SME online insurance specialist BizCover has been piloting an artificial intelligence chatbot, Frankie, as it looks to pursue efficiencies through technology.

Operational Excellence Manager Brad Hoyle says Frankie is using supervised learning, an artificial intelligence methodology, to develop responses to inquiries, opening another path for customers to interact with the firm at any time.

“Most of Frankie’s human-like responses are powered by a technology called natural language understanding (NLU), which allows it to comprehend questions,” he said.

“The result is a chatbot that feels like you’re chatting with a human. And over time our customers will help Frankie learn and improve.”

Frankie is powered by Einstein Bots, a part of the Salesforce Service Cloud and is expected to soon go live.

“While some situations require the human touch, Frankie will be there for the many straightforward customer queries that we get such as amendments, payment details, claim cancellations – those sorts of things,” Mr Hoyle said.

BizCover says operational efficiency gains are particularly achieved through Intelligent Process Automation (IPA), which pairs automation with artificial intelligence (AI).

The business says technology is proving effective in escalating work items to ensure service level agreements are met and in handling failed payments.

“Automation and AI have helped us service 200,000 small business customers across three countries with just 16 full-time customer service employees,” Mr Hoyle said.

“We can now let humans be humans and robots be robots, which means prioritising the high empathy work to people and using AI and automation to do everything behind the scenes.”