Last year, Allstate hired IPsoft’s industry-leading digital colleague Amelia as a whisper agent. Forbes profiled the ongoing successes of this partnership via an interview with Allstate Senior Vice President Carla Zuniga.
Last year, Allstate, the largest publicly held personal lines insurer in the US, hired Amelia as a whisper agent to collaborate with human agents on customer support interactions. Amelia provides her human colleagues with personalized step-by-step procedures on more than 50 support issues delivered through a conversational chat-based user interface (UI). The successful partnership was recently highlighted by Forbes in an article titled, “Using AI for Customer Experience At Allstate.”
The feature, based on a podcast interview between contributor Blake Morgan and Allstate Senior Vice President Carla Zuniga, detailed some of the benefits delivered by Amelia (you can listen to in full conversation here). “Allstate employees can quickly chat with Amelia to get concise answers about complicated insurance questions from customers,” Morgan writes. “Not only does it allow customers to get the answers they need right away, but it allows employees to be ready to work much sooner by cutting down training time.”
As an added benefit, the article highlights how this human-AI partnership can ensure speedy compliance with government regulations — a particularly vital benefit in the insurance industry. As Morgan notes, “Amelia provides the best of both worlds — the quickness and accuracy of AI mixed with the personal touch of human interaction.”
According to Zuniga, Amelia is currently utilized by more than 75% of Allstate call center employees to handle more than 250,000 conversations each month, and she has greatly reduced average call times while expanding its first-call resolution rates. (A recent Wall Street Journal profile of the Allstate’s AI project highlighted that 99% of Allstate agents who worked with Amelia said they were “completely satisfied” with their interactions.)
But this is only the first step in Allstate’s automation journey. The author notes that “Allstate has plans to increase her workload and expand her scope to eventually interact directly with customers.”