Consumers increasingly want to interact with insurers via digital tools, but the industry’s investment in this appears to be lagging, according to research and advisory business Celent.

About 37% of consumers surveyed in France, Germany, Italy, the UK and the US prefer to use smart technology over speaking with an insurance company employee.

Another 21% have never used smart technology but are ready to test it out.

Just one insurer in five has invested in smart technology, while 40% intend to invest or are thinking of investing in artificial intelligence in the near future.

A challenge for insurers is ensuring they channel investment funds into the smart technologies that will best improve customer interaction, Celent says. The industry also needs to explore the operational impact of using smart technologies.

“The proportion of insurers that have already invested in smart technologies remains low… there is manifestly a harmony between consumers’ and insurers’ growing adoption of new machine-driven interaction tools,” Celent says.

“However, these tools create business challenges that insurers need to anticipate and address before investing in smart technologies.”

On customer service, a contact centre led by robots should capture all relevant information about a client, to quickly address queries, Celent says.

In sales, insurers should have in place machine-driven advisers capable of proposing the best covers, and this can only be achieved by having relevant and recent data about clients.