the opportunity to access attendees outside your region, to engage in global business. Building personal relationships is more important now than ever, so take advantage of ITC’s many scheduled Happy Hours and breakout sessions to foster them.

Treat it like a real-world conference.

With the advent of recorded sessions and zero travel-time, it’s tempting to overcommit. Don’t. Pace yourself because 3 days of a virtual conference will be just as exhausting, even if you’re wearing comfortable/no shoes. Professional presentation still matters, so whether it’s a tasteful virtual background or a ring-light for illumination, be sure to put your best pixels forward. And give yourself plenty of breathing room. It’s tempting to schedule out your day, but remember that the screen can be taxing on your eyes, and strategic buffers allow you to recharge and be on time.

It’s understandable that the focus is on capabilities when evaluating an automation vendor - you need to know first and foremost if their product can truly meet your organization’s needs. The conversation usually pivots to cost - vendor software licensing, potential professional services needed, in addition to talent allocation from your own company.

What should also be occurring in parallel with learning about features and pricing is carefully evaluating how a solution provider would protect and secure one of your organization’s greatest assets - your data.

If an information security assessment is never completed, the reality is the risk of a major data breach that will damage your business and reputation is only a matter of when not if. When this evaluation is only initiated as the last step before signing a contract, you’ve lost - if not wasted - time.

Either you go into a holding pattern, as your data security team works with the solution provider to complete the assessment, and you’re not able to yet launch your important automation project.

Or the worst outcome becomes your reality if the vendor solution is found to not meet your company’s information security requirements. Now you’re back at square one to look for other automation options. You’re late even before you can get to solving business problems, improving the customer experience, and eliminating manual tasks for your employees.

In Part 1 of our Information Security (InfoSec) blog series, we introduced the idea of a vendor embracing a proactive information security approach as being mission-critical to protecting your - and your customers’ - enterprise data. Here in Part 2, we will discuss 6 important considerations for delivering the two key components of information security - cybersecurity and operational security, including Ushur’s recommendations for combating the associated challenges.

Cybersecurity focuses on protecting networks and systems from digital attacks. This is an increasing threat not only to businesses but also governments and our personal lives. Not a week goes by where we don’t read about a data breach at a company or a ransomware attack on a community. And we are all probably receiving phishing emails daily at home, as criminals try to access our personal data.

Operational security consists of the procedures and protocols used to maintain and enhance cybersecurity. If cybersecurity is the fortress, operational security is the camera system monitoring the perimeter to ensure all gates remain locked.

Cybersecurity

• Virtual Private Network (VPN) Techniques - Threats to your company’s network security are evolving minute-by-minute, as criminals develop new ways to detect - if not create - vulnerabilities to break in online. A VPN creates a secure, end-to-end connection, keeping activity on a public internet connection anonymous, private, virtually untraceable, with security and encryption. Introducing VPN features to your company’s network connections will strengthen the security of your external touchpoints. Regular and extensive auditing of any connections with an automation service provider is essential, to detect any warning signs of a potential problem emerging on their end.
• Network Redundancy - For anyone who has strung up holiday lights, all it takes is one bulb to go out and the whole string goes dark. Hence it’s vital for companies to have multiple options for network activity to travel, so a problem with one server doesn’t bring business to a halt. This “distributed architecture” is something you would want to see in place with an automation service provider. You will be leveraging their tool to conduct your business and you want high confidence that they have addressed any risk of downtime.
• Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS) Prevention - DDoS attacks involve bombarding a website with more traffic than its network can handle, to hopefully force it to shut down. When successful, a DDoS attack does major reputational damage to a company and can be both expensive and time consuming to repair. When selecting an automation solution provider, you want to be sure that they have DDoS preventative measures in place, including with any cloud partner in use.

Operational Security

• Change Management - Your company has a robust change management process in play to ensure any and all technology changes individually and in concert are technically compatible. This prevents a security gap that could emerge if one or more systems within your organization are no longer fully functional. An automation solution provider should be able to walk you through their change management policy - both how they manage change within their environments and how they will collaborate with you, as their customer, when they update their applications that you are using. This includes how they screen their code for potential security issues, including using code analyzer tools and a manual review process.

• Compliance Management - More and more legal data protection requirements are emerging, specific to a state or region, like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Plus, there is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). An automation solution provider should be able to explain how they ensure for each customer that they are adhering to that customer’s strictest data security requirements.
• Administrator Access - Managing systems and hardware requires some people to have extra access privileges so they can modify settings when needed. Some refer to this as “root” access. Admin access must be tightly managed and closely monitored to maintain the expected level of security over time. It’s important to understand how an automation solution provider limits access to their test and production environments. Ideally, multi-factor authentication is in use, with logging of all sign-ons and regular access audits.

Be Prepared

Be proactive and be informed. Ask questions as you explore new vendor partnerships. Be sure your business and technology teams are partnering early in the exploration process, to complete a 360 degree assessment as quickly and effectively as possible. Information security should be a shared responsibility for everyone in your organization.These cybersecurity and operational security best practices will help you safeguard your data.

To learn about how Ushur uses a proactive and end-to-end security approach to protect clients and arm them with confidence, check out our Information Security Whitepaper, where we discuss our security practices and protocols in-depth.

In the first of this three-part series, we explore what Information Security (InfoSec) is, what it isn’t, and which questions will help enterprise customers discern responsible intelligent automation vendors from those susceptible to data piracy.

Security is always excessive until it’s not enough.

Robbie SinclairHead of Security, Country Energy
NSW Australia

 

That’s a motto that savvy, Cloud-based companies live by. The cost of known data breaches since 2012 far exceeds $50 billion, according to one study by CGI and Oxford Economics.

As businesses, solutions, and customers rapidly migrate to the Cloud, the sheer number of expert-designed, collaborative platforms is a boon for innovation and new growth, and businesses that have traditionally operated in siloed, brick and mortar facilities stand to gain the most from this bonanza.

For a business that’s evaluating a cutting-edge technology, how a solution provider protects and secures information needs to be answered transparently, coherently, and completely. Otherwise, the risk of a major data breach is only a matter of when, not if.

Of equal importance is a company’s ability to ensure privacy. Given strict and diverse regulatory frameworks, it’s imperative for a solution provider to demonstrate future-proofed and comprehensive privacy protocols.

With the emergence of the Cloud, the narrative emphasis has been on cybersecurity, but secured data demands a turnkey, end-to-end approach.

To separate the wheat from the chaff, here are three questions that any vendor who is serious about InfoSec should be able to clearly answer:

1. What is your plan for maintaining and enhancing Cyber Hygiene?
2. What are your Physical Security protocols and how have these been integrated into your overall plan?
3. A breach happened. How do you execute Incident Management to minimize damage to me?

Ushur, for example, is committed to addressing each of these questions in its Information Security plan, thoroughly framing our security and privacy design. Our complete solutions for intelligent automation attract and retain Global 2000 enterprises because we innately understand security and reflect that in our people, processes, and technology.

A turnkey security and privacy plan seamlessly integrates proactive, adaptive, and reactive security models. In Parts 2 and 3 of this series, we will discuss both the challenges of delivering security and what a comprehensive strategy looks like, analyzing the following topics:

• Digital Security
• Organizational Security
• Vendor and Third-party Security, Privacy, & Compliance Management

Buzzwords and jargon abound when it comes to enterprise technology. Remember synergy? How about big data? No-code automation and citizen developers may seem equally amorphous at first blush.

How does no-code automation actually work, in real-life? Has it actually accelerated enterprise-scale development? On August 26, 2020, Ushur and two leading insurance providers who use its eponymous platform set out to find concrete answers to these questions during a live webinar and panel discussion hosted by Vandana Rao, VP of Customer Success.

Unum Group and Tower Insurance are leaders in their respective lines of business, providing diverse and comprehensive coverage and services to their clients. However, as insurance providers, they address completely different markets and their corporate histories, services, and strategies contrast sharply. Unum is a Fortune 500 global disability, life, and financial protection insurer. Tower Insurance is a medium-sized, digital challenger brand serving customers in New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.

What they do share is a keen sense of opportunity and urgency. Both enterprises are primed for these unprecedented times, successfully transforming how they do business by streamlining their teams for agility, accelerating growth, and completing their digital transformation journeys, by leveraging Ushur’s AI and no-code automation tools.

The panel format invited lively discussions among Rao and the panelists, Preetha Sekharan of Unum, and Miles Fordyce and Daniel Maconaghie of Tower. Sekharan, Head of Digital Incubator, brought her insight as an IT strategy and digital transformation leader at a mammoth enterprise. Fordyce, Head of Platforms, spoke to his broad background across a range of industries, including retail, logistics, and financial services. With Maconaghie, the IT integration and development lead at Tower, he detailed how Tower’s nimble brand was harnessing agile techniques and automation expertise to drive development and customer engagement.

Judging by the commentary and questions in the Q&A section, the audience was hungry for answers, and the panelists did not disappoint.

Defining Citizen Developers in the Enterprise Context

As Agile methodologies and no-code/low-code automation have proliferated to non-technical teams, so too has the idea of the citizen developer. Citizen developer is a team-agnostic term that highlights the trend of non-programming-focused teams using software tools and infrastructure to serve their needs (to learn more, read this comprehensive breakdown).

Sekharan was enthusiastic about the scalability and success of citizen developers. Within her own team, business users with no background in programming have been able to spin off full concepts after a few hours of demonstration.

The use cases are plentiful, and Sekharan feels that the deployment of business users as creators of complex workflow automations has been a win-win for both her team and IT, as they’ve become better partners.

“When I think ‘citizen developer’, I really think there are two challenges they solve [...]. IT resources are kind of at a premium - there is always more demand than supply. For me, ‘citizen developers’ are really people who may not be trained to program [...] with the right tools and a little training, now they can. And so that's really unleashing capacity across the overall organization. But almost more important than that is just the speed and agility,” Sekharan said.

And that speed and agility have been critical to keeping Unum and Tower on top in a highly competitive industry that has undergone seachanges with long-term shifts in customer expectations and options.

No-code Automation Helped Unum Group and Tower Insurance Get Agile

Imagine a Lego set, where each Lego is imbued with capabilities. The green Lego helps you fly. The yellow Lego keeps regenerating. The red Lego and blue Lego fuse to create a purple Lego that talks. This is the sort of fantastical Christmas set that kids dream up. Adults have made it a reality with no-code automation. In no-code automation, AI-imbued building blocks can be combined to create complex workflows and intelligent automations, without a lick of coding knowledge.

No-code automation has empowered business users in the guise of citizen developers to nimbly create and iterate new business tools, with guidance from IT departments that are rapidly becoming AI Centers of Excellence. And nowhere is this solution taking hold more dramatically than in the insurance industry.

Long recognizing that Tower Insurance’s viability as a challenger brand was dependent on its successful switch to digital outreach, Fordyce said that Tower, “had been driving very hard to be nimble [...] to position ourselves against large insurers [...] It’s about rapid deployment and that’s the space we want to play in.” Fordyce pointed out that Tower’s relatively small team and corporate structure was a boon when it came to quickly pivoting to an automation-centric approach.

In the midst of a global pandemic, Tower underwent a remote onboarding process with the Ushur platform, a testament to both the platform’s ease of deployment and the clear vision Fordyce had for Tower’s digital transformation. As Rao pointed out, the deployment took less than a month, in sharp contrast to other enterprise technology integrations that would often take the better part of a year.

Tower saw its investment in agility pay off almost immediately when a major storm in the Pacific left thousands of its New Zealand-based members scrambling. Tower’s business teams were able to quickly deploy self-designed solutions to collect critical information from customers over an omni-channel, two-way platform. This information was then used to fulfill claims, reducing risk and time to business significantly.

With customer touchpoints few and far between, ensuring a positive experience during a stressful event is exceptionally important for member retention. Tower’s speedy turnaround boosted member satisfaction and confidence, as measured by CSAT scores, demonstrating a very real-world ROI.

Sekharan, pushing innovation at a large multinational, has to consider very carefully the ability to implement across a vast number of organizations when evaluating a new technology or protocol.

“How do organizations code at scale when not everyone has the programming skills?” she posed rhetorically.

When it came to developing a series of member portals, she had to think long and hard about the most sustainable way to create these. After learning about Ushur’s drag and drop, yet highly differentiated platform, Unum Group decided against hiring an army of engineers to cobble together these custom portals. Aside from the price tag of training a new engineering team, the true cost in Sekharan’s mind lay in the time to deployment. Building a custom portal from scratch could take months, resulting in missed business opportunities.

With an AI-powered, no-code platform in their wheelhouse, Unum business teams could suddenly create complex and malleable journeys, supercharging the company’s solution development. More importantly, these teams could iterate in real-time. In today’s hyper-world, shortening the timeline from ideation to execution is an investment in sustainability and scalability, in Sekharan’s mind.

Even if you have strong engineering resources, she argued, creating an automation framework from scratch was resource-intensive, without a compelling pay-off. But with a ready-to-deploy platform like Ushur, a platform optimized for insurance, Sekharan knew she had a racehorse she could bet on.

Watch the webinar

What Business User-Driven Implementation Actually Looks Like

For policyholders who deal with their insurance providers infrequently, the process can often be bewildering and frustrating, from long holds on the phone to multi-step sagas for filing, updating, or even checking a claim. Business users, who have a holistic sense of these members’ needs, can actually create journeys that speak efficiently and logically to policyholders.

For insurance members, this means highly personalized interactions and communications that are tailored to their priorities. It’s typically complex processes like First Notice of Loss (FNOL) that are now step-by-step workflows that members can fill out on their preferred digital device, when the toddler and puppy are safely asleep. It’s a blend of automated and human support that is optimized for a seamless journey. In short, members don’t hate their insurance.

For members, if dealing with their insurance company is facile, nondisruptive, and digital, it’s a win.

This smoothness is mirrored on the implementation side. As a technical lead, Maconaghie has been responsible for integrating the Ushur platform and using its no-code toolkit to train business users to create engagements.

On the ‘how’ of achieving this, Maconaghie and Fordyce believe that it starts with leadership buy-in from the get-go.

“In order for us to get the outcomes we’ve been striving towards [...], if you’ve got someone who lives and believes in what the product can do and how you can deliver value really fast to your customers [...] executive sponsorship is necessary to determine how we actually interact with customers - getting a differentiated way to reach them [...]. From there, it was figuring out the opportunities,” said Fordyce.

Equally important? The business subject matter experts (SME) on Maconaghie’s team who knew the business process and who were empowered to make decisions.

They started small, strictly defining their MVP (minimum viable product). The business SMEs would take a limited set of use cases and build around those. “The first thing we did was get the [Ushur automation] live as quickly as possible. We had to test the use case first, to prove it. And once we determined, ‘ok, this one’s working,’ we’d keep iterating on this,” Maconaghie said, noting that only then would he bring in his IT developers to help with more complex integrations.

Maconaghie feels that oftentimes, IT teams have long, multi-step plans that, while comprehensive, can slow implementation when bottlenecks arise. Leading with business users cum no-coders, he felt Tower benefited from a startup-like, lean approach, where IT and business teams were now collaborating and complementing each other.

Sekharan, coming from a much larger enterprise, asked Maconaghie how he circumvented the shadow IT debate that embroils some tech CIOs. His answer - the proof is in the pudding. He emphasized that getting security team-approval early on in the process was critical to moving fast and hard.

“We can iterate very quickly, proving our dataset first. One of the first things we used Ushur for was getting data from our customers. [...] From day one, we’ve trained our business users, and it’s paid dividends.”

Start Small, Expand at Warp Speed

For Unum, the first citizen developed-Ushur automations have come in the form of micro-engagements™ over digital channels like texting which have dramatically improved resource optimization.

“Our claims adjudicators used to call five or six times just to get a hold of a customer. Now, everything is happening on the backend. It’s a text message that goes out. The consumer has been very comfortable answering questions over text,” said Sekharan.

Unum is now starting to leverage Ushur’s Invisible App, its white-labeled, two-way direct communication channel that mimics an app-like experience without requiring a download. She has found the dynamism and security of the Invisible App, in addition to its no-code architecture, of high-value to creating branded, immersive member engagements.

One of Tower’s first critical challenges was how to deal with paper-based mailers and emails that would bounce back from customers and land in long queues, waiting for customer service representatives to sort through them.

“Maybe it’s a cancellation of their policy which adds risk. So we used the Invisible App and omnichannel workflow to gather data [...] we’d take that address data and pull it back into our systems [...]. [The platform] did a little bit of everything,” Maconaghie said. More importantly, Maconaghie reiterated that the entire process from onboarding to execution had happened in less than a month.

Of course, with such rapid development, there is a theoretical risk of too many siloed projects that overlap or don’t integrate well within the organizations’ overall mandates. Fordyce addressed this by pointing out that IT can build guardrails and create a governance structure. By having IT coordinate solutions delivered by citizen developers, the IT department itself could become an automation Center of Excellence, “bringing this together in a framework that allows our people to be super flexible.”

Maintaining an Automation Edge

Consumer behavior is changing rapidly; the insurance industry’s insulation from change has been eroded by the rise of digital platforms and 24/7 access.

For these insurers, “stodgy” is NOT in their lexicon.

Embracing automation has allowed Unum and Tower to solve diverse, modern problems rapidly, improving policy-holder satisfaction, and reducing the risks and costs of business significantly.

As Rao underscored, “Unum and Tower have added capabilities without adding headcount.”

With low-code/no-code and citizen developers on the horizon, more leaders in the insurance space are adopting and adapting software ideology and project management to empower business users and rapidly accelerate automation development.

With business users in control of automation development via no-code builders, the ability to fill market niches on the fly and at scale is limitless. Learn more about the pitfalls and the successes on the path to digital transformation for insurance by watching this recorded Webinar.

With a history of success introducing digitally disruptive technologies into insurance, healthcare and financial services markets around the globe, Kate Gingras, JD, joins Ushur, the customer engagement automation platform, as the Vice President of Strategic Accounts.

Gingras, an insurance and technology industry thought leader, comes to Ushur by way of market makers Pegasystems (BPM), Appian (Low-Code/RPA) and Cogito (AI/ML). At these companies, she served in executive roles leading critical lines of business through exponential growth. In her new role, Gingras will guide Ushur’s growth as an AI, automation and no-code platform leader in key verticals including insurance, healthcare and financial services.

“Kate’s extensive background in the insurance industry, both in terms of her business acumen and deep understanding of the buyer needs, is a great and timely addition to the team as we focus on meeting and exceeding the growing demands of insurers. Her familiarity with BPM, RPA, and AI tools is a huge plus as Ushur challenges incumbents head-on by combining all of these tools in one disruptive, cloud-native, purpose-built automation solution,” said Simha Sadasiva, CEO of Ushur.

Gingras earned her Juris Doctorate at Suffolk University Law School and transitioned to a career in management consulting with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Insurance Practice. After participating in 250+ consulting engagements with insurers around the globe, Gingras joined IBM Global Business Services. Through IBM, she gained expertise priming large insurers for their digital transformation journeys. Gingras has since applied her transformation capabilities to move a number of different industries forward in their digital journeys.

About her new role at Ushur, Gingras said, “I am thrilled to help insurance and healthcare companies smooth out the piece of customer engagement that sits at the intersection of OpEx and CX. The ability to support two-way engagement in the micro-moment, and then hop between SMS, voice, email, chatbot, and custom service channels, seamlessly, while executing the underlying work, has proven a digital win-win for Ushur’s clients. The Ushur leadership is unyielding and has put together a team that is incredibly mission-driven. The technology is six years ahead, and the rate of engineering delivery is impressive. It’s hard to find a software or AI company so well-positioned. I’m grateful for the opportunity to introduce this platform to the insurance and healthcare markets.”

On August 26th, Ushur, an AI-powered automation platform, hosted its inaugural Innovation Awards ceremony, where individuals and companies were honored for their leadership in driving digital transformation initiatives in the insurance industry. Three awards went to two individuals and one company, respectively, who are “building a more compassionate world through their exemplary development and deployment of innovative AI solutions,” according to Simha Sadasiva, CEO of Ushur.

Unum, the Fortune 500 global disability, life, and financial protection insurance behemoth,won the Digital Transformation Innovator award. The individual awardees were Ken Lynch, Head of Information Services at Irish Life, and Ted Reed, who spearheaded business development at Unum Group prior to his retirement.

The event, which took place virtually at InsurTech Selection Day, was also a testament to Plug and Play Tech Center, an innovation platform that pairs large global corporations with vetted startups to foster relationships and improve corporate nimbleness while granting young companies access to institutional resources. According to Saeed Amidi, Plug and Play CEO, successes like Ushur, a Plug and Play portfolio company, “are a real pride and joy for me. [...] We pride ourselves on finding great entrepreneurs, incredible technologies and ideas, and then making a positive impact on their journeys.” Amidi and Simha opened the ceremony with a discussion of the companies’ close relationship, the opportunities to expand digital transformation to new verticals, and the need for agility as a startup working with enterprise clients.

The awards were especially significant in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic that has tested the ability of insurers to offer their policyholders consistent and quality service. While the honorees have been pushing digital innovation in career-long strides, their work has noticeably buttressed their organizations and stakeholders during the crisis that has seen rapidly rising and sustained policy-holder demand, highly remote workforces, and the confluence of urgent, seemingly unrelated disasters.

Simha acknowledged the unusual new pressures felt by the insurance industry.

Welcome everyone to the Ushur Innovation Awards. [...] We are obviously operating in a strange time. I think it’s therefore that much more important to bring people together, to recognize game-changing work.

Simha SadasivaCEOUshur

 

The winner of the Digital Transformation Innovator, Unum has been notable for its aggressive push towards conversational AI and workflow automations as a vector for new growth, modernization and better service. The desire for operational efficiency and enhanced member experience has been especially critical to Unum as it serves a diverse, global customer base.

Marco Forato, Unum’s SVP of Corporate Strategy and Development, underscored this idea. Given the nature of Unum’s products, potential customer touchpoints may be periodic, so it is incumbent on agent teams to deliver exceptional interactions.

Welcome everyone to the Ushur Innovation Awards. [...] We are obviously operating in a strange time. I think it’s therefore that much more important to bring people together, to recognize game-changing work.

Marco Forato Unum

 

As Simha pointed out, company-wide change at large enterprises is often a difficult, slow task, stating that “even at a startup like Ushur, every workplace tool we adopt - let’s just say adjustment is a process! So for a large enterprise to make strides in a new space can only be orders of magnitude more daunting.”

With a culture that rewards experimentation and leaning-in, Unum is a case study for large, deeply established enterprises on how they can nimbly pivot to keep would-be competitors at bay, while giving policyholders more flexibility and opportunity. According to Forato, the company has seen customer satisfaction metrics rise dramatically, and the success of the partnership has led to more opportunities for collaboration with Ushur.

Leveraging low-code solutions, Unum has pioneered empowering business teams to join the ‘citizen developer’ movement (read more). “We started with a small pilot a few years ago and now have over five applications, with more in the pipeline. [Ushur’s] ability to rapidly prototype and automate customer journeys has provided us with a competitive edge, delighting our customers while allowing our employees to focus on higher-value work,” Forato added in an email interview.

Simha highlighted that Unum was committed to working with startups despite the perceived difficulties of doing so. Forato agreed, praising the Ushur partnership and calling the company “a true partner in our digital transformation.”

Speaking from a sailboat off the Northeast coast, Reed recounted working with Ushur as a capstone to a long and impactful career driving change. “We began with a very small seed use case that we were able to turn around in literally less than a week [...] it evolved to many other solutions for intelligent automation opportunities [...] What this has taken on both parties’ parts is really good listening, the ability to see latent opportunities. [...]"

Welcome everyone to the Ushur Innovation Awards. [...] We are obviously operating in a strange time. I think it’s therefore that much more important to bring people together, to recognize game-changing work.

Ted ReedCEOUnum

 

Ken Lynch won the AI Pioneer Award for his vision to apply “the power of AI to create operational excellence and drive an unparalleled customer experience at Irish Life.” Lynch, who heads information services for Irish Life Corporate Business, Ireland’s largest benefits company, was key in bringing AI and agile methodologies to streamline and automate many of the manual processes that had created administrative hassle and a burden on Irish Life’s business teams (Read the Case Study). As the need to address member concerns in real-time grew clearer, Lynch invested in vendors and partners who would create technologies to drive down response times and improve service. Lynch has worked with Ushur for a number of years and lauded the success of the partnership.

During his acceptance speech, Lynch recounted meeting Simha at a Plug and Play event. “At Irish Life, we started to look at conversational AI technology several years ago with the aim of both improving customer experience and delivering operational efficiencies.” After a 10-minute pitch from Simha on low-code and no-code AI, Lynch told Simha that he was not completely sold on Ushur’s ability to deliver and could not believe the Ushur platform could perform as Simha had described.

Now, he has no doubts. “Having built the partnership over the last year, we’re now interpreting, indexing, and routing all incoming email without human intervention. This means quicker service for our customers and frees up our highly trained staff to focus on strategic initiatives."

Welcome everyone to the Ushur Innovation Awards. [...] We are obviously operating in a strange time. I think it’s therefore that much more important to bring people together, to recognize game-changing work.

Ken LynchCEOIrish Life

 

If the theme of the ceremony were a celebration of technical excellence and implementation, the throughline for the winners was relationship-building. Said Simha, “Ushur could have the coolest technology, [...] but it took smart risk-takers with an appetite for discovery to get us here.[...] Aligning technologies is one thing, but selecting individuals with the same temperament and commitment to excellence is challenging, and we are lucky.”

We were going to wind you up with a loooong intro.

But then we figured, it’s been an interminable summer, it’s abominably hot, and even superheroes like yourselves could use a little straightforward good news.

For the enterprises that have battled sky-high call volumes, hundreds of thousands of emails, heat-mad customers, and agents collapsing from fatigue in their bedroom-turned-everything, we are here with cool reinforcements.

A Quick Recap

Ushur is an intelligent workflow automation platform that uses conversational AI to create rich, contextual customer journeys with ease. Using its low-code environment, enterprise business users automate complex processes, integrating with their backend systems to serve customers in real-time. Enterprises simultaneously boost customer satisfaction while easing the burden on their agents, streamlining and future-proofing business.

Tailor-made, Super-approved

Like any superhero, your suit is your power: your fashionable yet functional statement of id. For enterprises that use Ushur, that manifests as a desire to serve 21st-century customers with 21st-century business solutions. Enterprises that seek to complete their digital transformation, enterprises that lean into self-improvement, enterprises who are always looking for better ways to engage their customers -- these enterprises maintain an edge by going above and beyond.

Like any superhero, your suit is your power: your fashionable yet functional statement of id. For enterprises that use Ushur, that manifests as a desire to serve 21st-century customers with 21st-century business solutions. Enterprises that seek to complete their digital transformation, enterprises that lean into self-improvement, enterprises who are always looking for better ways to engage their customers -- these enterprises maintain an edge by going above and beyond.

As with any suit, your mad scientists are here to help you level-up with six new abilities.

No. 1: Chatbots for Superscaling

For so many customer-centric operations, chatbots are the pretty window-dressing on a website. While they can be a neat visual, too often, a live agent ends up doing the heavy lifting.

Now, Ushur’s AI-powered chatbots allow enterprises to create actual value for their customers. These chatbots, trained via Machine Learning on industry datasets, can speak the language of the organization they’re serving. And unlike your physical premises and human agents, chatbots can scale with a yawn, casually handling thousands of interactions.

Insurance-savvy, healthcare-savvy? AI-powered chatbots can converse on relevant topics and engage in a meaningful conversation with customers seeking support. That’s real-time, 24/7 availability for your customers to resolve issues. Ushur’s AI-powered bots can even update customer data in your backend system without involving an agent, reducing administrative work and promoting entry compliance.

Read this eBook to learn how Ushur’s enterprise-grade chatbots for insurance are:

• Scalable to meet 100x call volume spikes
• Workflow-driven, helping members update claims, schedule appointments, and more
• Pre-trained to speak knowledgeably in industry-appropriate terms
• Smart, providing immediate answers to urgent queries
• Highly secure, HIPAA- and SOC 2 Type 2-compliant for sensitive PII transfer

Bonus: Ushur breaks it down

The Ushur team decided it was time to demystify the chatbot landscape. We know that enterprises on the hunt for a chatbot need to scale quickly to meet customer needs, so we’ve analyzed the latest trends and deployment techniques for successful selection and adoption.

No. 2: On-demand Intervention for Supercharged Agents

Trust, but verify! Keep your agents looped in, at their convenience.

Ushur automates the busywork, allowing agents to assess workflows at critical junctures. Once workflows are undertaken, your agents have opportunities to support customers directly if and when appropriate.

Take advantage of options for agents to review and modify data or documents from customers easily and efficiently as a part of an engagement. Agents can approve forms and re-engage at-will to capture updated information or handle other requests.

Here is a familiar use case where the ability to involve agents at-will is a game-changer:

1. A customer sends an email to an enterprise requesting a quote
2. An enterprise-grade chatbot processes customer intent and automatically extracts key data points from the email
3. Syncing with the backend system, the enterprise puts a quote together in mere seconds
4. Prior to sending, an agent reviews the generated quote to ensure accuracy

Bonus: Birth of a Superpower
Ushur Product Manager Vishnu Rajkumar discusses his Ushur journey and dives into how the Supercharged Agents feature was ideated, executed, and implemented. Read how and follow his AI musings here.

No. 3: Virtual Business Cards for Super-branding

Put the virtue back in virtual.

Virtual Business Cards are to the post-Pandemic world what business cards were to journalist Clark Kent. Virtual Business Cards help enterprise agents keep top-of-mind for their customers.

Here’s a stat from the Temkin Group: “A moderate increase in Customer Experience generates an average revenue increase of $823 million over three years for a company with $1 billion in annual revenues.”

In a world where personal connection is more precious than ever, a Virtual Business Card is a reminder of great service and an invitation to the customer to interact and keep in touch with someone they liked. Agents can now brand a customer experience, promoting retention.

No. 4: Calendar Reminders for Superscheduling

Like we said, it’s been a hot, stressful summer. And even the best amongst us should be forgiven for not remembering which day of the week it is.

Eliminate that pit-in-the-feeling stomach for your customer when they’ve missed an appointment. Preempt an agent’s stress as they futilely try to reach a customer who’s taking a dip in the pool. Our Calendar Reminder feature gives end-users the ability to download reminders (in the form of ICS files) into native phone calendar apps.

When the kids are screaming, the new puppy is peeing, and the Zoom invites are piling up, give you and your customers a gentle, handy escape with a well-timed reminder.

No. 5: Integrations for Superslacking

It’s ServiceNow! It’s Salesforce! It’s Slack! You’d be forgiven for thinking we were playing an alliteration game with our certified integrations, but we know superheroes don’t have that kind of time.

No, we are talking Ushur’s new, deep integration with Slack, enabling intelligent automation for all sorts of work activities. Meet employees where they are already collaborating, communicating, and completing tasks. Integrate with your backend systems to automate tedious chores like data entry, ticket creation, and status updates.

With our Slack integration, initiate the Ushur App through your employees’ preferred communication channel. For example, Ushur can continuously provide the user with status updates throughout the life-cycle of tickets created. Workflows can be customized in the Ushur App and deployed instantly from Slack.

Bonus: Additional Powers

• Meet your employees on their preferred communication channels
• Eliminate logins to service desk applications
• Speed up help-desk processes
• Eliminate manual data entry
• Enable Slack with intelligent automations

No. 6: Authentication and Audit for Supersecurity

If every superhero has a Kryptonite, our goal is to not let hackers reach your customer data, to be your Kryptonite.

Ushur is SOC 2 Type 2-compliant, and we maintain standards across a diverse range of industries, including HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA, and TCPA.

Maintaining Secret Identities Requires Multifactor Authentication

By default, Ushur supports both multifactor and biometric authentication as optional mechanisms. Our partners can customize workflows to introduce further levels of authentication using their own enterprise data. For example, a business can choose to relay information such as an image to verify its own identity with its end-users. By leveraging customizable workflows, Ushur enables partners and their end-users to adopt safe practices to proactively defend against potential villainy.

Audit Trails to Catch ‘Em in the Act

Audit trails, electronic records that chronologically catalog events, provide support documentation and history that is used to authenticate operations and mitigate threats. Robust and accessible historical data allows Ushur to quickly red-flag abnormalities, allowing us to pivot from defense to offense against cyber-threats, security breaches, data corruption, and other information misuse.

We regularly perform audit exercises in conjunction with authorized third-party vendors, publishing frequent reports. Our engineering teams use in-house tools to perform extensive and routine penetration testing. As soon as we identify a vulnerability requiring remediation, it’s logged, triaged, and addressed.

Superbonus: Multimedia Messaging Service Support

Wow, you made it to the end of this article. Now you know why we jumped right in!

Here’s one more superpower, to keep up your sleeve for the right moment. Ushur now supports MMS, for all those rich images, complicated documents, and multimedia content you want to send your customers and vice versa.

Alright, you know what’s coming, but it has to be said: With great power, comes great responsibility … and opportunity!

To learn more about how you can wield these powers for good, contact us for a quick consultation.

Set up an automated insurance prospecting system in less than a month

Picture two rival health insurance providers with similar policies. There’s only one difference between them. When open enrollment season comes around, the first trots out the same old enrollment game plan: recruitment teams making cold calls, educational events, a website for prospects to register interest, and a limited post-enrollment plan. The other embraces and deploys new AI-powered software to automate outreach, appointment reminders and onboarding on an enterprise-scale, with scalable customer retention capabilities baked in.

At the traditional firm, agent teams spend most of their time on administrative tasks and chasing prospective customers. Everything is a struggle, even getting prospects to show up for calls they scheduled.

At the firm using insurance sales automation, it’s a whole different story. Agents aren’t wasting time touching base, sending reminders, doing data entry. They’re doing what they do best: seeing the big picture and signing up new members. In fact, they’re:

Those aren’t fictional numbers. Insurance agency automation systems are the real deal--light-years more advanced than the barebones expert systems of yesteryear. They’re highly customizable AI-powered workflow automation platforms that integrate with a firm’s other customer systems (e.g. CRM, service desk) while maintaining security and compliance.

Today, we’ll walk through five insurance automation ideas for getting an insurance prospecting system—fully equipped to handle the pandemonium of open enrollment season—up and running in less than a month.

We recommend starting with 5 key insurance automations:

We recommend these five insurance automation ideas to start because most focus on mobile engagement. Your prospects are already on their phones. Meet them there! You’ll see better engagement rates using the channels your customers prefer.

Additionally, cloud-based insurance sales automation platforms (like Ushur) are driven by quick development cycles. Automation is no longer an arduous, multiyear, big budget initiative. Born-in-the-cloud companies pass that iterative, fast-moving advantage back to you.

1. SMS Automation

We know you can’t sell health care over SMS. Hear us out.

Due to heavy government regulation and the difficulty many health insurance prospects have comparing plans online, most firms still reach out to prospects over the phone.

But customers much prefer the convenience of digital channels, and your firm can use SMS automation as a supporting, auxiliary medium. For example, it can send health insurance prospects SMS reminders about an upcoming call—and give them the option to reschedule if needed—to improve appointment attendance.

This relatively simple form of automation can improve results across a firm’s prospects because it reaches even those without smartphones. For those who do have smartphones, the opportunities for engagement are even more diverse and media-rich.

2. Low/No-code Virtual Agents

Your prospects might want to engage with you digitally, on their phones, but no one wants to install another app. Not convinced? One insurer we work with saw a download rate of just 2% of their mobile app among members and a usage rate of 3%. Low/no-code virtual agents are the perfect solution here.

When we say “virtual agent” we’re referring to a conversational interface accessed through a mobile device. Basically, prospects engage with a virtual customer service agent in an app-like experience.

A firm might use virtual agents to send health insurance prospects a pre-appointment checklist reminding them of everything they’ll need for the call (social security card, current set of prescriptions, doctor’s contact info, etc).

The trick with virtual agents is getting them to do what they need to. That’s where coding comes in. Normally virtual agents need to be programmed by someone who knows their Java from their Python. But a new breed of low- and no-code platforms have ushered in the era of the “citizen developer,” allowing business teams without any formal coding knowledge to construct sophisticated, AI-powered workflows.

Using these low/no-code virtual agents, prospects can schedule calls, browse plans and check the status of a quote—all tasks that previously agents would have needed to handle. And since these prospecting platforms work just as well on mobile devices as they do on desktop, customers can take a picture of a signed form and seamlessly upload it to their application.

Because the low-code UI is designed for agents, not engineers, firms can spin up open enrollment “special agents” in a matter of days, without waiting on IT.

3. Automated Inbound and Outbound Requests

Choosing a healthcare plan can be stressful and confusing, and people under stress ask a lot of questions. It’s human nature. But for your agents, fielding all those informational calls leaves little time for anything else. That’s why it’s important to give prospects a legitimate self service channel so they get their questions answered.

AI-powered chatbots for health insurance can drastically reduce the volume of inbound requests by automatically answering simple questions that would otherwise flood your call center. Conversational AI enables these types of health insurance chatbots to answer even the more complicated questions, such as queries comparing different plans.

Health insurance chatbots also excel with outbound communications. For example, if the customer’s behavior indicates they might need support (perhaps they’ve left parts of the application blank), the chatbot can proactively reach out to the customer and retrieve the missing information or guide them through the next steps.

Of course, not every inbound request can be answered by a bot. It’s worth mentioning here that some chatbots for health insurance have highly evolved AI sentiment analysis, which can automatically and seamlessly bring in a human agent if it detects the customer is getting frustrated.

4. Email-to-Quote Automation

Many requests for quotes come in via email from brokers. The more brokers you work with, and the more clients those brokers have, the more data you’ll need to process—data that often arrives in disparate formats and various messages.

If providing manual quotes is a huge drain on specialists' time and resources, a powerful email automation system that provides data entry automation and document processing should be high on your wishlist. An email-to-quote automation tool does exactly what it sounds like: the software scans incoming emails from brokers, extracts critical quote data from the body of the text AND attached documents and populates directly into quoting systems. With email-to-quote, you can process customer information, and thus turn around a quote, much much faster.

Time is money when your organization is trying to hit 70% of its yearly sales targets in Q4. The longer it takes to provide a quote, the greater the chance of losing out to a nimble competitor.

5. AI-Driven Recurring Campaigns

Closing business at open enrollment isn’t the end of the sales cycle. The best insurers know, it’s just the beginning of a long customer relationship.

Instead of thinking about the sales cycle like this:

Outbound > Appointment > Quote > Sale

Think about it like this:

Outbound > SMS opt-in > Reminder and appointment prep > Appointment > Quote > Follow-up > Sale > Survey > Outbound > Sales Incentive > Outbound > Next Year’s Open Enrollment

Insurance automation can do a lot more than just win business today. It can strengthen and expand customer relationships throughout the year and beyond, ultimately reducing member churn.

The key is customization. Remember those low-code customer agents? Likewise, a low- or no-code automation platform can be quickly tailored to offer discounts, send birthday greetings or whatever you’d like after the customer is on board. Because the automation platform hooks into the firm’s CRM (and you should make sure any solution you purchase does), it can access all that customer data to deliver a highly personalized experience from start to finish, without an agent needing to make a single call. It’s the most efficient way yet devised to engage customers—and retain them.

No need to bombard them—just connect with them periodically to keep the relationship warm.

Remember: firms that keep most of their customers year after year don’t have to sweat their sales targets in Q4.

Ushur’s Insurance Sales Automation: Ready to Go in <1 Month

Open enrollment is fast approaching, but it’s never too late to equip your teams with insurance sales tools that can help them nail their targets—and even get a head start on next year’s.

Ideal for companies struggling to get ahead of open enrollment, Ushur’s insurance agency automation system accelerates time-to-value from months to weeks with features like:

• Free white glove implementation. Unlike other insurance sales automation vendors, who hand you a chatbot and expect you to train it yourself—or charge an additional $40K for onboarding—Ushur’s implementation is all-inclusive and led by our engineers.
• Pre-trained virtual agents. Chatbots typically need to train on 1,000 machine learning examples before they achieve human-acceptable accuracy. We pre-train our chatbots for health insurance on a database of common language so they start with 80% accuracy out of the box.
• Agent-friendly platform. Our interface uses an easy drag-and-drop interface. Insurance agent sales tools your team can actually get the hang of quickly.
• Customizable workflows. Unique to Ushur is our design-your-own automation workflows. Tailor the open enrollment customer journey to fit any plan or product, and easily add in retention lifecycles.
• Military-grade security. Our automated insurance sales tools are SOC 2 Type 2- and HIPAA-compliant, complete with AES 256-bit encryption and multi-factor authentication.

Contact us for an insurance sales automation demo today.

COVID-19 turned everyday life upside down, and everyday work too. Yet work goes on. Companies need to connect with their customers as much as ever, maybe more. The question is how.

We recently hosted a webinar on just this topic—how businesses are using conversational AI to engage customers during the COVID crisis, and just as importantly, why. For those who couldn’t join, here are some of the highlights.

How Has the Pandemic Affected Customer Engagement?

Customer inquiries have spiked during the pandemic. In one study by Customer Contact Week, 32% of the companies surveyed reported an increase in inbound requests, and 10% of those surveyed saw a 50% jump in volume.

For businesses, this is a real dilemma. They need to keep customers happy. But their agents are working from home, where tasks may take longer to complete and Internet connections aren’t always reliable. At the same time, businesses still need to comply with strict regulations governing customer privacy and cybersecurity. Communication channels like email, which might have been fine for casual exchanges in the pre-COVID world, buckle under the strain of everything they’re being asked to do.

One Harvard Business Review study examined a million customer service calls fielded at call centers since the start of the pandemic. It discovered that escalations were up 68%, and overall call length 34%. Calls were not only becoming more numerous, but longer and more complex. Not surprisingly, the study found abandon rates up as well, signaling that customers were losing patience.

How Can Conversational AI Help Solve the Problem

Clearly, status quo solutions won’t cut it anymore. Businesses need alternatives, and one of the standouts is conversational AI. This is technology that understands human language, but also understands intent and sentiment, giving it the ability to engage customers with realistic dialogue and react like a human agent.

Unlike human agents, conversational AI doesn’t get tired or impatient. It doesn’t forget facts. It allows businesses to offload high-volume, routine conversations to a bot, giving agents the freedom to focus on higher value formats that require human judgement.

We see enterprises leveraging conversational AI and, more broadly, automation, to power a comprehensive, omnichannel approach to all sorts of customer tasks.

Automated Two-Way Messaging

According to a survey from customer-desk software firm Zendesk, customer inquiries via SMS have increased 26% since the start of the pandemic. This is an ideal opportunity for a chatbot powered by conversational AI. The bot can handle routine conversations and automatically pull in a live agent if the discussion gets too complex, or the AI senses that the customer is getting frustrated. Similar bots can be implemented on a company’s website.

Dynamic Call Deflection

With Dynamic Call Deflection, businesses can give customers waiting on hold the option to talk with a digital agent, powered by conversational AI, rather than to wait for a live agent.

Email Automation

Conversational AI and email automation mesh surprisingly well. Companies that receive hundreds of thousands of inbound emails per month can use conversational AI to quickly route them to the most relevant customer service department, or even answer them automatically.

5 Reasons Why Conversational AI is Catching On

Empathy & Design

Automation is good, and bots are helpful. But no one wants customer interactions to feel, well, robotic. With conversational AI, businesses get the efficiency of automation with the personal touch of a conversation.

All-Remote Implementations

It doesn’t look like businesses will be back to normal anytime soon. They need to automate now, and they need solutions they can implement remotely. Conversational AI platforms that are based in the Cloud or can be implemented by remote teams fit the bill.

Agility & Adaptability

Customers have options. They’re impatient. They want—and expect—to engage using the digital channel of their choice, whether that be text, email, or other. conversational AI allows businesses to meet customers where they are, enabling an omnichannel approach that’s automated from beginning to end, while still delivering a friendly and personalized experience.

Rise of the Citizen Developer

Remember that need for speed? So-called low-code conversational AI solutions allow business users—what we might call “citizen developers”—to quickly build sophisticated AI-powered workflows without knowing a line of Python or Java. That in turn allows them to quickly launch customized new campaigns, build their own customer journeys and implement the right compliance and security guardrails without having to wait on IT. It’s the breaker of barriers, bringing siloed organizations and departments together.

Broader Applications

A survey conducted by AppDynamics found that 88% of technologists and IT professionals rate digital customer experience initiatives as their number-one priority. Conversational AI can be a big part of that strategy. We see customers use it to proactively engage with claimants, subscribers, or patients, to request information or complete routine tasks. And since conversational AI platforms like Ushur easily connect to your CRM and customer-desk systems of record, the data from these interactions can be saved, analyzed and used to improve future customer engagements. The more you use it, the more it learns and the more it can do.

Conclusion

If you’d like to learn more, check out the full webinar and hear Michael Fisher, VP of Product, and Vandana Rao, VP of Customer Growth, talk about how leading organizations are adopting conversational AI today.

If you groaned, you know how frustrating and demoralizing this experience can be. After getting rerouted multiple times, customers, who’ve come to expect instant service, are placed in queues that feel like an eternity with delightful Muzak, growing more irate by the minute. Harried agents are disparaged for something out of their control. It’s a recipe for losing morale and consumers.

When phone calls come in faster than your teams can handle them, you need a strategic way to deflect those calls, for everyone’s sanity.

A Troubled 'Calldom'

Existing Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology or Workforce Management (WFM) software are no match, given the increasingly complex and heightened expectations of consumers.

Today’s customers are empowered, and they:

• Demand faster service
• Expect less chit-chat
• Have more devices to reach out from

With the world at their fingertips and with a swipe on a smartphone screen, why would customers be OK waiting for hours to speak to a live agent?

Hint: they’re not.

Enter call deflection, a solution that supports existing IVR systems with the flexibility of digital channels.

An Invisible Knight

After fire, writing may be human beings’ most enduring invention. It’s powerfully asynchronous ‒ you can communicate across lifetimes and continents.

Customers don’t like to call in, if they can help it. In fact, the No.1 inbound digital medium is the email, a writing delivery system that would make Guttenberg grin. However customers often turn to the phone when they’re convinced that their urgently dashed off requests will be lost in the ether.

Gartner Research indicates that 70% of service interactions over the phone can be solved via AI-powered, automated customer support. That’s

It’s time to meet customers halfway, by suggesting a digital medium of their choice just when they’ve given up hope and are desperately trying to reach an agent (and simultaneously overwhelming the system).

Introducing IVR-to-text, call deflection with the humble, but beloved SMS.

If you’d like to hear our hours of operation, press three now or say “hours.” Call volumes are unusually high and wait-times are long. Would you like to continue this conversation over text? Press four now or say “let’s talk.”

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Instead of being held in-queue during peak hours, you can give your customers a choice to have their issue or query handled via a digital channel instantly...right through their smartphone. For example, your customer can enter Ushur’s Invisible App, an app-less, app-like automation that exists over their web browser. No download or account needed.

The Invisible App (IA), part of the Ushur platform that is designed to intelligently automate workflows, is a white-labeled, direct encrypted channel that allows for two-way communication with your customer. It can handle the type of flows that agents would typically deal with over the phone, using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand and address customer needs.

For inquiries as diverse as billing to support to account update, even for sales orders, customers can now interact with an AI-powered experience instantly, instead of waiting for a live agent. The Invisible App is especially adept at handling multi-step, complex processes with accuracy and speed.

Regardless of the selected digital medium, customers can get and communicate information at their convenience, on their preferred digital channel, even as the pressure on your agents and call infrastructure drops.

Three Ways Call Deflection with IA Helps Close the Gap

Deflect Calls When Volumes Spike

With COVID-19, businesses were confronted with surges in calls, and this incredible volume shows no signs of dissipating. Deflecting calls with digital channels, like the Invisible App, allows you to manage this lumpiness. Automated digital channels are easy to scale, allowing you to service customers in real-time, reducing the possibility of angry calls and overwhelmed agents. With the reduced demand from repetitive inbound, your agents can actually dedicate their time to problem-solving worthy of their abilities.

Give Customers the Ability to Query at Their Convenience

With digital deflection, give customers a frictionless option to have their needs met in real-time. Whether it’s checking on their insurance co-pay or updating critical financial forms, customers can verify and upload documentation on their own schedule, with the convenience of an app. As a two-way medium, the Invisible App can keep customers abreast of changes or missing information, giving them peace of mind that you’re on the case. The customers who do end up needing a live agent will be able to reach them faster.

Integrate with Your Existing IVR Technology

IVR is here to stay; it’s endemic to so many enterprise operations, and while it may not be the sleekest of technologies on its own, it’s reliable and ubiquitous. The Invisible App can easily integrate with your existing IVR technology, instantly modernizing your operation while keeping the best parts of your current setup.

Reduce churn, bring those C-SAT scores back up, and give your agents the breathing room to have quality customer engagements. From healthcare to financial services to car insurance, your customers want to feel heard. Raise them one, and make them feel understood. And AI-powered call deflection allows you to do just that.

If you work in finance, insurance, or healthcare, you likely don’t think of yourself as a technologist.

This is despite the fact that half of all major capital investment since the 1980s has gone to information technology adoption. According to a 2020 report by the World Economic Forum, 85% of executives at global financial institutions are already using some form of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to power their business. 77% of those surveyed expect AI will become essential to their businesses within 2 years. Healthcare and insurance see similar trends.

With technology adoption so ubiquitous and monotonically increasing, it’s easy to assume vast engineering manpower for implementation. But as many business teams discover, projects and integration often hit a bottleneck at IT. The IT department is triaging highly specialized requests from hundreds of individuals and teams across your enterprise, and IT is often under-resourced and overwhelmed with delivery deadlines.

So enterprises often end up asking the age-old, fraught question: to build or to buy?

A False Dilemma Questioned

When in-house production straggles along, it’s tempting to hit the buy button. There are enticing pros:

• The technology is created by companies with dedicated knowledge and resources. They’ve ostensibly done their market research and are delivering the features others in your industry say they want.
• If the technology is well-designed, it has some degree of universalizability, allowing it to become standard in industry. You do not need to be a guinea pig.
• Implementation and integration time aside, a purchased solution may be a quick alternative to a backlogged and overburdened IT team. Even if the rollout takes months, it’s one less ask you have to make to your IT department.

But there are so many cons, which is probably why you’ve hesitated before making an enterprise-grade technology purchase. It goes without saying that the solution is not customized to your unique needs. Making the necessary changes is its own saga. Purchased solutions can cost a pretty penny, putting a serious dent in your ability to make other, necessary purchases. And at the end of the day, you’re force-fitting a generic technology that all your competitors potentially have access to.

For business teams, there’s an inherent lack of choice in these calculations, and a new shift in who gets to design and build solutions is rendering the above narrative moot.

When a business team discovers a new use case in need of a solution, in a traditional organization, this need is percolated up to management. Once approved, the business team has to take this ask to the IT department. In this legacy model, with a singular IT team serving many organizational needs, IT often becomes the bottleneck for projects ‒ there are never enough resources. Projects are added to a long queue that hampers agility.

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Organizations Updated for the 21st Century

Traditional hierarchies and organizational structures have been eroding steadily, even in the most conservative industries. As diverse businesses have realized the benefits of distributed decision-making - agility, innovation, and long-term growth - the idea that one department should have exclusive domain over technology implementation is outmoded and retards progress.

Buy versus build is predicated on overburdened internal IT against sleek, but generic outside solutions. What if business teams could not only design solutions, but actually build them?

Enter low-code software, the citizen developer, and decentralization to enable quick, customized, internally created technology that scales.

As Agile methodologies have proliferated to non-technical teams, so too has the idea of the citizen developers. Citizen developer is a team-agnostic term that highlights the trend of non-programming-focused teams using software tools and infrastructure to serve their needs.

Citizen developers, by nature, create organically. In biology labs, where this technique was pioneered, many grad students have extended visual integrated development environments (IDE) to create tools highly specific to their projects and experiments. At the enterprise-level, citizen developers can rapidly relieve pressure on the IT department, by executing on problems themselves. Within the IDE, citizen developers can use drag & drop modules, connecting them strategically to develop unique applications.

This distribution of technology creation and implementation work implies that the problem, the business constraints, and the typical end user are innately aligned; that’s a significant advantage over relying exclusively on the IT department for tool development.

The Rise of the Low-code Wielding Citizen Developer

What does a low-code or no-code framework mean? As software evangelists realized that more and more, it was the business teams who were the driving force behind features and solutions, a clear barrier presented itself.

Enterprise teams that lacked coding proficiency were locked out of execution. Low-code architecture was developed so that a lot of the tortuous, repetitive software could be modularized in blocks (akin to APIs). Business teams, with little to no programming knowledge, could then use these blocks to develop solutions for themselves.

As Agile methodologies have proliferated to non-technical teams, so too has the idea of the citizen developers. Citizen developer is a team-agnostic term that highlights the trend of non-programming-focused teams using software tools and infrastructure to serve their needs.

Citizen developers, by nature, create organically. In biology labs, where this technique was pioneered, many grad students have extended visual integrated development environments (IDE) to create tools highly specific to their projects and experiments. At the enterprise-level, citizen developers can rapidly relieve pressure on the IT department, by executing on problems themselves. Within the IDE, citizen developers can use drag & drop modules, connecting them strategically to develop unique applications.

This distribution of technology creation and implementation work implies that the problem, the business constraints, and the typical end user are innately aligned; that’s a significant advantage over relying exclusively on the IT department for tool development.

Growing Developer Communities Responsibly

That’s not to say that teams will run amok, stealing each others’ functions and accidentally duplicating projects.

While the citizen developer may exist in situ, creating a sustainable and scalable environment where teams across the enterprise can contribute requires planning and coordination. The IT department would spearhead the creation of these communities by creating compliance and security guardrails. While business users, for example, can create their own customer journeys, IT would focus on establishing the enterprise architecture, developing integrations between systems of records, and providing oversight and training to any business user who wants to use a low-code platform.

Delivery teams eventually give way to squads. These are loosely coordinated groups that consist of both IT personnel and business users/citizen developers. Squads can scale new solutions rapidly since each unit contains both the integration and business knowhow. Squads can work collaboratively, but are able to function independently. Tools for the entire organization can be designed locally and proliferated globally, accelerating development. Delivery teams eventually give way to squads. These are loosely coordinated groups that consist of both IT personnel and business users/citizen developers. Squads can scale new solutions rapidly since eThese squads are loosely governed by an automation center of excellence (CoE). The CoE defines the Enterprise IT guardrails within which each squad can innovate. CoEs enable automation at the enterprise-level as an ongoing initiative that's part of a company’s digital transformation roadmap.

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Communities of citizen developers are the antitheses of siloed, rigid teams; with enough of the right connections made, these developer communities can accelerate development across the organization and create knowledge and tool repositories for the next generation of teams.

Importantly, the presence of citizen developer communities can rapidly up the rate of a company’s digital transformation. According to Forrester Research, they have the potential to make software development 10 times faster than the current IT-only model.

Does this all sound a bit amorphous, like tech jargon? Citizen developer communities already exist when it comes to insurance and conversational AI.

Ushuring in Low-code Automation

Ushur, a Silicon Valley tech firm that seeks to change the conversation around conversational AI, is already enabling business team users in the insurance and finance industries to build their own workflow automations, like chatbots, service desks, and mail triage, through its low-code, plug & play platform.

Ushur has designed solutions built around democratization, specifically enabling business teams to build software germane to them, with minimal IT involvement. For example, insurance business teams have been able to build out solutions around unique challenges such as First Notice of Loss (FNOL) and claims processing, to allow their members to send and receive information over digital mediums of their choice, at their convenience. These solutions are replete with sophisticated artificial intelligence that allows providers the ability to engage customers across a spectrum of needs with the same technology.

Better still, this AI is packaged in low-code, business friendly software. The modules are strung together in a visually simple, aesthetic environment over a web browser, and developer tools consist of easy-to-access libraries of features that form the building blocks. Business teams that are trained on Ushur can execute tools within mere days, without having to turn to IT. The platform is industry-agnostic; the same architecture has been used by finance-, healthcare-, and insurance-focused teams to drive customer engagement, eliminate repetitive administrative tasks, and reduce operational load and costs.

While enterprise software typically falls exclusively within the IT domain, Ushur builds explicitly with citizen developers in mind. The agility with which these teams can turn ideas into reality means more opportunities, faster, for the companies that foster these communities.

After all, what’s that old sales adage? The customer knows best. In this case, that’s the business team, and now, the customer can execute on that knowledge.

Not All Bots Are Created Equal: How Do the Types of Chatbots Stack Up?

If you’ve ever been burned by a chatbot, we’ve got good news: just because you’ve met one doesn’t mean you’ve met them all. The truth is chatbot solutions span a wide range of functionalities and use cases. Many businesses tend to start with a bottom-of-the-barrel model to get a feel for how chatbots might benefit them. It’s a fair idea in theory. Inevitably though, they end up with disappointing ROI and write off the whole breed as unhelpful.

But if you’re here reading this blog, it means you’re giving chatbots a second chance (thank you!) Or perhaps you’ve heard mixed reviews, and you’re “just browsing” to see what’s out there. In any case, we know there’s a lot of factors involved in chatbot evaluation.

So we’ve done a comparison of chatbots to help you out. Our chatbot evaluation criteria examines chatbot providers in different tiers—what services they offer, what use cases they support, pricing and ease of use—and how Ushur’s own conversational AI chatbot rewrites the paradigm.

Our chatbot comparison groups chatbot providers into SMB- and enterprise-tier, implying both the intended end-user type and their chatbot’s corresponding functionalities. You’ll notice enterprise-tier chatbots are workflow-driven, serving as virtual customer service agents, whereas SMB-tier chatbots tend to be conversation-driven, acting more as virtual hosts.

Conversational Chatbots vs. Customer Service Chatbots

We pointed out earlier that enterprise-tier chatbots tend to be workflow-driven while SMB-tier chatbots tend to be conversation-driven. Clearly, there are a lot of variables even within those two categories. An easy way to keep them straight is by thinking about them the difference between a conversational chatbot vs. a customer service chatbot.

Low-tier, SMB-oriented chatbot solution providers offer conversational chatbots. These are essentially e-commerce assistants trained to recognize buyer intent and accomplish simple sales tasks. When you shop or request services online, most often you’re interacting with a conversational chatbot. Conversational chatbots can offload volume by deflecting simple questions away from your customer support team. But these bots don’t offer much in the way of customer service beyond answering FAQs.

On the other hand, enterprise-tier vendors provide customer service chatbots designed to help end-customers self-service. Customer service chatbots guide users to get stuff done without assistance from a human agent. Industry-specific solutions like insurance chatbots, fintech chatbots and healthcare chatbots all fall into the broader category of customer service chatbots.

Unique to Ushur’s customer service chatbots is our design-your-own automation workflows. Our intelligent AI platform enables business teams to build custom and complex workflows that align with the customer journey via simple drag-and-drop tools, without involving the IT department.

PS: We wrote an entire e-book on using chatbots to retain customers during COVID-19. While the book is framed by the insurance industry, the key takeaways apply to any audience in any context.

Key Point in Chatbot Evaluation: Implementation

Now that we’ve explained the broad strokes, we’ll dive into the more specific qualities that set chatbot tiers and vendors apart.

Your relationship with an automation partner truly begins at implementation. Fittingly, this is also the stage where customers start to wonder if they’ve bit off more than they can chew. Overwhelm by implementation happens for a few reasons: perhaps the solution is more technically complicated than you bargained for, or perhaps the vendor wasn’t transparent about customer support resources.

The bottom line is, as you compare chatbots, it’s crucial to consider how much support you’ll need to implement your bot.

Some vendors do not offer training or free setup assistance, so the process falls entirely to you. Others charge onboarding fees that depend on the use case and complexity of system integration. For example, typical onboarding starts at $40K for some enterprise-grade providers.

Unlike other chatbot providers that just hand over the chatbot without training or upcharge for onboarding, Ushur’s implementation is all-inclusive and led by our engineers.

Additionally, we pre-train our chatbots on a database of common industry parlance so they can start with 80% accuracy out of the gate. Typically chatbots require training on a minimum of a thousand machine learning examples before they achieve human-acceptable accuracy.

If you’re planning on setting up a chatbot in-house, better get up to speed on machine learning, as it’s not for the faint of heart.

But once you’ve got your chatbot up and running, how can you tell if it’s hitting ROI?

Choosing a Chatbot Provider That Measures and Adds Value

It’s unlikely a bot will work perfectly for you right out of the box. Most organizations have to modify a few workflows and do some tuning before the chatbot can really sing. Determining chatbot efficacy is where a committed chatbot provider comes into play.

A committed chatbot provider will use key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate whether your chatbot is excelling in its target use case and meeting your business goals and objectives. Measuring the KPI of your chatbot is critical. You have to know what is and isn’t working so you can make the right adjustments.

Ushur begins every engagement by setting custom KPIs with our partner. Examples of KPIs include number of deflected calls, number of deflected emails, increased resolution time by xx%, customer satisfaction scores and more.

In addition to measuring value through KPIs, we continuously add value by providing AI/ML model training with historical data and version controls. Our intelligent call center chatbot software gathers data from the powered-by-chatbot call center and strips the data of personally identifiable information (PII). Usher engineers train the bot using the dataset, then later evaluate its performance.

If Version 4.0 is better than Version 5.0, then we revert back to 4.0. We use this iterative process to improve our AI chatbot solutions version-by-version until they reach or exceed human accuracy.

Security is the last factor that separates the sheep from the goats, and thankfully it’s fairly straightforward.

Prioritizing Security and Compliance in Chatbot Solutions

We encourage every buyer to ask potential chatbot providers if they follow industry compliance standards. When you’re an enterprise hosting millions of data points of sensitive customer information, you need to ensure every vendor with access to your customer data maintains airtight security.

Our chatbot solutions are built with military-grade security, complete with AES 256 encryption and multi-factor authentication. Ushur is SOC 2 Type 2 and HIPAA compliant.

Where Do Ushur’s Enterprise Chatbots Come into Play?

Obviously there’s a wild gulf between solutions designed to capture leads and answer basic questions and enterprise chatbots that can automate complicated customer service workflows.

Usher’s chatbot solutions technically fall in the latter category, but just calling them “enterprise chatbots” doesn’t quite do them justice. “AI chatbots” or “AI chatbots for customer service” might be more appropriate, as our chatbots are powered by intelligent automation and conversational AI.

Remember the frustration of being on-hold for an entire afternoon, as weird Muzak plays in the background? Using chatbots for customer service (especially when they’re AI chatbots for customer service) minimizes wait-times and agent transfers, accelerates issue resolution, reduces operating expenses and ultimately improves the user experience.

If increasing customer satisfaction and engagement is your goal, you need an efficient customer service chatbot—that’s where basic types of chatbots like conversational chatbots fall short and result in missed customer service opportunities.

The chart below explores how Ushur compares to other enterprise chatbot providers.

On levers, short and long - the unexpected impact of automated email routing software

“Give me a place to stand, and with a lever, I will move the whole world,” the Greek scientist Archimedes supposedly said.

Silicon Valley is full of Archimedeans. We love to talk about leverage. Leveraging our differentiators. Leveraging investments in technology and people. But not all levers are equal. As an executive, you have short levers that move a little. You have long ones that move a lot. And it’s harder than you might think to tell the difference.

I thought about this while reading an interview we recently did with one of our customers, Irish Life. It’s a distinguished company that came to us with a specific need: establishing an automated email routing software solution for their corporate division. They had a team of highly educated employees reading incoming emails and routing it to the right departments. They saw an opportunity to streamline the email routing process with Ushur’s SmartMail email routing software and put the triage staff onto higher-level tasks.

And that’s exactly what happened. We set up a pilot, trained our conversational AI, and put it to work. The benefits started rolling in immediately. Responses that used to take as much as 2.5 days to process were now routed in a blink of an eye. Total resources required to get the work done dropped 40%.

I’m not going to lie. It was a thrill. It never gets old seeing your product and people deliver.

But while the project’s success was exciting, it wasn’t exactly surprising. After all, it’s what we do every day. What stood out to me was that what might seem to outsiders a modest modernization of Irish Life’s back office, in fact, has huge impacts far beyond the initial scope of the project. It didn’t just improve Irish Life’s email routing. It inspired the company to take a fresh look at how it interacts with customers.

Ken Lynch, Head of Information Systems at Irish Life, explained that insurance companies tend to steer customer queries to portals on the Web. But after the success of the email routing automation project, Irish Life started thinking there might be a better way to reach out to customers. Maybe they could proactively gather information from customers using Ushur’s Invisible App.

Lynch said: “You need to think about how the customer wants to interact with you. Think of yourself, think of your mother, or one of your relatives, and how they would try to interact with big companies. What we’ve seen with Ushur is that it's all about customer ease.”

I take away two lessons. First, transformation doesn’t have to be extremely difficult. Anything that makes the customer’s experience better--even in the back office--has the potential to improve the entire business.

Second, automation can be an even longer lever than you think. Obviously, it helps you do more with less. But as Irish Life discovered, figuring out how to automate customer service forces you to think about what customers want. How do they like to communicate, when, and through what channels? Would they prefer a phone call from a human agent, with all the potential friction that comes with it (e.g. missed calls, or calls that reach customers when they don’t have information on hand)? Or might they prefer to handle routine interactions at their convenience, using digital methods?

It’s impossible to answer those questions without putting customers front and center, which is where we all know they’re supposed to be. This interview reminded me yet again that improving customer ease--as Irish Life memorably put it--might be the longest lever you have.

In the shipping and logistics industry, the phrase “last mile” describes the final leg of the delivery journey: the step right before a package arrives at your door. The last mile is famously the most expensive and inefficient part of the delivery process. It’s frustrating for consumers too—if you’ve ever cursed a package for spending a week “in transit” after leaving the warehouse, or waited to sign for a delivery that never came—you’ve felt the strain of the last mile.

We see a similar “last mile” in end to end customer engagement. It’s the final touchpoints customers have with a brand before they complete a workflow. This is the sweet spot after a customer has received their marching orders and now must execute them. Just like in the shipping industry, a lot can go awry during those penultimate steps.

Today we’re spotlighting part of the Ushur platform that helps customers deliver seamless customer engagement down to the last mile: our location based services feature.

How Do Location Based Services Work in Ushur?

You likely use the Invisible App for its conversational AI and end to end automation functionalities. What you might not know is that the platform also integrates artificial intelligence and location based services. Customers can send you their location in the Invisible App by manually inputting their address or allowing the browser to pick up their position. Then, you can guide them to the next step in their journey, whatever that may be.

Our customer engagement platform already enables brands to personalize interactions. Using location based services to offer extra support is a natural increment to any strong customer engagement strategy. With this feature, you can dynamically deliver solutions based on a user’s surroundings. Our location based services software is time-zone aware, and the services rendered reflect local market rates. Talk about effective customer engagement!

The timing of this blog might seem rather ironic. Why highlight location based services now when, for the first time ever, most of the world is staying home?

Location Based Services Use Cases During Shelter-in-place

Filing a Claim

Right now it’s important to limit your public exposure as much as possible. That means taking the most direct route from A to B when you do venture out.Let’s say a customer gets into a fender bender coming back from the grocery store. They complete a claim through the Invisible App. If they opt in to location based services, the insurance company can identify exactly where they are (helpful when an accident occurs out on the road where there’s no exact address) then send the customer names and addresses of nearby body shops. The customer can call ahead to ensure availability—eliminating the need to “shop around” and keeping public interactions to a minimum.

Locating Medical Services and Scheduling Appointments.

Or, in a perhaps more significant example, a customer who reports a medical emergency can be directed to the closest in-network hospital. A health insurance company might also guide customers experiencing COVID-19 symptoms to a nearby testing site.The auto-locate capabilities is one of the top benefits of location based services. Time is of the essence when a customer is in crisis, and typing in an address can be mentally or physically difficult.

Nearby products..

Every customer is different. Every customer journey is different. The beauty of digital customer engagement is that workflows can be, too. When we talk about practicing contiguous customer engagement, we mean supporting the customer no matter what situation they’re in—whether they need to see a doctor ASAP or they’re a work-from-home dad desperately searching for baby wipes. With location based services, help will be on the way very soon.

The SOC 2 Type 2 Certification Proves Ushur’s Airtight Security Practices

Today we’re adding another medal to the wall: our shiny new SOC 2 Type 2 certification. Ta-dah! SOC 2 reports are how service providers demonstrate that they securely store customer data, and the Type 2 assessment is one of the most stringent audits out there. Compliance isn’t the most exciting topic on the planet—we know. Still, completing this milestone definitely calls for recognition.

For cloud-based SaaS providers like Ushur, a bulletproof security policy is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s absolutely essential, especially for service providers handling sensitive customer data.

Insurance companies, for example, host millions of data points of sensitive customer personal information. This makes them an easy target for hackers. Let’s say a large insurance company grants a third party vendor access to their customer data. But, the vendor’s systems are not set up securely, leaving customer data unprotected. That insurance company just exposed millions of records to a potential data breach.

So if you’re an enterprise that outsources any part of your business, get in the habit of asking service providers if they have SOC 2 compliance. It could save you from a very costly breach—not to mention the blow to your brand reputation.

Ok, I’ll Bite. What is SOC 2 Compliance, Exactly?

SOC 2 is a security standard written by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). A SOC 2 report reviews the security procedures of products or services based in the cloud.

What Ushur’s SOC 2 Type 2 Assessment Means for You

Earning SOC 2 Type 2 compliance takes months of preparation, technical development and evidence collection as well as the actual audit of internal systems and policies.

To complete our SOC 2 Type 2 audit report, we were evaluated on how effectively our policies, procedures and controls* meet security requirements and Ushur’s service commitments.

What our customers really need to know is this: SOC 2 Compliance guarantees that the confidentiality, availability and security of your customer data is protected from unauthorized access.

Think of a SOC 2 Type 2 certification as a stamp of approval from a third-party compliance expert that says, “this company really prioritizes data protection.”

During a SOC 2 Type 2 assessment, you’re continuously being audited against five security performance criteria called “Trust Service Principles.” Companies that participate in SOC 2 compliance must select a focus for the audit per the AICPA.

For us, the “Availability” principle—ensuring that services and products are accessible as expected—resonated clearly with our mission. We take pride in offering a frictionless interface for our end customers.

Availability has been top of mind lately as offices around the world have gone remote. Being SOC 2 compliant enabled the entire Ushur team to seamlessly transition to remote work nearly two months ago. Maintaining business continuity empowers our customers to do the same—a critical ability in a time when end users rely on you now more than ever.

SOC 2 Type 1 vs Type 2

You might be wondering why we’re writing about SOC 2 reports again when we announced our compliance last year. So what is a SOC 2 Type 2 certification, and how is it different from what we already had?

There are two kinds of a SOC 2 report: SOC 2 Type 1 and SOC 2 Type 2.

What we earned previously was a SOC 2 Type 1 certification. A Type 1 report is a “point in time” audit that presents a snapshot of an organization’s security procedures at the time of the audit. To complete a SOC 2 Type 1, a company collects evidence that shows its security controls meet the minimum security requirements, internal requirements and service commitments (like privacy policies).

A SOC 2 Type 2 audit does all that too—but with a more in depth look at how internal controls perform over a longer series of time. The organization tests its policies and procedures during a six or twelve month period, all while collecting evidence that prove its security controls are operating as described. That six to twelve month time frame is why passing a SOC 2 Type 2 report is much more difficult.

Ensuring Continuous SOC 2 Compliance

We began our nine month SOC 2 Type 2 audit after earning SOC 2 Type 1 in July 2019. In total, it was an arduous 18 month journey of building compliance, and we don’t regret a single second. We’ll be completing the Type 2 certification on an annual basis. The bottom line is, our customers are worth it.

*If you really want to know: policies are high level security statements like firewalls or network configurations. Procedures are how we maintain and implement our policies. Controls are the actual mechanisms that prevent and minimize security risks.

Learn how to respond to emails faster in our new guide

B2C enterprises everywhere are completely swamped with customer emails. Even the world’s most efficient support agent can’t wade through the torrent of customer emails pouring into bulk inboxes quickly enough to respond in a timely manner. All of these emails have to be reviewed and routed to the correct employee, who then must read the email again and finally write a reply. It’s no wonder agents everywhere are desperately wondering how to respond to emails faster.

That’s the focus of our latest e-book, The Email Automation Guide for B2C Customer Service.

The guide unpacks how email automation software (like Ushur’s SmartMail solution) processes thousands of incoming emails, attachments and photos to help you answer customer queries more efficiently.

In under a second, SmartMail categorizes bulk emails based on pre-set email classification rules, auto-responds to each sender and forwards the email to the appropriate internal team. If it’s a simple question, SmartMail’s conversational AI and intelligent processautomation services can retrieve information from back-end systems and proactively answer the customer. Pretty amazing, right?

Even sending them a holding message (“we’re working on your issue!”) via outbound email automation software is a big improvement in responding to customers faster. No, really! A little validation that they’re not being ignored goes a long way.

For one, responding to customer emails faster curbs channel switching. Channel switching is when customers cycle through multiple conversation platforms over the course of their journey. If a customer doesn’t get the help they need over email, they’ll keep trying other outlets (like your support line) until they reach you. The more delayed your response, the more likely you’ll trigger channel switching.

Channel switching quickly becomes detrimental because it runs up your OpEx astronomically. Live channels (phone calls, live chat, manual email) cost about $8.01 per contact, while self-service channels (automated email, chatbots, mobile apps, website FAQs) cost around only $0.10 per contact. Switching to even one live channel incurs an OpEx cost 80 to 100 times higher.

Automated email sending, even if it’s simple holding messages, blows your customer’s expectations out of the water. Forrester research found that while 41% of customers expect an email response within six hours, only 36% of businesses respond that quickly and 14% never respond at all.

How Email Automation Improves the Customer Service Experience

The Benefits of Email Automation

Let’s look at a real email routing case study. A life insurance company serving 1.3 million customers sought to use an automated email system for the hundreds of thousands of emails it receives every year. Every email was opened and read by a member of the email-triage team, who would classify based on Key Business Indicators (KBIs) and forward it to the appropriate team. There the email would be opened and read again, and finally sent to an individual case manager.

Automated email campaigns delivered impressive results:

• Cut email processing times from an average of 2.5 days down to a second
• Required about 40% fewer resources
• Eliminated backlog

That’s consistent with the benefits of email automation other large enterprises experience:

• Improved C-SAT and NPS scores
• Email routing classified 100s of categories
• Cut costs by 85%

Enterprises using email automation typically realize a 5x-10x return on investment by dramatically shortening email processing times and improving the customer service experience.

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Satisfy More Customers

Customers interacting with automated email platforms notice a difference. Questions actually get answered and problems are resolved delightfully quickly. They have validation the issue is being addressed—even if it’s just an auto-response that says “we’re working on it!” They’re no longer left wondering if their email was lost in the ether.

Accomplish More with Fewer Resources

For enterprises always drowning in a flood of messages, email automation delivers the holy grail: inbox zero.

Customer support agents are limited by fatigue, the 40-hour work week and the increasing weight of unanswered emails on their motivation. AI reaches the end of the queue in seconds and looks around for more work. With your email bases covered, employees assigned to the menial review-and respond-work are freed to focus on more business-critical tasks.

Enterprises using email automation can not only achieve the impossible (processing hundreds of thousands of emails every month), they can eventually run a nearly hands-free operation, automating 100% of incoming email.

Email as a Power Tool, Not a Problem

Applying conversational AI and machine learning transforms email from a major headache into a compelling channel that actually solves issues. Sure, automated data extraction and population knock out time-consuming, error-prone tasks, but they can also enable new business insights.

Data extraction tools pull critical information from customer emails. Data population tools automatically ingest it to your CRMs or systems of record (if your email automation platform integrates with back-end systems). That’s already a huge bridge to better understanding your customers. Email automation platforms with reporting dashboards take analytics a step further, delivering real-time stats on automation activity, customer engagement rates and step-by-step responses.

Mobile customer engagement rates looking low? You might be a bad texter

We’re back with another installment in our SMS tips and bad habits series! To recap, in our last post we covered text messaging best practices around SMS compliance and writing clear, actionable copy.

Today we’ll unpack four more do’s and don’ts of running successful SMS campaigns. How often can you text customers without seeming desperate? When do you know it’s time to give them some space? Read on to up your mobile customer engagement game!

Bad texting habit #4: Blowing up people’s phones

Hitting customers with four or five messages a week is only going to get your number blocked.

Sending message after message in rapid fire is an especially bad habit. Not only is it annoying, a customer’s anti-spam and anti-DoS attack safeguards can cause similar messages to be dropped. Related and equally annoying is sending duplicate messages that repeat earlier content. If you’ve already conveyed the information over SMS, there’s no need to do so again unless it’s a reminder message.

Best practice #4: Set expectations, engage thoughtfully

SMS marketing experts recommend sending 4-5 messages/month for the most successful SMS campaign possible. 10 messages/month is the absolute maximum, and only if there’s a really active engagement opportunity.
It’s important to note this guideline only applies to text message marketing. Important transactional messages, such as the status of claims/orders or appointments, do not have a cap. However, per the TCPA, you need to let customers know how many messages they might receive in a month when they opt-in.

For example:

“[HappyIns] Dear Alice, thank you for opting in to receive SMS notifications. You may receive up to 5 messages a month.”

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If your SMS campaign involves a survey, give customers an estimate of how much time it should take to complete. Keep the number of questions and open-text responses to a minimum. Long surveys that require lots of typing are more likely to be abandoned by customers on a mobile device.

Bad texting habit #5: Texting in novels

If you’ve ever gotten a text from a brand that spills over to two or even three separate messages, it’s likely because it hasn’t been encoded properly.

Special characters in SMS require two bytes instead of one byte. Incompatible encoding will cause messages with special characters to bloat and fragment, meaning they land in a customer’s inbox in multiple incomplete parts.

Nobody wants to get triple-texted… especially not by a brand.

Best practice #5: Use GSM-7 for full compatibility

GSM-7 character encoding is the standard alphabet for SMS messages, written in the standard GSM 03.38. You can dig in to the details of GSM 03.38 encoding later, but for now, remember to keep your messages under 140 characters. That should accommodate any URLs or links without fragmenting the message.

Bad texting habit #6: Being creepy

You obscure instructions for opting-out and fail to tell customers what SMS charges they might incur. Or, the unforgivable: you text customers in the middle of the night or after they’ve unsubscribed.

Best practice #6: Make disclaimers and opt-outs transparent

It’s good practice to warn customers about potential messaging fees when they first sign up for SMS. You can simply say, “Standard SMS rates apply.”

Text message regulations also mandate that you may not text a customer who’s opted-out of messages, or text them during non-business hours (9am-9pm local time). Don’t be that guy sending “U up?” at 3am.

Bad texting habit #7: Letting yourself get ghosted

We all have that friend who never responds in a timely manner. A good way to make them realize they’ve left you hanging is sending them something completely unrelated two days later. Then they text back something like, “Sorry just saw this!” or “Sorry, I was asleep when you texted me earlier!”

Whether they unintentionally missed your message the first time or not, sometimes all it takes to get a response is a gentle nudge that starts the conversation back up.

The same thing happens at the brand-customer level. Customers see your text come through while they’re at work. They make a mental note to read it later, but then six hours pass and they’ve forgotten it entirely. Or maybe they get distracted in the middle of the SMS campaign and never return to finish the workflow.

Best practice #7: Use reminders

The truth is, if a customer doesn’t respond, the onus is on you to make sure they complete the campaign. Why are you responsible? You’re the one running a mobile customer engagement strategy, not them.

You don’t have to let yourself get ghosted. You can easily draw the customer back in with quick reminders to respond to an outstanding request or pick up where they let off in the workflow. A simple follow-up can go a long way in maximizing campaign completion rates.

Try the customer engagement mobile app used by good texters everywhere

Only by being a good texter will you build trust and enhance customer experiences through SMS. Constructed through industry recommendations and years of learnings with our own customers, follow these best practices to maximize your SMS outreach.

Ushur uses a template-based approach to solve industry-specific use cases for SMS campaigns. A state-of-the-art linguistics engine can capture unstructured inbound texts, analyze responses using our AI based Language Intelligence Service Architecture (LISA) and take intelligent actions, such as retrieving information from your system of record or routing to an agent.

Together with a drag-and-drop process and workflow builder, Ushur’s Invisible App delivers a fully-functional white-labeled conversational interface. The platform also provides real-time monitoring, audit capabilities and a powerful analytics engine.

Sample Ushur features every good texters should use include:

• Delay mode that inserts a brief pause between messages
• Do Not Disturb: never text a customer after business hours
• Remind feature that lets a customer resume workflow midstream

Invisible App is a customer engagement mobile app that automates inbound and outbound communications using conversational AI. Try it today and deliver fully branded, app-like experiences that convert more customers than ever before.

Don’t launch a SMS campaign before brushing up on these text messaging best practices

Bad texters: we all know them. Maybe we are them. Bad texters write long, rambling messages. They annoy you with too many emojis or too much punctuation. Or, they’re completely toneless, leaving you wondering if they’re mad. They blow up your phone. They take days to respond… or don’t at all.

And guess what? Bad texters aren’t just grandmothers and irresponsible friends from college. Sometimes they’re insurance agencies or banks or healthcare providers.

More enterprise brands are launching a mobile customer engagement strategy, and for good reason. SMS is a cheap channel for communicating quickly with thousands of customers. If done correctly, it can drive impressively high engagement rates.

But those bad texting habits that crop up in our personal lives roll right over to brand-consumer interactions.

So, if you’re an enterprise with an SMS channel, here are three signs of bad texting behavior to watch out for—and three text messaging best practices to use instead.

Bad texting habit #1: Ignoring SMS compliance

This is first in the list because it’s the absolute worst habit you could develop. Why is it the worst? The others might annoy or confuse your customers, but ignoring text message regulations is downright illegal.

The reason you don’t get telemarketing calls in the middle of the night is thanks to FCC text message regulations called the Telephone Consumer Privacy Act. The TCPA controls what kind of content and conversational methods brand can use when communicating with consumers over phone, email and text.

Honoring customer consent is the throughline of TCPA regulations, which you can read in full here. For example:

• You have to receive explicit, written, subject-bound consent to text customers. If a customer only opts in to receive messages about promotional deals, you don’t have permission to text them about product updates
• You have to message customers between the hours of 9am and 9pm in their local timezone
• You have to deliver on marketing offers, i.e. if you promise a deal for opting in, your first message should fulfill that offer.

Best practice #1: Follow text message regulations!

The TCPA is a good snapshot of general SMS regulations, but it’s certainly not the only standard you should know. You may also have to comply with country or state-level rules, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

While not requirements, the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association offers a list of best practices worth a review.

If following the law seems like common sense, then good, because brands do get this wrong. In 2013 Papa Johns agreed to pay a $16.5M class action lawsuit after sending 500,000 unsolicited texts advertising pizza deals—violating SMS opt in regulations. Customers reported getting spammed with 15 to 16 texts in a row, even in the middle of the night, despite not opting in to receive promotions. Yikes.

Bad texting habit #2: Sounding like a robot

If you send customers a message that says, “Your appointment is on Feb 5th at 3:00,” they might have some questions. Among them: “Wait, what appointment?” and “Who dis?”

Customers will hesitate to interact with your messages if you don’t provide any context. Worse case scenario, they might think the message was sent in error and simply ignore it.

Best practice #2: Be clear, but be friendly

You absolutely should keep your messages short and sweet, but remember that they need to very clearly explain the offer, update or reminder.

The content of your message should introduce yourself and address the customer by name. That helps customers identify that the message comes from a legitimate source and is intended for the right person.

See example below:

“[HappyInsurance] Hello Bob, we’d like to remind you of your upcoming appointment with Agent Joe on Feb 5th at 3:00 PM”

However, you can use direct language and still keep a friendly tone. Like this:

“Hello from Your Insurance! Alice, we’d like to remind you of your upcoming appointment with Agent Joe on Feb 5th at 3:00 PM”

Bad texting habit #3: Leaving customers guessing

Are customers leaving you on read when you’re expecting a response? Maybe that’s because you’re sending messages like:

“Hi, We need more information for your application.”

Without a specific action requested, customers won’t understand what you’re asking them to do or how to do it.

Best practice #3: Give them a call to action

When you need customer to complete a task, your message to them should contain:

• The reason they’re being contacted
• What they need to do
• How they should do it

Compare the message above to this second message:

“Hi Jane, please upload your driver’s license using the following link to complete your insurance application.”

Ushur’s customer engagement mobile app helps bad texters get better

Did you see your brand in any of those bad texting habits? We’ve got four more signs you’re a bad texter (plus four more text messaging best practices) coming up in part two. Tune in to 4 More SMS Bad Habits + 4 Mobile Customer Engagement Tips to learn what customers find creepy, how to combat ghosting and the dangers of triple-texting.

For a customer engagement mobile app that provides everything you need to be a good texter, try Ushur’s Invisible App. The Invisible App automates inbound and outbound customer communications, combining advanced natural language technology, sophisticated process automation and a UX designed for large brands.

Sample Ushur features every good texters should use include:

• Customizable opt-in/opt-out messages
• Foolproof opt-in/opt-out preference management
• CTA engagement that supports rich media (image, voice, video, document uploading and consumption)

See you in part two!

We are proud to announce that we’ve officially launched the Ushur’s Managed Package for Salesforce, now available in the Salesforce AppExchange.

Now you can use Artificial Intelligence to automate customer engagements over email, web, SMS, and more, integrating directly within the Salesforce interface. This allows customer support and operations teams to deliver powerful self-service tools across the digital channels your customers are engaging on.

With intelligent process automation in Salesforce, you can streamline a number of use cases including:

• Account Updates
• Support Resolutions
• Sales Enablement
• Document Upload
• Email Routing

Ushur’s App key features include:

• Classify and index high-volume customer emails, documents and texts for routing to internal teams within Salesforce.
• Read and write customer account information from and to Salesforce
• Integrate with Salesforce Process Flow and trigger communication-based actions within the Ushur platform, even for custom-objects
• Allow customers to automatically upload docs and images into Salesforce cases

With Ushur’s Intelligent Automation App for Salesforce, enterprises see faster customer response times and increased customer satisfaction. To learn more about the app, how it works, and the benefits to the enterprise, check out our app on the Salesforce AppExchange or contact us for more information.

If you’re curious about why conversational AI is getting so much attention, read on.

We get a lot of questions about whether conversational AI lives up to its promise. And we get it: on a personal level, one frustrating experience with an all-too-helpful chatbot or virtual assistant can be enough to turn you off. So it’s hard to imagine those conversational platforms in play at an enterprise level, especially if you’re dealing with sensitive customer information.

But the reality is that our interactions with smart speakers and chatbots are a tiny window into what full conversational AI platforms can do. That’s particularly true when it comes to delivering personalized customer experiences.

Today, conversational AI can automate nearly any kind of customer interaction, execute complex outbound and inbound requests and pull information from backend systems—and perform all of these tasks across platforms. Customers can text you if they hate making phone calls, and later they can continue the conversation over email. All of this happens in the same communication channel. Conversational AI operates at both an incredibly wide and incredibly personalized scale: it can read and process thousands of emails in seconds, and it also remembers to tell your customers “happy birthday” every year.

We would know a thing or two about its capabilities. We wrote a whole guide on using conversational AI for customer service, which you can download for free here.

Our guide details the AI techniques used in chatbots and other conversational AI tools for a business audience (read: we’ll tell you how Natural Language Understanding actually works in a digital self-service context), provides conversational AI examples in use by customers today, and explain the difference between conversational AI and chatbots, best use cases, what value to expect from conversational AI platforms and more.

From The Smart Guide to Conversational AI for Customer Service:

Chapter 5: Business Benefits & Impact

In addition to the customer experience benefits, conversational AI also drives two varieties of business results.

Better Service = Happier Customers

The faster you address their concerns, the happier the customers. In insurance, for example, it might take two or three weeks to resolve a claim. With conversational AI automating the manual data entry and back-and-forth, that claim can be resolved in a day.

The majority (66%) of adults feel that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide them with good online customer experience.3

Obviously, “happier customers” is sort of an indirect benefit, but it does break down to real business benefits. Take this story for example.

One large insurance company decided to automate its claims servicing using two-way SMS. The claims process took three weeks to complete, with agents making six attempts to reach customers by phone. In its first year deploying conversational AI, the company converted its outbound calls into 70,000 automated text messages per month. The results were dramatic:

• 85% overall campaign engagement rate
• 50% of customers completed within five minutes
• 90% completed within one hour

Other enterprises using conversational AI saw similar results:

• Raised NPS scores by 9%
• Cut email processing from days to seconds
• Cut queue times from 15 hours to one minute

Reduced OpEx = Happier Employees

Companies that make a concerted effort to improve their customer experience also see employee engagement rates go up by an average of 20%.4

Service agents who spend more time solving meaningful problems for customers and less time completing menial tasks are happier employees. The main business benefit to conversational AI is happier employees—but reduced OpEx is another sub-result.

In chapter three we talked about how conversational AI slashes high volume drivers. Let’s take support calls as an example. Typically, every call costs you between $12-17. Lowering call volumes has an impact force on operational expenses.

One large enterprise using conversational AI reduced outbound calls by 94,000+ per year.

We’re talking about reducing OpEx spending not in the thousands or even hundreds of thousands—we’re talking about saving millions of dollars every year—and that’s on just one call driver.

• 80% OpEx reduction
• 14% reduction in agent attrition
• Cut processing times by 8x

Time is money, so there’s also the impact to top line revenue to consider. In the shipping industry, for example, if a customer emails requesting a quote it takes businesses (on average) 57 hours to respond. Conversational AI can automate quote processing in 5 hours. Getting 90% of your time back and being 90% faster than your competitors drives an outsized advantage.

Let’s just get it out there: Customer Contact Week in Nashville is...a lot. A lot to see. A lot of people to talk to.

You can’t meet with everyone. You have to prioritize.

That’s why we’ve created this quick quiz to help you decide whether Ushur belongs on your shortlist of must-see vendors.

1) Are you a Customer Contact professional?

Of course you are. You’re going to CCW.

2) Do you want to cut wait times, reduce call volume and make your customers happier?

Thought so.

3) Are you interested in automation but wish it was a lot smarter?

You’re speaking our language! Ushur is a complete solution for intelligent automation. It contacts customers proactively over email, apps, SMS and more, so they can self-serve just about any transaction you want. Onboarding customers, updating account information, scheduling appointments, delivering customer surveys--Ushur can do it all. You design the workflows with our intuitive visual builder. Ushur handles the conversation start to finish and integrates with popular backend systems like Salesforce and ServiceNow so you never lose track of anything your customers tell you.

4) Did we say ‘conversation’?

We did indeed. Ushur isn’t just smart. It’s positively talkative. Ushur uses conversational AI to understand what your customers are saying and what needs to happen next. Customers interact with Ushur over the channels they prefer, using the words that come naturally.

5) Did you answer ‘yes’ to all questions above?

We should meet up! Drop by our CCW page to schedule a meeting with a member of our very human, very helpful and all-around wonderful team.

Too busy at CCW but still want to hear more? We’ve got you covered. Drop us a note, and we’ll find a time that’s not so hectic. Whether you’re Nashville-bound or sitting this one out, we’ll hope to talk to you soon.

Intelligent automation is a comprehensive solution for digital transformation which combines AI, ML, and RPA technologies. The financial and strategic benefits of this technology are widely known and acclaimed, yet many companies have intelligent automation questions regarding its implementation and deployment. Keep reading to learn more about the Top 5 FAQ’s potential customers have about the Intelligent Automation adoption process and how Ushur can answer these uncertainties.

Intelligent Automation Questions:

1. Integrating this intelligent process automation solution into existing systems is requisite to fully automate the processes. How long is the typical deployment time including integrations?

We have had customers with complex systems of record integrations fully deployed in 1-2 months. The process typically starts with scoping out the data requirements needed, and then how that data will be transferred. Often, this is done through APIs or standard integrations with core systems which Ushur will provide.

2. I’ve heard RPA projects fail most of the time because the processes that are being automated change or become obsolete. How does Ushur help me solve for this scenario?

Our technology offers an automation analytics dashboard which continuously tracks user trends, behaviors, and adoption patterns. Any alarming patterns or trends will be reported to appropriate personnel, so that your company can make necessary adjustments to the processes before they become obsolete. Our intelligent automation platform highlights proactivity and being one step ahead at all times.

Our visual, workflow builder with drag-and-drop capabilities ensures that any modifications to the automations can be achieved in an expedient matter and by non-technical users.

3. We want to automate our processes once and use different channels (SMS, email, chatbot) to engage with our customers. Does Ushur support this model? If so, how?

This technology is designed to ease your employees’ lives, so our workflow builder, which can be handled by any employee regardless of their technical background, can stitch together a process which can be engaged on SMS, email, or web chatbots depending on what you prefer.

Furthermore, our customers are often using Ushur for deflection to preferred, lower cost channels. For example, with voice to text technology, Ushur is able to deflect customer calls to web or SMS based communication if the customer prefers, saving the company money and customers their time.

4. We want to engage with our customers via texting, but are worried about meeting the compliance requirements of TCPA. How can Ushur help us?

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act limits the usage of automatic dialing systems, artificial or prerecorded voice messages, SMS text messages, and fax machines. To maintain the standards of the TCPA, we have text and email opt-in capabilities so customers have control over the messages they receive. Moreover, Ushur Visual Tools and APIs allow enterprises to distinguish the customers who have opted in by themselves and those who were added explicitly by the enterprises. Users can also opt out of receiving messages whenever they want. Once a customer opts out, Ushur will maintain their contact information on a blacklist.

Lastly, Ushur has a Do Not Disturb (DND) feature which limits the times when messages can be sent to an end user depending on user preference (i.e. restrictions on sending messages during the weekend). All of these capabilities are in place to protect the end user and ensure that our customers are TCPA compliant.

5. We have tried using AI/ML to auto classify, triage and route inbound email/voice/text, but those projects have been expensive failures. Why do you think Ushur can help where these other companies couldn't?

Our AI/ML solution can be deployed without investing in any data science engineers since with our data anonymizer, model training, and pre-flight simulator tools. Moreover, the workflow builder allows users to handle and manipulate solutions with ease and without technical expertise.

Some specific solutions such as SmartMail, Smart Conversations, and Intelligent Data Extraction will apply AI/ML to problems in real-time, making the platform more relevant and useful for customers and enterprises alike.

Business Insights through our analytics dashboard make it easy for companies to realize KPIs and analyze customer experience and ROI in a transparent manner, so any issues will be flagged and remediated before coming close to failing.

Lastly, there are a multitude of machine learning and deep learning models available and designed for specific intelligent automation use cases. These specific solutions are more tailored to your company’s needs, so the success rate of the solutions are skyrocketing.

App usage is skyrocketing with 194 million global app downloads in 2018 alone. This smartphone era is distancing itself from calls and emails and shifting toward mobile solutions. Modern problem solving is designing apps and throwing them at the problem hoping for something to stick. With this surplus of apps comes a greater challenge to differentiate your business’s app, to capture the attention of the customer, and to convince them to download and utilize your app. In 2017, the average smartphone user had 80 apps on their phones and used around 40 of them a month.

But what if you could deliver an app-like experience, without asking your customers to download an app?

Keeping these challenges in mind, Ushur conceived the Invisible App to remove the friction of apps, while still maintaining the digital, app-like experience that customers prefer. Not only is app adoption an arduous process, but app development is time-consuming and demanding on developers. Bringing apps to market takes around 4-5 months and constant updates and bug-fixes are required after the app is taken to market as well. We wanted to lower the barriers customers face when interacting with enterprises, thus marking the inception of the Invisible App.

Fueled by conversational AI, this 1:1 communication channel connects you with customers in the snap of a finger and automates two-way conversations to fulfill tasks like onboarding, scheduling, order tracking, and much more. Through a link delivered via SMS, email, or the web, customers are taken to a secure, encrypted HTML5 container where rich experiences including video submissions, surveys, file uploads, and payments are all possible. Since there is no login required, the Invisible App is there when you need it, and when the customer engagement is completed, the secure channel closes.

How does this all work?

Build as it requires no development resources on the enterprise side. Ushur’s web-based portal is the central hub for building, deploying, and tracking all automations visually. The drag-and-drop workflow builder requires no-code and champions creativity and customization.

After you’ve mapped out the experience you’d like to have with your customers, building the app simply requires the arrangement of the modules in the order you wish. Ushur’s APIs allow you to integrate with your CRM platforms guaranteeing that all data exchanged within the Invisible App is automatically updated in your backend systems. The Invisible App also offers white-labeling capabilities allowing full brand visibility for your enterprise.

Some other notable features include:

• No app creation or download
• Can create and deploy in less than an hour
• Secure and encrypted channel
• Integrates into your backend CRM systems
• Image, Text, Voice, Video, and Location Services/Rich capabilities
• Push or pull capabilities -- depending on your needs
• Powerful analytics in our tracking dashboard
• White-labeled (add brand colors and logos in seconds)

How can this enhance customer experience?

An app-like experience without the app development, the invisible app means the customer does not have to take any additional steps since engagement is possible via communication channels such as SMS. Additionally, the journey which is designed in the drag-and-drop workflow builder mimics the features of apps such as image uploads, file and document uploads, order tracking, and more.

In this age of overwhelming app proliferation, we wanted to create a refreshing take on two-way communication that takes the pressure off developers, while maintaining customer needs and expectations.

Ever wonder what working at Ushur is like? Meet Ushur’s Summer 2019 Interns. This past summer, Ushur’s office nestled in a Santa Clara-based office park was illuminated by the jovial and energetic spirits of 7 fresh-faced interns. Keep reading to learn more about their meaningful work here at Ushur and their impression of the unique Ushur culture.

Meet Simrin

(University: UC Berkeley, Major: Economics and Data Science, Role at Ushur: Marketing and Sales Operations Intern).

As a Marketing and Sales Operations Intern, I tackled a wide range of projects from creating sales and marketing collateral containing competitive analysis and consumer statistics to gaining expertise in the CRM platform we employ, to creating quarterly reports for the sales, marketing, and finance teams to authoring blog posts (like this one!). Ushur indeed kept me busy this summer, but I was fortunate to have gained such invaluable experiences which a classroom simply can never provide.

What was the most meaningful thing that you did at Ushur?

At Ushur, I had the opportunity to pursue projects which the company not only valued but also implemented! There is no sense of ego or hierarchy, and everyone is willing to help you learn and become a better professional. Moreover, the most surreal experience I had was presenting my sales operations project to the VP of Sales and Director of Customer Success. In most other companies, interns would never be offered the opportunity to spearhead such a project AND present their findings. I felt valued at Ushur, and I felt like my work mattered. This feeling is insurmountable, and I’m grateful for all the wonderful people who guided me and helped me develop skills crucial to my future success.

Meet Vamsi

(University: UC Davis, Major: Computer Engineering, Role at Ushur: SWE Intern).

As a Software Engineering intern in our office, Vamsi tackled projects involving email triage, database migration, single sign-in, and customer data anonymizer. Over the course of his 12-week internship, Vamsi emphasizes how unique the experience at Ushur was because he was able to not only have flexibility over the projects he chose, but he also was immersed into the company. Henry, Ushur’s CTO, and Raj, Director of Engineering, worked closely with Vamsi to develop his learning, but they also entrusted Vamsi with high-level projects.

What was the most memorable/meaningful experience at Ushur?

“Seeing your code get put to use in production - the things you work on actually get used instead of just sitting on a pile of unused projects.”

Meet Avinash

(University: University of Chicago, Major: Computer Science, Role at Ushur: SWE Intern).

Avinash’s time at Ushur consisted of parsing, storing, and executing enterprise data triggers to create a more robust, parallel design, as well as adding capabilities for data triggering throughout the platform. In addition, he redesigned the logging infrastructure to allow for enhanced debugging, auditing, and accessibility. To boost performance and construct more relevant metrics, Avinash worked to improve internal Ushur data collectors.

How is your work at Ushur influencing your future career decisions? How did this experience aid your professional development?

My experience at Ushur gave me an excellent feel for what it is like to work in a quick-moving startup environment. I learned how to effectively document and implement engineering projects, and follow them through the entire process - from design to deployment. This experience made me far more confident and prepared for other engineering and computer science roles.

What was the most memorable/meaningful experience at Ushur?

The very first day that I arrived at Ushur, I was given training and a debrief on my first project by senior technical leaders. By the end of my first week, I worked with my management to finalize a design, and by my second week, I had completed the implementation. The amount of attention and technical guidance that I was able to receive exceeded my expectations, and allowed me to complete many more projects and learn much more that I would have been able to without it.

Meet Vibhu

(University: University of Washington, Seattle, Major: Earth and Space Sciences: Geology, Role at Ushur: Data Science Intern).

Vibhu, our out-of-state intern focused his time at Ushur in the data analytics and data science department. He constructed a model to detect patient rejection and acceptance as well as utilized data visualization software to create a gauge chart showing the response rate of individuals using Ushur’s software. Vibhu also worked with the marketing team to consolidate and automate their list management process -- epitomizing the collaborative culture of Ushur.

What made your time here at Ushur unique? (culture, people, projects, etc.) How has this experience differed from any past experiences?

I enjoy working at Ushur since it is a small startup where I know everyone. I am able to meet with multiple different teams and have the freedom to pursue projects that interest me. In addition to this, I especially enjoy the fact that there is no bureaucracy in the company so things could be done as efficiently as possible. I have also worked at Northwest Behavioral Associates as an intern for a completely different role and even though that was also a good company to work for, there was still some degree of bureaucracy when it came time to accomplish certain tasks.

We concluded intern interviews with one piece of advice they would give all the interested and future Ushur interns:

Simrin: Ask questions! At Ushur, you will find yourself in the coolest meetings with all combinations of departments, C-level executives, etc. Take these moments in, and use everything as a learning experience. Strap in, it’s going to be a thrilling ride!

Simrin: Ask questions! At Ushur, you will find yourself in the coolest meetings with all combinations of departments, C-level executives, etc. Take these moments in, and use everything as a learning experience. Strap in, it’s going to be a thrilling ride!

Vamsi: Stackoverflow and Henry are your best friends.

Avinash: Interning at Ushur is an excellent experience and you will be working on projects that make their way into the product, something unique to Ushur's program. My advice for future Ushur interns would be to view the internship as both an excellent learning opportunity for your own professional development, and an opportunity to contribute to a goal bigger than any one person's individual aspirations. You will get to work with very experienced professionals in your field and become an integral part of a close knit team.

Vibhu: My advice would be to start an internship as early as possible, as learning through practical application is something that more people should do in order to advance their skillset and knowledge. Furthermore, I recommend working at Ushur and other small startups so that you can further develop your aptitude in a shorter period of time and nurture your career. The only thing I regret from my internship is not starting it earlier!

About 124.5 billion business emails are sent and received each day, and this number is only growing (DMR). Manual email triaging, the primary mode of email intake up until recently, is not scalable for such growth. Employees, on average, receive 121 emails per day (DMR). Spending approximately 3 minutes per email would result in 6 hours of labor just combing through emails. Moreover, employees whose jobs are dependent upon checking email (i.e. IT, helpdesk, customer service, etc.) receive mountains upon mountains of emails exceeding that of an average employee.

The crazy thing about this is that complex and time-sensitive emails to bulk email inboxes which necessitate diligent supervision and follow-through get muddled up with routine requests for address changes or password resets. This is why it’s paramount that enterprises begin automating their email intake with process automation.

Personnel optimized. Time saved. Savings maximized.

Automating these processes frees up employees allowing them to hone in on other tasks which require their detailed attention and utilizes important human skills such as context, cognition, empathy, and sentiment.

Prior to digitization, a large life insurer we work with, had email queue times of 15 hours, all front-ended by a team of intake agents.

For this insurer, it took approximately 17 full-time employees to:

• sift through their support desk email inbox
• read each one
• understand the content and intent, and
• accurately classify the email and route to a subject matter expert to perform a follow-up

With SmartMail implementation, their emails are classified in just a few seconds. Furthermore, their triaging process before SmartMail was limited to the 8-9 working hours. Due to SmartMail’s unsupervised functionality, their email classification is now a 24/7 process.

How does the technology work?

How can I get started?

At Ushur, use cases can be deployed quickly. The process begins when our customers specify their pain points, and define the areas where they are receiving the most repetitive emails and tasks that could be automated. After deciding on the use case, the Ushur team creates a custom demo to showcase how the Ushur platform can be used for the specific needs of the customer. Then, a proof of concept (POC) process begins.

For the POC, we take a sample of historical emails and strip away PII information using an anonymizer tool. This sample set acts as training data to augment to Ushur’s existing machine learning data. Our quick and efficient POC process is a limited scope deployment, and it takes about one to two months to complete. With the KPIs and goals in mind, the POC is tailored to meet the needs and expectations of the customer. During the POC process, customers go through training so that they can adopt the knowledge and skills to ensure the SmartMail technology runs smoothly post-deployment. After this process is completed, both the customer and Ushur analyze ROI and KPIs to verify all intended goals were met.

The process is simple. Emails flood the company’s inbox. Ushur’s technology uses AI, ML, and OCR and ICR to read email body and attachments. Then, the emails are either a) classified and routed to the appropriate destination (person or department) or b) classified with intent clearly identified to kickstart an automated Ushur workflow to accomplish a certain task (i.e. change of address, claim initiation, tax ID modification). Not only does Ushur’s technology have the propensity to automate email triaging, but the SmartMail technology can also reduce the manual labor needed to perform simple, repetitive tasks.

Email Intake Automation is a “must-have”

The best part about automating email intake processing is how flexible and customizable automation can be to your company’s specific needs. From Helpdesk automation which enables automatic resolutions, to new user/password reset, to address changes, the options for email triage automation are endless (helpsystems).

Interested in reading about how one of our customers, a large life insurance provider, implemented SmartMail for their email automation needs? Download the whitepaper below.

What is it and how do you deploy it successfully?

What is it?

Business processes involve routine tasks that are getting increasingly complex with rapid technological advances. Workflow Automation can provide the relief to both the employee and the employer—to the employee opening them up for more creative and value-added work; the employer in cost savings, efficiency, and avoidance of errors. Workflow automation is about automating business processes based on workflow rules where human tasks, data, or files are routed among systems or people. Typical workflow automation examples include onboarding a new customer, adjudicate a quote request, handling an Invoice, process a new claim, etc.

Conversational AI is about leveraging the channels facing the customer, including messaging apps, speech-based assistants, and chatbots to automate communication and create personalized customer experiences at scale. The AI in conversation represents elevating the engagement to a new level of intelligence by appropriately introducing certain components, especially the Natural Language Processing units. At times, the processing involves Machine Learning and sometimes even Deep Learning. The key is to leverage the AI components at appropriate points in the conversational flow.

Combining these two powerful technologies (process automation and conversational AI) is the key to building a smart enterprise and happier customers. With these tools, major insurance provider has already seen ~12M in costs savings after the first year of deployment. Similar impacts are being felt in other industries as well.

How does it work?

Workflow automation is typically achieved by connecting software nodes involved in a repetitive process, capturing human operator’s visual movements on a screen and deploying them as being done by software robots.

An SMB can automate their workflow by connecting a cloud-based application like Google Sheet with their backend structured database. As the google sheets are getting filled-in with data, manually or automatically through other means, their backend database is getting populated for further internal processing. The database tables can then be viewed via a CRM application.

A large banking organization that is processing loan applications can employ software robots to take the information from the submitted loan forms that are on the screen and copy it into the next system to continue processing. This was originally being done by humans who were involved in the routine task of copying and pasting data across systems.

Conversational interface is about being proximal to the customer (the end-user). This interface is the conduit through which a customer is reached, content of their interaction handled, conveyed into a software-based system, stored into a database, used in computing, fetching other related information, and finally efficiently giving back to the customer what is relevant in that engagement. With the recent advances in machine-learning algorithms and with a set of relevant AI technologies, there is a cognitive dimension to the conversation and hence termed conversational AI. This now becomes the realm of NLP (processing) along with NLG (generation) and NLU (understanding), depending on the depth of the use-cases.

How to deploy with success?

For the digital transformation to be on the right path, clarity, and priority in sequence of actions must be established in the strategy. As found in PWC article [1], in the modern era of advanced engagements, the customer is the first stop. They are the driving force for businesses. It is only then that the business processes kick in. So, here the conversations with intelligence drives the workflow automation giving rise to an era of intelligent automation.

Let us consider an example here. A user initiates an engagement by texting in a keyword to a well-known virtual number. This is done over SMS channel. This user is interested in securing a health insurance policy. The content in this engagement is fetched from the backend system and is presented to the user. The two-way engagement continues as a conversation while the backend system is continually engaged for further information. As part of this ongoing engagement, there can be information stored on the backend system. At any point the backend system may choose to reject the policy creation and the conversational interface will deliver that experience appropriately.

While the end-user has engaged, the backend system is kept in sync and may transition accordingly. So, we see here workflow automation on the backend system as well as in the front-end, along with the advanced conversations going on in a seamless flow. Regardless of the user input being voice or text, the user’s sentiments can be derived and fed back to the backend for appropriate actions. Instead of a plain old telephone call where the operator is picking up the call, support systems at the backend operation in this old paradigm is forced to enter data manually into a system (this is often much slower and prone to errors). Here, the cognitive elements of the conversation interface is now extracting the information (structured and unstructured data) and feeding it appropriately to the backend. Thus, the conversation together with the backend workflow acceleration leads to a fully unified workflow automation via conversational AI. As part of the ongoing engagements, a cognitive graph can be built and enhanced for future intelligent engagement handling with the end-user. The system is thus self-learning for ongoing improvement.

A successful deployment is one where the focus is not just on the efficiency of business processes, but also on the means of achieving it. This includes customer engagement; the mode of interaction that is the current trend; future-proof considerations of how the consumer is moving; changing paradigm of software, computing, advanced cognitive technologies, cloud deployments and so on. Instead of narrowly looking at the backend efficiency of automating processes alone, it is vital to holistically look at the use-cases and bringing in the right set of cloud-based solutions, which can withstand rapid changes in the software spectrum and societal trends.

How are companies using it to reach KPIs?

Companies that are deploying Ushur’s Workflow Automation Solutions are primarily first focusing on the Conversational aspects of it. They fine-tune the message delivered to the end users based on the context of the engagement, clearly establish the purpose of the engagement with the user, are very specific in what they expect from the customer, they set reminders to the end users accommodating the users behavioral patterns and finally they convey to the end user if the purpose of the engagement is achieved. They also employ Ushur’s AI-ML modules at the right places in the conversational flow.

The companies choose their integration strategy based on their backend systems. Some have leveraged reporting capabilities of Ushur and using those reports have integrated customer data into their backend systems. Still, others have utilized Ushur’s API that taps into every AI-powered engagement Ushur deploys with the end user and thereby integrates those API hooks into their backend systems. The possibilities are limitless depending on the goals and strategy

Ushur is proud to announce our SOC 2 Type 2 Compliance Certification.

The proliferation of Big Data has put data at the forefront of all business processes and decisions. Regardless of industry or field, generating, analyzing and interpreting data is crucial to success. However, the benefits associated with Big Data come with a fair share of threats as well. In order to use data to its peak potential and achieve the ultimate business goal of delighting customers, then data security must be a top priority. If customers cannot entrust their medical, credit, or identity details to a company, the company will run itself into the ground.

The insurance industry is especially susceptible to hackers and other security threats. Hosting the sensitive health, property, banking, and/or credit information to millions of people in single databases, insurance companies are vulnerable and easy targets for hackers who wish to swipe information efficiently. According to the FBI¹, health insurance fraud costs the healthcare industry $80 billion annually while non-health insurance fraud costs $40 billion annually. Not only do these security breaches cost a fortune, but they destroy the customer’s trust in and relationship with the company (FBI²).

So, what can your company do to ensure that you meet your obligation to the customer to protect their privacy?
SOC 2 Compliance.

What is SOC 2 Compliance?

If you are outsourcing any processes or tasks to B2B companies and handing them your customer’s sensitive data, ask them if they are SOC 2 Compliant. SOC 2 Compliance is a stringent auditing procedure, in which technology-based organizations storing customer information in the cloud, are scrutinized for the most airtight and secure data protection practices.

1. Security: Are system resources are protected against unauthorized access? (i.e. firewalls, two-factor authentication)*
2. Availability: How accessible are a company’s services, products, etc.? (i.e. performance monitoring, security incident handling)*
3. Processing Integrity: Does the system achieve what it is supposed to? (i.e. process and quality monitoring)*
4. Confidentiality: Does the data have limited access for certain groups? (i.e. encryption, firewalls)*
5. Privacy: How does the system use, collect, disclose and store personal information? (i.e. access control, two-factor authentication, encryption)*

What does it guarantee?

A SOC 2 compliant company is guaranteed to:

• Monitor malicious and unknown malicious activity to cover all their bases. 
• Implement notifications to combat security breaches and threats in a timely fashion. 
• Incorporate detailed auditing trails ensuring that if an incident were to take place, the steps to remediation and improvement can be tracked in a transparent manner. 

Why is it important?

Not only is it the Fort Knox of data security, but the SOC 2 Compliance procedure is also completely voluntary. So companies who willingly choose to go through the auditing process have data protection and security at the forefront of their priorities. Also, this process takes months of preparation, development, and auditing as well as several technological and human resources. Thus, the SOC 2 Compliance has grown into a symbol of how much a company cares about and prioritizes data protection.

Ultimately, a SOC 2 Compliant company guarantees that the security, privacy, availability, processing integrity, and confidentiality of your customer data is protected from any threats or dangerous activity. Choosing a SOC 2 Compliant company means putting your customers first – ensuring security to both your company and to your consumers.

Ushur is proud to announce our SOC 2 Compliance Certification. Your data security is our top priority, and with our SOC 2 compliance, we guarantee to adhere to the strictest and most trustworthy security practices.

The Impact of AI and ML in Insurance

CEO & Co-Founder, Simha Sadasiva discusses where AI can help Insurers at 2019 Global InsurTech Summit Panel.

Our CEO & Co-Founder sat down at the Global InsurTech Summit with Group Head of Artificial Intelligence of Zurich, Gero Grunkel, Global Head of Artificial Intelligence at Prudential, Michael Natusch, and CSO, Eric Sibony, of Shift, to discuss the ways Insurance companies are utilizing AI for increasing productivity and digitizing their business.

There is a consensus that AI and automation have become a need of their industry, and the panel discusses the areas they are tackling first including enrollment, claims and customer support. Watch the video below to hear their thoughts and strategy around deploying AI.

Topics of discussion were:

• Hype about AI and applications of AI
• Key terms like Neural Networks, Deep Learning, AI for Linguistics using NLP, NLU, NLG
• How do you go about leveraging data for the purposes of building knowledge graphs and corpus?
• Types of applications being created using AI that Insurance companies are deploying
• How to apply cognitive technologies for process automation in quote intake, claims, training and customer service use cases
• How to impact customer experience while leveraging AI-powered automation

As you may have seen recently, Ushur announced its Series A funding round led by Silicon Valley’s premier firm 8VC. This is a significant milestone for us to celebrate and the entire team looks forward to expanding Ushur into a global brand.

Co-founder Henry Peter and I recognize this to be a great endorsement of our business and our technology, and we are excited to partner with Bhaskar Ghosh and David Moskowitz from the 8VC team as we accelerate to the next orbit.

So, let’s take a look at where we’ve been—and some of the lessons we’ve learned along the way—in order to set the stage for where we’re headed.

The Beginning

After nearly a decade of building and selling infrastructure to telco carriers worldwide, Henry and I found ourselves in teams that made it possible to commoditize and deliver technology to the masses at affordable prices. With the ubiquity of the mobile device and the daily content overload caused by social media, it became clear to us that we were staring at a fantastic opportunity to “ushur” in short snippets of engagements between businesses and consumers in the same way we engage with each other.

By automating these “micro-engagements™” - and augmenting that with process and workflow automation, we realized that we could create significant value for enterprises that are reliant on legacy systems of records largely powered by human touch.

So, we quit our stable, corporate jobs and took the plunge into the world of startups.

Why We Call it Ushur

Reinforced by emerging technologies such as Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI), we could eliminate the friction that exists in interactions with customers, employees and partners. More importantly, our micro-engagement platform, coupled with an AI system, could accelerate workflows afix the endless wait times and frustration experienced when calling an insurance company, an airline or a retailer.

Similar to the seamless experience one has with an usher getting you to your destination, we deliver services for end users which are nothing short of a personalized white-glove, usher-like experience, albeit fully automated.

Staying Focused

With our team of experts in ontology, machine learning, data visualization, zero-code systems, analytics, and enterprise software, Ushur has combined robotic process automation with a conversational automation platform. Our architecture and system design have proven our ability to apply this platform to a variety of verticals and use cases—from top-line sales and marketing to cost-optimization, operations and customer support.

Our focus on these fundamental differentiators provide us with the advantage of a bottoms-up approach to making the enterprise smarter, quicker, and more cost-effective—especially in insurance. Some of the world’s leading disability, life, and property and casualty insurance companies use Ushur for evidence of insurability, claims automation, billing automation, and a plethora of other agent assistance solutions.

Staying Hungry

Without losing focus, we recognize that similar problems exist outside of insurance (think about the friction we experience with airlines, cable companies, retailers, healthcare providers…the list goes on).

The first two years of any startup journey is largely focused on understanding the market and creating the minimum viable product—and Ushur was no different. We dabbled in a few market experiments that ended in failed go-to-market partnerships. These setbacks were not the end; they just meant it was time to reevaluate.

Our true north has always been our customers, so we decided to optimize our product, processes and services around customer acquisition and retention, and train every employee to become a Customer Success Champion. Since then, we have grown to serve Fortune 500 & Global 5000 companies.

We started Ushur with the vision of dismantling barriers for frictionless interactions, and it all starts with process automation. However, this is just the beginning and there is much to be done to put Ushur on the global map.

Staying Humble

Regardless of the number of years of experience in established businesses, first-time entrepreneurs need to acknowledge that they don’t know what they don’t know. Along with talking to our network, attending conferences, and doing research, we recognized the need to reach out to a broad set of experts and recruit amazing mentors who have had entrepreneurial experience in investments. Our mentors provided valuable point of views that we internalized for our startup.

While a lot of advice from many sources is available, we eventually realized that every situation is unique and the team DNA and dynamics need to be a part of the decision-making process.

Charm Lady Luck

In the words of Vinod Khosla, venture capitalist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, who spoke about the entrepreneurial roller coaster, “The essential thing that entrepreneurs do is to charm lady luck.”

Some call it luck; others call it providence. Regardless of the name, I’d consider lady luck a good friend of ours. We met one of our largest customers on an airplane. A phone call to a long-lost friend brought in one of our lead investors. We hired our first engineer—one of our star players—from a Craigslist ad.

Each time we have faced adversity, we dug deeper, came up with creative solutions, and charmed lady luck to carry forward successfully on our entrepreneurial journey.

Staying Frugal

We pitched the idea to my friend Sri, a tech executive and mentor, whose enthusiasm encouraged us to jumpstart building a proof-of-concept. With that in hand, and the help of friends and family, who were receptive to our pitches anytime, anywhere—even mid-karaoke—we raised half a million dollars and officially became a “funded startup.”

As first-time entrepreneurs, we were amazed by the pride that came with raising our first seed money, as well as the excruciatingly painful process of raising early capital. We now understand why early investors are called “Angels”. That’s definitely how we see those who have backed us. The experience of working with limited resources drove us to be very cost and capital efficient with everything we do right from our early days.

As we race ahead to gain the required velocity to take Ushur into the next orbit, the path ahead is filled with more hard work, exciting opportunities to solve hard problems and growing the company sustainably without losing the core culture that we have cultivated.

And we remind ourselves and our team each day: stay focused, stay hungry, and stay frugal!

Acknowledgements

Right after our funding, my mother passed away to be in a better place. I know she is watching over with pride on what we have accomplished. My mother has been the most influential person in my life and I owe all of my successes to her.

A special mention goes out to Pankaj Patel - an industry stalwart who has mentored us and been very instrumental in our evolution. As an up-close investor and board member of various companies, Pankaj’s deep experience in operationalizing businesses and being up-close as an investor and board member at many companies has proven to be invaluable to team Ushur.

This post would be incomplete without the acknowledgment of gratitude to acknowledging our mentors, investors, partners, and friends – Hem Korubilli, Don Fotsch, Murli Thirumale, Sridhar Chandrashekar, Shashi Kiran, Murali Venkatesan, Sreevathsa BG and David – for believing in our vision and supporting us all the way as our mentors, investors, partners and friends.

To our angel investors, thank you for backing us with your investments and constant support, without which we would not be here today.

Finally, we could not have stayed the course if it was not for the tremendous sacrifice our families have made. A big thank you to our families - Geetha, Eshaan, Preethi, Thomas, and Maria for supporting us every step of the way, despite all the hardships they endured.

Many IT workflows that were previously done primarily through email, would be much better suited for automated text-message conversations using conversational AI, saving time and frustration and optimizing productivity. Let’s look at a few scenarios how this can alter the digital experience for your company:

Approvals

Employees often need answers quickly for important requests that their jobs depend on, like those involving their IT needs around hardware or software or related to an important request to the HR team. The old way of fulfilling these requests done through email has demonstrated friction, longer SLAs, and significant costs. Often I have had to remind my boss with that special reminder email to let her know my approval was sitting in her inbox and if she did not approve it by the end of the day, I would have to file that request again. Or for that matter, the approval requests that I would receive from my staff that would get buried in the 500 odd daily emails that I had to deal with. No matter how organized one is, the sheer volume of stuff in your Inbox can defeat you. A text message that lands on your mobile device for an approval request can be dealt with quickly, easily, no matter whether you are in the airport or at a coffee shop, without needing to log in to the corporate network or logging into the system of record. Enabling such an interaction is not only feasible but also effective. These are not off-channel interactions. Imagine such a service working alongside your Jira Service desk or Confluence to ensure all these engagements and interactions are recorded in the system of record for compliance, audit trail and record keeping.

Incident management

Incidents are a broad term used in the industry to define service requests from employees. Also known as Case management or Service Request Management, Incidents are the reason your IT administrator or your HR business partners have a busy job. In fact, they are too busy answering or servicing the same requests over and over again. Before Service Desk products like Jira Service Desk came into existence, most requests were being handled through paper-based forms, emails and phone calls supported by dedicated support teams. As software became easy to deploy and distribute with the advent of the cloud, Service Desk software has become the lifeblood of the IT and HR teams. And guess the form of engagement still being used alongside the new breed of systems of record - email!

While accessing a service desk portal may not be a big deal for many of us, a modern workforce that can include employees on the go (think salespeople or executives) or those without access to a corporate IT infrastructure (think about a truck driver) or those that don't use legacy channels like email (think college students and millennials) need a different way to engage and request services. Just like approvals via text, an incident creation service to text in your request is not only possible but also available. Such a service allows a requestor to look at how their request may have been previously handled, providing an incident deflection to reduce cases to your HR partner or to your IT admin, before creating a ticket in the service desk. A simple text message that allows the truck driver or the retail store employee to file a service request can save significant service desk costs while dramatically altering the experience for the worker.

Resolution Confirmations

The single biggest call volume or email volume into a service desk is a status request on an incident or ETA for servicing a case. Companies are finding this to be a big issue. In fact, when it comes to external customer request, the problem is so prevalent that there is even an acronym to describe this: WISMO (Where is my Order). Repeatedly answering status related questions puts significant stress on support teams, not to mention friction between teams. Closing the loop on the ticketing process is important to ensure that the service request is unambiguously resolved. A Service Level Agreement (SLA) governs the metric for IT and HR teams on how quickly they are servicing the incoming requests. Most times, SLAs are not accurate because requestors fail to acknowledge that their issues are fully resolved. A company-wide policy to age or “soft-close” an issue after 48 hours of no-follow up from the requestor is how many teams try to address this issue. I believe this is a terrible way to acknowledge that an issue is indeed resolved to the satisfaction of all parties. Disputing the resolution is a common reason for reopened tickets leading to back and forth between the employee and the HR/IT personnel. Can you avoid this dilemma? You bet! A simple conversational AI workflow for the employee who requested the issue to confirm closure through a text message, followed by a recording of this and an automated state change in the service desk incident.

Each of these scenarios can be solved with automated text messaging using conversation AI. We have launched our Ushur for approvals app in the Atlassian Marketplace that works with your Jira Service Desk for text-based approvals, so you don’t have to send those email or text reminders to your boss. With Ushur, your approvals are no longer getting buried in the pile of emails. More of these apps for your service desk are on the way. We would love to hear your thoughts on what this could mean for your business.

Check out Ushur for Approvals in the Atlassian Marketplace to learn more.

How to optimize I.T. service desk with automated two-way text messaging

I was at the Atlassian Team Tour event recently when a panelist commented how email has become a digital space where information goes to die. It is hard to imagine how much has changed since Blackberry made email accessible just 15 years to-date. Email was the tool that allowed us to move business communications from paper and phone-based communication to the electronic form, but it feels like it is past time for email to step aside for some things. It is time for a better way to “interact”, particularly one that lends itself for the modern workforce, for the mobile workforce and for anyone wanting to get their request unstuck from the pile sitting in an Inbox. There are better ways to accomplish fast and smooth IT workflows i.e. simple text messages.

The average time it takes to service a request in an enterprise is about 6 minutes. Yet, the average resolution time is nearly 48 hours. The majority of time lost in servicing a request is in the theatrics of information exchange between the requestor and the fulfiller and to extract the most urgent calls to action for either party buried in emails. Most of us can attest to the experience of an urgent approval that gets lost in the boss’s inbox and requires that special “Please Approve” email or text message.

In an age where we have distributed teams, collaborative efforts within systems of records form the backbone of agile teams. But service desk workflows relying on email can be long and cumbersome. While an email is not delivered any slower than a text message, user behavior has transformed in the way we react to a text, compared to the responsiveness to an email. In our world today, we can take days to respond to an email, but most text messages are opened and responded to within a couple of minutes.

The ubiquity of the mobile device and the small form factor of the mobile phone leads to a better user experience to consume shorter snippets of information. This is what the term micro-engagement means - a short snippet of information exchange over messaging. A conversation consists of one or more micro-engagements™. It is perfectly suited for the sachet sized information exchange age we now live with our penchant for micro-blogging, micro-learning, micro-service. So why not micro-engagement?

Micro-engagements™ are not just how we engage in a social context. Many of the trends adopted by consumers are eventually embraced by enterprises. As a matter of fact, when 50% of our workforce in 2020 will be millennials, the way they prefer to engage socially and professionally will not be all that different. Bringing Micro-engagements™ to the enterprise bridges the gap in the digital experiences that most employees are already engaged in their social contexts. Besides, micro-engagements™ bring real benefits for improving productivity, lowering costs, particularly by automating many of the tasks that currently served through human touch.

Want to be the hero of your company? Introduce SMS based micro-engagements™ into many more IT workflows so you can solve problems quickly and efficiently with users interacting with Jira Service Desk using simple text messages for a quick and powerful service desk experience.

We are launching our Ushur for approvals app in the Atlassian Marketplace that works with your Jira Service Desk for text-based approvals, so you don’t have to send those email or text reminders to your boss. With Ushur, your approvals are no longer getting buried in the pile of emails. Check out Atlassian.Ushur.com/learn-more to see how teams leverage Ushur for the most modern team experience.

Want to learn more? Text #UshurForAtlassian to 87487

When it comes to processing claims, there are a number of potential security and compliance traps that could mean serious problems for insurance companies. Whether it’s HIPAA or TCPA, companies need to stay vigilant when it comes to insurance communications with their customers.

Filing paper based claims is not only inefficient and time consuming, it can lead to serious human errors. There are few ways in which companies can use technology to make sure they are on top of the latest compliance requirements while accelerating claim management to save huge costs

Keep your communications secure and private.

It is extremely important to make sure that your communications with your customers and their private information is as secure as possible. HIPAA covers many aspects of protecting patient information. Those working with claims that require exchange of patient health information (PHI) or personally identifiable information (PII) must pay especially close to Title II, which holds standards on how and with whom patient data can be shared. HIPAA has standardized the requirements for electronic claims processing software.

Key considerations for engaging with claimants is to ensure that they have opted in to engage electronically and via phone and texts to be in compliance with the national regulatory laws like TCPA if your claimant is in the US. Each country may have exclusive regulatory requirements that insurance companies need to be aware of while interacting with their claimants electronically using new technology like chatbots but the fundamental objective of these laws are designed to protect privacy for the customer, and allowing them to opt-in and opt-out of communication methods at their will.

Keep claims accurate and prevent mistakes.

When you electronically transfer information, there are a number of advantages over humans handling paperwork and files. Consider a software platform for claim engagements a safety net that will keep you from falling out of compliance or making any mistakes.

Conduct electronic audits.

With increasing scrutiny of insurance claims processing systems by regulatory agencies and auditors, it is more important than ever for companies to conduct regular audits of their claims processes. Audits can be painstakingly long if you are not using the latest technology. Here is where the latest software platforms automating a variety of customer engagements can be helpful. As the venture capitalist and entrepreneur Marc Andreessen puts it, “Software is eating the world” and if you need to stay relevant, you have to embrace the change.

Finding the right solution

Digitizing your claims processing through electronic medium is not just the current fashion, but it is great for business. The customer experience is dramatically frictionless. You cut costs by automating many of the steps that you may be currently doing manually. You can catch and prevent more errors, reduce administrative time, and most importantly, protect yourself from potential compliance vulnerabilities. Have the most sophisticated, advanced system in place so you never wake up with any sort of million dollar lawsuits.

Insurance claim processes are notoriously lengthy and cumbersome, for both insurance companies and their customers. From long and arduous back and forth to messy, complicated paperwork, claim cycles can be a real pain for all sides involved.

For insurance companies, long claim cycle times increase administrative costs, reduce claims department employee productivity, and negatively impacts relationships with providers and policyholders. For the claimants, frustrating, long wait times for time sensitive financial decisions leads to poor NPS scores for the brands.

The delays in the adjudication of the claim is due to the arduous process of collecting and coordinating a variety of information between the two parties. Insurance companies typically deploy claims personnel to interact with claimants through the traditional modes of email and phone calls. When customers have to speak to agents in person or through email, it takes an average of 6 attempts to converse and collect the relevant claims data, eating up the claims department time as well as the claimant’s.

Leading insurance companies are now beginning to use new technology in order to cut claim cycle times - chatbots. These chatbots support customers through the life of their claim, just as a customer support specialist would do. But now, insurance agent chatbots are available 24/7 and instantly to answer any question for the claimant or to collect information from the claimant using automated two-way texting conversations.

Also known as “operator texting” or “agent texting”, these bots are being used for all sorts of use cases, including

• Confirmation of claim information received
• Confirmation of claim adjudication
• Payroll requests
• Reminders to send pay stubs
• Bots for collecting  information
• Last day worked information gathering

Companies that have implemented chatbots as insurance agents have enabled better customer engagement, keeping the customer informed and adjudicating claims as quickly as possible. Those companies have also seen better efficiency when it comes to claims processing, with over 30% improvement in NPS scores while saving over 60% reduction in costs.

If you’re interested in learning more on using chatbots to support your team of insurance agents, write to us at [email protected] or text #TryUshur to 87487.

AI and Chatbots are all over the news lately, with companies moving to automate their low-level, repetitive tasks in droves. With the sector relatively new however, some might remain confused as to how exactly chatbots work and whether the return on investment actually lives up to the hype. Does your company need to consider chatbots?

Do you have any departments spending 10+ hours a week on repetitive tasks?

Is your team struggling to keep up with your growing business?

Do you want to increase your conversions from your customer outreach strategy?

If you answered yes to any one of these questions, then your company could benefit from chatbots and see decreased costs as well as increased customer conversions.

First though, what are chatbots?

Chatbots are a useful, efficient form of automated customer engagement. Bots are simple artificial intelligence tools that interact with your customers. Those interactions can be straightforward, like asking a customer to refill their prescription or provide missing information to process an insurance claim, or more complex, like having a customer troubleshoot a problem with their internet service or help them to make a product purchase decision.

Chatbots, using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, are able to answer your customer inquiries as well as automate your sales & marketing messages via based on the conversation mapping you have created. The context and cognition is built from ingesting existing data from your business which can include: knowledge base, FAQs, case history, incident reports, or just plain old documents.

Companies have started to use chatbots in order to bolster and automate customer support functions, supercharge their marketing and sales campaigns, and streamline IT and HR service desk operations.

Now, why does your company need them and what results will you see?

There are two main reasons companies are choosing to integrate chatbots into their customer engagement strategy. One, is to create and retain loyal and engaged customers and two, is to lower their operational tasks and costs at the same time.

More Engaged Customers

The world is completely mobile. 80% of all internet traffic in the world is now consumed on mobile devices and the most ubiquitous form of communication for mobile is texting or messaging. In order to reach your customers and keep them, active and engaged, companies must effectively engage their customers on their mobile devices

In fact, Gen Xers and Millennials are now texting more than 100 times a day, compared to just an average of 0 to 1 phone call. More than 70 percent of Gen Z and Millennials say they sleep with their phones within reach, and automatically pick up their phones if they’re awakened in the middle of the night.

This is perhaps just one reason why chatbots and automated messaging perform at significantly higher rates than traditional forms of engagement like email and apps. Open rates for text message for example, sit at 98% with the majority opened within 90 seconds, while email is just opened 24% of the time. When you include a call to action in your text message, companies see an average click-through-rate of 36%, compared to an average of just 6% CTR in emails.

Lower Costs for You

Companies that implement chatbots have seen significant reduction in operational costs when it comes to customer support and marketing techniques.

Call center costs for example, have been dramatically reduced because of chatbots, with companies reporting a 50% reduction in call volume since implementation. If you’re struggling to keep up with customer support demand, chatbots can be a great way to automate repetitive support functions and leave your reps to focus on what they do best.

Would you like to learn more about what your company can do with chatbots? Reach out to us at [email protected] with any questions you may have.

Sources:

1. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/what-are-chatbots-why-does-big-tech-love-them-so-n572201
2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/larryalton/2017/05/11/how-do-millennials-prefer-to-communicate/#54cbcab86d6f>

HR departments are in desperate need of automation. The number one complaint of HR professionals has consistently been of lost productivity due to answering repetitive employee questions, lengthy forms, and onboarding new employees. Departments across all industries would rather put the human back in human resources by connecting with employees to strategically move the company forward rather than get sucked into these repetitive tasks that deserve to be automated. And chatbots are rising to the occasion.

To give you an idea of just how bogged down HR professionals are, research by Ed Lawler and John Boudreau from the Center of Effective Organizations found that, on average, over 50% of a human resources department’s time is spent processing employee information and answering their questions.

Here are just 3 important reasons why your HR department needs to join those who’ve already started their automation journey:

1. You have a large company, and those employees have lots of questions

Not only that, the requests at hand often require HR to spend time crawling through mounds of information specific to each employee in order to provide the correct answers. A chatbot can use your internal data to offer employees instant responses to their questions without them ever reaching out to your HR personnel. Case or incident deflection is the term used in the industry to enable employees to find answers before they become a task for your HR partner.

With an average HR-to-employee ratio of 1:100 in the United States, reducing questions by 70% will mean departments will gain back significant amounts of time. Take your frequently asked questions, cases and incidents and enable an Artificial Intelligence based chatbot to answer those questions effectively.

2. You’ve got remote employees and multiple cities/buildings

Going digital has many advantages, but with today’s global multi-site operations, it’s more important than ever to move your tasks online. It’s estimated now that 43% of the workforce in the United States are currently working at least some of their time remotely engaging with their co-workers. Maintaining engagement with a global team is crucial to the cohesion of your company, and your employees will appreciate communicating in frictionless texting based conversations. Chatbots integrated with your HRM, CRM, and IT systems are tailormade to drive your company to higher productivity levels.

3. Standardizing and automating onboarding

Your company is expanding rapidly or your industry may have a high churn rate, either way your HR department could use some help in this realm. From June 2015 to June 2016, U.S companies on-boarded 62.3 million new hires., About 25 percent of those new hires, or 15.5 million people, likely will switch jobs within a year. Onboarding and offboarding not only costs a lot of money, but takes up significant time in the HR department. Here are some functions that chatbots could automate:

• Send and complete prior paperwork to keep day-one housekeeping to a minimum.
• Complete HR related tasks, including I-9 forms, payroll information, 401(k) contributions, and other benefit selections over automated messaging, collecting all information into one database.
• Schedule drug screenings or other pre-hire background checks to make the process less invasive.
• Coordinate technology and equipment so that it is ready to go upon arrival.
• Send directions and reminders for time, location, and more.

A CareerBuilder study found that 55% of HR managers believe Artificial Intelligence will be a regular part of their function in 5 years. More than a quarter of managers believe they are already losing 20 hours or more a week to functions that could be automated.

There are a vast number of use cases for which chatbots can automate HR workflow functions. Any of those tasks where a chatbot can take over will leave HR professionals open to focus on strategic functions such as connecting with employees, hiring development, and networking externally. With automation, companies will save significant time and resources, and in turn grow and expand their business cost-effectively.

To learn more on how chatbots can automate your HR functions, reach out to us with any questions at [email protected].

Sources:

1. 10 Ways Enterprise Chatbot Solutions & AI are Changing the Workplace
2. The Future of Work – The Intersection of Artificial Intelligence & Human Resources
3. My Company Automated
4. Careerbuilder – Over Half of HR Managers Predict AI Will Be Part of Their Future
5. Remote Workers Work From Home

According to a report released by Gartner, consumers want to manage 85% of the total business interactions with banks through Fintech chatbots by 2020. These numbers show the future of banking depends on automated customer engagement, but are banks ready for their digital transformation?

It seems the banking industry is in a very early stage of adopting automation and AI for banking services, as call centers remain a large piece of their customer engagement strategy. Forrester reports the finance industry is the biggest employer of call center jobs, representing 15% of the population.

This is a paradoxical statistic as research shows that phone call-based customer service is an outdated form of engagement, and is not only costly, but customers also do not prefer it. A Zendesk survey found that two-thirds of customers prefer self-service over speaking to a company representative, and nearly half of respondents in our Millennial Mobile Consumer survey stated that they have switched companies after waiting on hold with customer service for too long. Customers would rather handle their issues themselves instantly than to speak with a representative. Companies that will delay embracing these trends will likely lose customers and struggle for existence – just like retail businesses that ignored the rise of ecommerce.

This is a paradoxical statistic as research shows that phone call-based customer service is an outdated form of engagement, and is not only costly, but customers also do not prefer it. A Zendesk survey found that two-thirds of customers prefer self-service over speaking to a company representative, and nearly half of respondents in our Millennial Mobile Consumer survey stated that they have switched companies after waiting on hold with customer service for too long. Customers would rather handle their issues themselves instantly than to speak with a representative. Companies that will delay embracing these trends will likely lose customers and struggle for existence – just like retail businesses that ignored the rise of ecommerce.

Incumbent financial institutions need to make their leap into embracing these new tech trends before losing their customers to companies who are already adopting innovation into their customer engagement strategy.

Companies that have already begun to reach the 1.2 billion mobile banking users worldwide with automated customer engagement are using these strategies for a wide variety of successful use cases. Here are some examples:

• Citizens Bank had previously noted that customers were not receiving notifications via email and phone calls, and so began using a messaging app to send reminders. Using automated reminders helped increase their loan completions by 10%.
• Bank of America is focusing on helping their customers save money with suggestions on how to pay down debt, providing updates on their FICO score, and tips on how to make smarter banking decisions tailored to their customer’s needs.
• 82% of all customer support for Digibank, Singapore’s largest bank, is now handled through a chatbot, helping the company run their customer service unit at a fifth of the cost of running a traditional bank.
• Capital One’s chatbot helps customers manage their money via text. They are able to request account balances, recent transactions, credit limits, and payment history. Customers can even pay credit card bills by text.

AI and Automation allow banks to reach their customers where they’re at, at a significant fraction of the cost. By handling simple transactions like the examples above with chatbots, banks can solve customer requests instantly, and save money at the same time. In fact, Juniper Research predicts chatbots will be responsible for cost savings of $8 billion per year as of 2022. So, even though Gartner estimates that we’ll reach 85% banking automation by 2020, the question is, why not sooner? We can help you get there a whole lot faster.

If you’d like to learn more about automating customer engagement in banking, email any of your questions to [email protected].

Sources:

1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/blakemorgan/2017/08/06/5-ways-chatbots-can-improve-customer-experience-in-banking/#1e79ab714861
2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/blakemorgan/2017/08/06/5-ways-chatbots-can-improve-customer-experience-in-banking/#1e79ab714861
3. https://www.americanbanker.com/news/chatbots-to-humans-move-aside-i-got-this
4. https://www.juniperresearch.com/press/press-releases/mobile-banking-users-to-reach-2-billion-by-2020

Gartner estimates that in 3 years 85% of companies will be using automation and AI as a part of their business strategy, meaning that those who don’t have a plan in place now, will assuredly be left behind in the wake of our fast-paced technological landscape. So how does the Insurance industry shape up in light of this statistic?

One study suggests the insurance industry may be falling behind. The Future of Insurance, a 2016 survey of Insurance Professionals, found that 1 in 3 professionals felt that “tech capabilities and legacy systems” were the parts of their business slowing them down the most. The report highlighted that out of date technology is the biggest barrier to change for insurance, and that insurance professionals feel that digital channels would have the biggest impact on insurance going forward, with 23% of respondents listing digital channels as the top impact on their business along with Wearables and Big Data and Analytics.

Thankfully, many insurance organizations have begun their descent into the chatbot world and have worked towards updating their legacy systems. Insurance companies are currently using automated text messaging for use cases ranging from incident management, to sales enablement, to billing, and to resolution confirmation.

Perhaps the most transformative use of chatbots in the insurance world is in claims processing. Often a long, tedious process, chatbots can simplify and automate the interaction between the customer and the insurance company. Insurance Innovation Reporter, in their article on how chatbots have disrupted the insurance industry, describes parts of the claims process that can be automated.

“Chatbots can help a user register the first notice of loss, schedule the survey appointment for the evaluator, provide loss prevention recommendations, arrange emergency assistance during accidents, and offer pre as well as post disaster assistance.”

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For those companies that have taken steps to update their systems with automated text messaging within these use cases, they have already begun to see big results. One Fortune 500 company had the goal of reducing claimant outreach by 10% after deploying chatbots, but results after deployment are showing greater than 20% reduction in call volume saving the company significant time and resources.

As we stated at the beginning of this article, many Insurance professionals feel that they could invest in more advanced technology in order to break barriers to growth. It is important to note however, that when insurance companies have invested in updating their systems, 28% feel that their Digital Customer Relationship Management was the most important new technology investment to their organization for growth potential.

While the industry’s chatbot and AI usage has taken off, it seems to be just the beginning. In our recent survey of Millennial Mobile Consumers, who will have purchasing power of $200 billion by 2020, 40% of Millennials reported wanting insurance companies to use more text messaging for customer engagement. So there is a disconnect between what consumers want from their companies, and what the Insurance industry has provided thus far. We’ve seen when that gap closes, company conversion rates soar to 85% and the automation of 70% of services saves significant costs. If the Insurance industry would like to see these results and to keep up with the 85% of companies who will be automating their systems by 2020, hopefully they will consider updating their legacy systems.

Sources:

1. http://shiftinggears.io/blog/2016/3/30/the-future-of-insurance-survey-report-2016
2. http://iireporter.com/5-reasons-chatbots-will-disrupt-the-insurance-industry/
3. https://ushur.com/blog/2017-millennial-mobile-consumer-report
4. https://www.ibm.com/blogs/watson/2017/04/10-reasons-ai-powered-automated-customer-service-future/

Millennials are expected to occupy 50% of the US workforce by the year 2020, just three years from now. Their purchasing power of $200B will make a significant part of the US economy. We interviewed this group to learn more on their social and consumer behavior and produced the 2017 Millennial Mobile Consumer Report.

The report shows the instant society with real-time interactions has already begun, and it’s time for companies to catch up

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You probably wouldn’t be surprised to find that Millennials are frequently texting throughout the day, with more than 15% of respondents stating they are sending a hundred text messages or more. Now let’s compare that to phone calls. When asked about the number of times a millennial dials and/or receives a phone call, a large number of respondents, 35%, said that they make less than two calls per day. Answers show that messaging remains the most popular form of communication for millennials, 100 times over.

But some may wonder, “Well that may be how they feel in their personal lives, but that doesn’t mean that is the way in which they’d like to interact with a brand as a consumer….” However, our survey shows this actually seems to be the case. Millennial consumers seem to expect instant communication with their brands, and don’t want to change their behavior from their personal life to their consumer one.

Just as the average Millennial expects to be able to communicate instantly in their personal life, they expect to be able to reach the business of their choice at any time of the day, and get answers as soon as they request them. 72% of Millennial consumers expect a company to get back to them with answers to their questions within an hour, with 30% saying they expect those answers instantaneously. If companies can’t live up to those expectations, our research shows that there will be a price to pay.

When just 6% of this group prefer phone calls as a channel, waiting on hold to engage with a brand is not an acceptable experience for Millennials. When ranking unpleasant activities, 1 in 4 respondents listed calling customer service as their top 3 most unpleasant things to do – in a list that included paying bills, going to the dentist, and studying for an exam. Nearly half of respondents even stated they have switched companies after waiting on hold with customer service for too long. To give you an idea what this translates to in lost revenue, Forbes estimated that US companies lost $61 billion due to poor customer service in 2016.

Automated messaging seems like a welcome solution to their instant gratification needs. 67% of millennial consumers have messaged with a business before. Of those that have used the automated communication, 88% would do it again after their previous experiences. From this data, it looks like Millennial consumers are ready and expecting self-service through automated instant messaging.

This seems true for multiple use cases. When asked which areas they would prefer to message a company rather than calling them, respondents answered that they would prefer messaging when a company to ask for directions and hours, to renew a subscription or order a refill, to check the status of an order, to check pricing, and to schedule an appointment.

Our survey shows that millennial consumers expressly feel that their engagement wants are not met by the brands they are currently doing business with. When asked which industries could benefit from more customer engagement through instant messaging, nearly every sector fell significantly short of their expectations.

As you can see from the gap that exists between what millennial consumers expect to what brands are able to deliver in terms of engagement, there is a huge opportunity for businesses to quickly adopt messaging based interactions for their marketing, customer service, and sales needs in order to cater to this fast growing demographic

Our report showcases an opportunity for companies to reach their millennial customers where they’re at and what they want, not to mention the 24/7 access to serve them.

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This translates to deploying automated mobile messaging based solution to serve customers without the costs of human agents or expending high touch, and with the added convenience of anytime, anywhere access to service. This is perhaps the most compelling case for this new category that some call chat bots or others refer to as “conversational interface”.

Capitalizing on this market’s needs could mean big for business as we all know that Millennials account for $200 billion in buying power. If companies can close the gap in engaging those consumers expecting instant interactions, we will have found the perfect application for this new instant message solution full of hype.

Mobile devices are the preferred way to access the internet for the majority of the population, and while mobile apps continue to thrive, companies are struggling with creating engaging experiences with their customers as their apps get lost in a sea of social networks, games, entertainment, and news. Even when users give it a try, seven of every ten use it for less than 24 hours!

The retail sector offers a daunting picture to those enterprises seeking to better engage with their customer base.

Retailers spend millions in creating apps, but just four of every ten use those apps on a weekly basis, and three of every twenty users report they never use it after the first download.

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It is an engagement dilemma, as retailers are trying to reach out to their customers using the wrong mechanism. Just like only 80 percent of Americans find phone calls as an inconvenient way to interact with a provider, mobile apps might not be the right tool either. App usage growth is slowing down in some sectors, but consumers are messaging more than ever.

App usage grew 53 percent in 2015 and slowed down to only 11 percent growth in 2016. Messaging apps, in particular, experienced a strong growth of more than 44 percent in 2016, while time spent within messaging apps grew by a factor of 4x.

Retail apps are on the decline, but consumers are messaging more and more each year.

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Simply put, there is only so much room on a smartphone, and an enormous amount of apps available, that for any company to expect their customers to download their app is a giant leap of faith. According to Mary Meeker’s State of the Internet report for 2016, a typical person uses no more than 30 apps actively. Couple that with the fact that there are two million apps available at any given time, just in the Apple store, with close to two thousand apps added each day. It shows how a company’s chance of a customer downloading their app is very slim.

Retaining those customers using the app is even more challenging. Only one of every twenty apps keep an active user for more than 30 days, and 70 percent of users disappear within 24 hours of downloading an app. It is a complicated situation when as much as 50 percent of apps are only used once.

While retailer apps are facing critical times, instant messaging as a preferred way of engagement continues to grow.

Individuals prefer instant messaging to a phone call in a 5:1 ratio and Millennials on average send 67 text messages per day, and would rather go to the dentist than make a phone call to a retailer!

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Instant message sessions with customer service agents are getting traction and resulting in increased satisfaction among users, but at some point, automation is required to keep operational costs low. That is one reason why the chatbot market is poised to take off. According to Job Pal, $360 million was invested in chatbots in 2016, up from $194 million the previous year, and just $50 million the year before that.

Messaging seems natural, convenient and lacks any friction. Whether it is through a Chatbot or a live session with an agent, the user interface is the same one that customers use when messaging friends and family, so there is nothing new to learn, making the customer experience simple. There’s no sign-up and sign in necessary, and companies have 24/7 access to their clients, and vice versa.

Retailers might need to rethink their approach to customer engagement and explore beyond the mobile app paradigm into more lasting, seamless modes such as instant-messaging communication. As a long-term business strategy, chatbots could be an investment that stands the test of time.

Sources:

1. “IOS App User Retention Rate by Category 2016 | Statistic.” Statista. EMarketer Research, Published by Statista, Apr. 2016. Web. 13 Dec. 2016. https://www.statista.com/statistics/259329/ios-and-android-app-user-retention-rate/
2. Mary Meeker. “2016 Internet Trends Report.”Dream Bigger — Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers. KPCB, n.d. Web. 01 Feb. 2017.
3. Kojouharov, Stefan. “This Is How Chatbots Will Kill 99% of Apps.” Chatbot’s Life. Chatbot’s Life, 26 Nov. 2016. Web. 01 Feb. 2017.
4. Perez, Sarah. “The Mobile App Gold Rush May Be over.” TechCrunch. TechCrunch, n.d. Web. 01 Feb. 2017.
5. “U.S. Retail App Usage Frequency 2015 | Statistic.” Statista. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 Feb. 2017.

Messaging has become the most dominant and ubiquitous channel of engagement. That is probably why 4 in 5 companies want to text their customers. However, only 1 in 4 marketers use this medium to reach their customer base. Many companies are just not keeping up with changing consumer behavior, and in turn creating a digital divide. If consumer behavior has changed so dramatically, why are marketers still choosing email over instant messaging for customer outreach?

Human attention is dwindling – fast. According to a study by Microsoft, over the past 17 years the human attention span has fallen to below just 8 seconds. While our attention span is dwindling, our power to consume information is at a faster rate than ever. Addictive technology behaviors have changed the name of the game. The first thing those between 18-24 do when they lose focus is check their phone. For over half of them this means they will reach for their phone every 30 minutes. And while they are on those phones, over half of those sessions last only 30 seconds.

Do these new parameters of engagement mean promotional marketing as we know it is dead in the water?

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Nowadays, we seem to think in chunks of 140 characters at a time and as such, we consume content dramatically different than in years past. Nearly three-fourths of the millennial generation, which is currently the largest living generation group, watch their favorite entertainment using streaming technology instead of live TV, less than one in five use email regularly, and over three in four solely use messaging for their communication needs. If consumer behavior is changing, companies need to follow suit with their marketing tactics.

For one, evidence already shows older techniques no longer drive value. Driving promotional marketing the same way that has been done through traditional marketing leads to drastically lower conversion rates. When was the last time you opened those flyers that the mailman delivered to you? You can take a look at email marketing vs. messaging, as another example. It is no surprise that a text message has an open rate of 99 percent, whereas less than a third of promotional emails are opened. In our daily life we open respond to most of our text messages, but many emails end up in the spam/promotional folder untouched. Even more disparate are the click-through rates (CTR). Pew Research Center reveals that if you include a link in your text message, customers will click through that link at a rate of about 36 percent. That same link in an email? The customers click through just 6 percent of the time.

Yet companies continue to push content through legacy channels like email, even for transactions with existing customers.

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Technology is moving so fast, that even ever-present social media may become less effective in engaging with young consumers. Business Insider research shows that millennials are beginning to move from the public spheres of social media to private media in order to communicate with friends and family. Messaging apps, on the other hand, have exploded, with Whatsapp having over 1 billion users to date. Facebook’s major investments have been in their Facebook Messenger, including bot applications. And just like that, messaging app usage has officially surpassed that of social networks.

There is a seismic shift in consumer behavior from public sphere interaction, to private, instant messaging and many companies are behind the curve in reaching their customers in the same way.

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The exponential growth in messaging apps and instant-messaging engagement shows consumers want fast and private engagement. The first step for companies to reach customers in this day and age is to realize that promotional marketing as we know has changed. Companies must meet consumers where they are and using modes that they prefer. And for the foreseeable future that will be instant-messaging.

Sources:

1. Sable, David. “Attention Spans Dwindling, Processing Power Increasing. Are We Becoming More Like Our Primal Ancestors?” The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 30 Jan. 2017. Web. 06 Apr. 2017.
2. Hendricks, Drew. “10 Marketing Tactics To Increase Conversions.” Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 18 June 2015. Web. 06 Apr. 2017.
3. Intelligence, BI. “Messaging Apps Are Now Bigger than Social Networks.” Business Insider. Business Insider, 20 Sept. 2016. Web. 06 Apr. 2017.
4. “Text Marketing Vs. Email Marketing: Which One Packs a Bigger Punch? [Infographic].”Business 2 Community. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Apr. 2017.
5. “5 Facts That Prove the Power of SMS for Business.” TTAG Systems, n.d. Web.

Companies with the best NPS scores power their business from making their service delivery front and center. Everything they do as a business focuses and delivers on the service experience for customers. Think of companies like Apple, Amazon, Costco which consistently rank in the top 10 for brands with the best NPS scores. These brands invest in infrastructure and technology to deliver outstanding customer experiences, and customers in turn reward these brands with their loyalty and active brand promotion.

97 percent of consumers cite customer service as important in their brand choice and loyalty, and loyal customers are 4 times as likely to refer other customers to your brand.

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But service delivery remains an afterthought for most companies. Historically, it has been an expensive proposition to deliver service because the bulk of the service has been driven by expensive human capital. It’s estimated by Metric Net that each minute of a customer service call costs on average $1.03 and each agent receives an average 2,202 calls per month. Hence, investing in service delivery is often looked at as an avoidable, costly overhead and companies consequently make it difficult to reach their customer service teams, with 75 percent of customers stating that it takes too long to reach an agent when calling for customer service.

The focus has been to avoid human touch (or any touch at all) rather than solving the problem. Companies would be surprised to find out though, that if customers were to have a choice, they prefer self-service rather than talk to a person.

A Zendesk survey found that 67% of customers prefer self-service over speaking to a company representative.

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Companies avoid effective, comprehensive customer service because they think it will cost them in extraordinary expenses of human capital, when really they could solve for customer needs and wants without any human capital at all.

Because of the power of automation and the rise of bots, it is now possible and practical for companies to make service delivery front and center. And this is not just for service delivery for external customers. It is an equally important KPI to deliver an awesome service desk experience for internal customers too. Productivity improvements with a great service desk experience for an enterprise translates to happier employees which translates to better products and services delivered timely and cost effectively to external customers.

It is now possible to scale a business without having to scale spending on human capital. Thanks to platforms like ServiceNow, SalesForce and others who are making programmable systems of records easy to deploy with software as a service. The race is on for a holistic platform play that can cater to the breadth of the enterprise needs – be it internal or external use cases.

Software and automation are excellent ways to expedite your operations, but if you have to pay five times as much to run those platforms, are you really transforming your operations?

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Which is where service “bots” have a huge potential. The ability to engage and automate service delivery for internal and external customer so that you can reduce service outages, manage sales ops, automate customer engagement, streamline order management, automate the approval process, automate IT operations, and all this at a fraction of the cost of how it was done in the past. Replace expensive and proprietary hardware solutions with SaaS and divert a big fraction of the engagements to service bots instead of handling it all with expensive human capital.

The ServiceNow Knowledge 17 Conference happening next week in Orlando will be a great opportunity to learn more about service automation and deploying effective customer service strategies.

Sources:

1. 30, 2016 Sam Milbrath | June. “13 Stunning Stats on Customer Experience (including the $1.6 Trillion Cost of Bad Service).” Vision Critical. N.p., 30 June 2016. Web. 04 May 2017.
2. “Self-Service: Do Customers Want to Help Themselves? (infographic).” Zendesk. N.p., n.d. Web. 04 May 2017.
3. “10 Key Call Center Statistics | 2014 Benchmark.” MetricNet Performance Benchmarking. MetricNet, 21 Oct. 2015. Web. 19 Dec. 2016.- Https://www.metricnet.com/author/jrumburg/.

I started dictating this article to Siri, but I gave up within a few minutes after I had to repeat my words again and again. Emerging Human Assisted Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Assistants, and Machine Learning technology has become a reality everywhere. We use them to check the status of our orders, reorder a prescription or book our trips. While chat bots enhance and optimize company function, bots assisted by humans are shown to be more effective for businesses, at least for the time being.

While these bots are ambitious, they’re not humans yet. They rely on scripted, command-responses, which can quickly get things wrong as they deal with more complex issues and the user forgets that they are interacting with a machine and start the path of natural language in the context of that specific instant-message interaction. There is no doubt that instant messaging is the preferred way of communication for most of us. We prefer instant messaging to a phone call in a 5:1 ratio and Millennials on average send 67 text messages per day, and preferring to go to a dentist rather than phone a retailer!

Instant-message sessions with customer service agents are getting traction and resulting in increased satisfaction among users, but at some point, automation is required to keep operational costs low.

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With the continuous improvement of AI, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML), we should be able to make these interfaces work much better. Despite the impressive number of chatbots deployed – chatbots on Facebook are growing at a faster speed than the apps on Apple Store in its early days – we still need to overcome some challenges, as chatbots are still in their infancy.

Gartner predicts 85 percent of customer business relationships will be intelligently automated by 2020, while a Forrester survey found that almost seven of every ten contact centers expanded their number of seats in 2016 to meet customer demand. Companies are automating customer relationships with chatbots while increasing their agents as well.

Can humans co-exist with chatbots? The answer is yes. Leading companies report a double-digit increase in marketing conversion rates and operational cost reduction when they automate low-value, repetitive functions and program their bots to escalate issues where necessary, leaving their employees to focus on complex problems and deliver the best customer experience possible.

There’s evidence that this automation is already happening and working. Just one of every fifty calls to local businesses involve asking for directions, hours, and account balances these days, as the answer to those questions are handled by technology.

BI Intelligence found that the potential savings from customer service automation could result in $23 billion savings for U.S. companies annually.

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80 percent of the population accesses the internet from their mobile device. The always-connected mobile consumers expect immediate responses from business services. Three of every four customers believe that it takes too long to reach a live agent and Accenture found that half of those customers stated that a better mobile service experience could have kept them from switching companies. This is where chatbots can be of great value, as the response is immediate. Instant-messaging is also the communication mechanism preferred by the average customer these days. And finally, chatbots can escalate issues as necessary, freeing up your customer service reps for important, timely issues.

Human-assisted Chatbots have a substantial impact on the bottom line of companies. The data shows that customers expect to communicate with businesses in the same way they interact with family and friends. Instant-messaging is a powerful communication channel, and Chatbots are a fantastic way to work alongside customer service and sales reps; while AI and NLP continue its relentless advance towards a robotic future.

Sources:

1. Busby, John. “Chatbots Will Not Replace 5 Million Jobs, as the Data suggests.” VentureBeat. Venture Beat, n.d. Web. 06 Mar. 2017.
2. Scout, Help. “75 Customer Service Facts, Quotes & Statistics.” 75 Customer Service Stats and Facts You Can’t Afford to Ignore. HelpScout, n.d. Web. 06 Mar. 2017.
3. Clark, Mark. “Chatbots Could Reduce Cost of Customer Care by up to 29%?” Chatbots Could Reduce Cost of Customer Care by up to 29%? Contact Solutions, n.d. Web. 06 Mar. 2017.
4. Burke, Collin. “100 Customer Service Statistics.” InsightSquared. InsightSquared, 22 Dec. 2015. Web. 06 Mar. 2017.

It would come as a surprise to few these days – no one enjoys calling customer service. Millennials, a demographic that will reach 50 percent of the workforce by 2020, would rather “get their teeth cleaned” than call into a customer service line and two of every three consumers prefer to communicate via some form of instant messaging. So why do companies continue to employ these old forms of customer engagement, at an outstanding opportunity cost of $61 billion per year?

Consumers find a traffic jam, going to the Department of Motor Vehicles or public speaking more enjoyable than calling a customer service line, yet companies continue to rely on call centers as prominent vehicles of customer engagement. 

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While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with call centers, these operations are suffering from severe budget cuts as retailers and other industries face fierce competition, and their customers demand lower and lower prices. This results in over 3 million customer services reps currently overworked in 66,000 call centers across the US.

Even when understaffed, companies are footing a high bill for their outdated communication modes. The average cost per minute for a US in-house customer service call is $1.03. With the average call being 5.9 minutes long and each rep receiving an average 2,202 calls per month, those dollars add up.

Despite the investment in the training and management of this large sector, Forbes reports that in 2016 alone, customer defection costs companies over $61 billion due to poor customer service. Among the primary reasons for customers discontinuing their business was frustration over being redirected to multiple agents and being put on hold for too long. It’s no wonder customers are frustrated when it’s been shown, in a study conducted by ResearchNow, the average person will wait on hold for customer service for a total of 43 days in their lifetime.

Of course, it’s not solely within the realm of customer service, the average person just doesn’t want to make phone calls anymore. Studies show Americans send and receive 5 times as many texts as they do phone calls each day. Among younger demographics, only one of every five interacts via phone calls on a daily basis, but over two-thirds of them use instant messaging, text messaging or social media messaging daily. Even faster forms of communication such as email are not fast enough for our connected society today. Email sits in a distant last place at 6% usage on a daily basis.

Social and instant message based communications facilitated by the mobile web caused consumers to expect instant gratification when communicating in their daily life, so it makes sense they’d expect the same of the companies from which they have purchased a good or service.

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And businesses should take heed. Customer service can very much determine revenue. For example, 82 percent of consumers have stopped doing business with a company because of bad customer service. However, on the flip side, 86 percent of consumers are willing to pay up to 25 percent more money for a better customer experience. When customer service is so closely tied to the business success, it is baffling that companies have not yet taken advantage of communication channels that customers prefer.

While companies have attempted small steps to improve their customer service strategy with technology, the friction continues. Voice systems are now equipped with voice recognition, but these systems still lack accuracy rates to work consistently across broad demographics.

Two of every three customers have hung up the phone out of frustration that they could not talk to a real person when calling a customer service line.

Whether the phone interaction is automated or not, companies are still forcing customers to communicate through a channel they don’t enjoy at a pace that is perceived to be too slow.

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The ways in which people interact with each other, access information and consume media have rapidly evolved over the last decade and companies have to evolve the way they communicate with their customers. The explosion of the mobile internet, with over 80 percent of the population accessing the internet from their mobile device in 2016, caused a significant shift from phone-based interactions to instant messaging, email, social media, and other channels. The ubiquity of smartphones has brought about a world that is within reach 24/7, and so the attention span of the consumer is getting shorter and shorter to the point where they will not settle for anything less than immediate responses. The ever increasing speed at which people communicate has inevitably caused an increased expectation of what timely service means.

While consumers utilized these technologies relatively fast, enterprises have yet to catch up with systems and processes to accommodate. Instant messaging is here to stay, so it seems enterprises will soon have to make a choice: evolve with their consumers or be left behind footing the $61B bill.

Sources:

1. “Crossing The Generational Divide: Providing Customer Service for Today’s Consumers –  Desk.com (Salesforce.com), Aug. 2015. Web. 11 Dec. 2016
2. Hyken, Shep. “Bad Customer Service Costs Businesses Billions Of Dollars.” Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 27 Aug. 2016. Web. 13 Dec. 2016.
3. “Occupational Handbook Outlook – Customer Service Representatives in the US.” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, n.d. Web. 13 Dec. 2016.
4. “10 Key Call Center Statistics | 2014 Benchmark.” MetricNet Performance Benchmarking. MetricNet, 21 Oct. 2015. Web. 19 Dec. 2016.
5. “Why Companies Should Invest in the Customer Experience.” Zendesk. Zendesk, n.d. Web. 15 Dec. 2016.
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ServiceBots could be a solution to some of the current woes of the retail industry. Using instant-message-based systems, these bots can automate many of the functions of a retail operations service desk, bringing a conversational machine interface to what is a costly human-to-human interaction today, thereby reducing the need for scaling human resources, while bringing faster and friendlier support to store employees.

Retailers face increasing business challenges, not the least being staying competitive in the challenging environment of their brick and mortar stores. What happens inside the store may be the weakest link in the chain, when it comes to operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. Forward-looking retailers want to empower all their staff with tools and resources that fit neatly into the daily routine of the store and do not require specialist equipment and training.

Store employees already have complete mastery of their own personal mobile technology. Now there’s a way for retailers to offer their staff a communications tool that utilizes these capabilities to reduce the friction of managing the store, and deal with any issues that may come up, in real-time via mobile devices.

With new servicebots or chatbots technologies, stores can customize and create secure two-way communications via texting, that can expedite a large number of day to day issues.

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What are some of the common culprits that reduce store efficiency and discourage customers and staff?

Store Operations

Imagine if the moment there was an issue with store equipment, a staff member could engage with Corporate, report the issue, and receive updates on how fast the solution would be fixed. For instance, if a cash register goes down on a busy Saturday morning, the manager can report the issue via text message, to alert the Service Desk that the cash register needs to be fixed. Once the issue is logged as a support ticket, the Service Desk can send a schedule of when service personnel will come to the store to repair the register. In the meantime, the manager can set expectations with the store team as to when it will be fixed.

For incidents involving store-related software systems, such as stock systems, security tag systems, or access to employee-only areas of the store, Service Bots can send a resolution confirmation to the store manager to confirm that the issue is actually resolved.

Employee Support and Education

Beyond store equipment and software, there are also ways that ServiceBots can support the day-to-day interactions of employees with Corporate. For example, on the sales floor, store employees don’t usually have access to a computer, and face-to-face training minutes are generally reserved for the highest priority safety and compliance training. However, there’s a host of other information and training that ServiceBots can deliver via instant messaging.

These engagements could take place between the Retailer and the employee at the employee’s convenience. By using simple dialogs, employees can conduct HR activities like choosing benefits information, taking a video based training course, or checking on staff rosters, all on the device of their choice.

Automating the Service Desk

All of these interactions can occur on any mobile phone without downloading an app or without the need to install client software. Retailers design workflows to fit their company processes and they can be scaled to national or even international employees.

The promise of ServiceBots is to automate many of the functions of a retail operations service desk, bringing a conversational machine interface to what otherwise is a costly human-to-human interaction today.

Proper automation via instant messaging reduces the need for scaling human resources and allows retailers to dedicate their expert individuals in the retail operation to take care of the most complex issues, while bringing faster and friendlier support to store employees.

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