Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Company, Limited

Background

Across all industries, the shift to digitalized customer touchpoints is accelerating. This is especially true in the financial services sector, where the various players - banks, insurance companies, securities firms, and credit card companies - are promoting digitalization to become more competitive. Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance, a major non-life insurance company, is no exception, and in recent years, it has assertively promoted IT investments centered on digitalization.

Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance has introduced chatbots for three of its products that customers can apply for online: Net de Hoken@Travel (overseas travel insurance), 1-Day Insurance (automobile driver insurance available in 24-hour units), and Customer Web Service (a service for policyholders). It has adopted CHORDSHIP, Fujitsu’s AI chatbot technology, as the platform underpinning these services.

Outcome and next step

Accessible means of customer engagement – even for handling sensitive inquiries

The CHORDSHIP chatbot system consists of a synonym dictionary and scripts, and works in conjunction with content management systems and other knowledge bases.

Ishibashi explains, “With our existing FAQs, customers could not easily find the correct answers unless they were very proactive. However, thanks to the natural language search used by the chatbot, the process has now become relatively simple. Storing various interactions also enables us to enhance the chatbot FAQs themselves.” Indeed, the resolution rate has already reached 70-80%.

Iwamae continues, “In the case of Net de Hoken@Travel, the chatbot assists customers to navigate to the quotation screen. This helps reduce the volume of inquiries, which we thought would be difficult to achieve using chatbot technology.” It turns out that in December 2018 the chatbot system received 8,800 inquiries, of which half were handled outside of staffed telephone support hours. In addition, despite an increase in the volume of policies issued, the number of incoming telephone calls decreased, and this highlights the effectiveness of the chatbot technology.

Nomura emphasizes the extent of the chatbot’s success, “We predicted that most of the inquiries will be the ones that are easy to ask, but it turned out that many inquirers write the specific disease name and ask whether they could be offered the insurance. Interestingly, many customers found it easier to ask questions to the chatbot than when speaking to a human telephone operator.” Introducing the chatbot technology has also led to contact with new customers. Ishibashi concludes, “We are increasingly making contact with new customers who had never called us in the past.”

In the next fiscal year, Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance plans to roll out chatbot services for customers other than those of its online service desk. As Iwamae states, the company regards CHORDSHIP as “an integral part of its efforts to promote companywide digitalization.”