Floatbot - The Management Interview

Overview

Founded in 2017, Floatbot is a SaaS-based platform designed to provide complete Conversational AI solutions for insurers, agents and brokers. Its product suite allows companies to increase digital sales, automate customer support, deliver an enriched user experience and achieve a higher sales funnel conversion rate. Floatbot’s Voicebot solution integrated with contact center solutions automates inbound and outbound calls. The chat and voice solutions work across numerous communication channels including:

Floatbot - The 'Management Interview'

Introduction

Key Areas of Focus

Target Market - Floatbot’s core markets are India, Asia and MENA where, despite the population size, insurance penetration remains largely in single figures given that many insurance purchases are optional. The focus will continue to be on insurers, agents and brokers that specialize in Life, Health, P&C and SME commercial business.

More recently, Floatbot is increasing its engagement with businesses in North America and UK. The ideal client profiles are large carriers and/or large brokers engaged in mass marketing campaigns of standard products to a mass volume customer base.

Floatbot’s unified solutions are designed to address the following pain points:

Driving digital insurance sales

Whilst many insurers provide web-based application forms, the number of offline agents and advisors they employ is limited. The web application forms are not interactive and cannot solve user’s queries. Due to this, sales through digital channels are <5%. Floatbot’s Conversational Sales Chatbot has a ‘Needs Analyser’ Module recommending personalised products based on customer need, assisting customers to complete the application form, addressing their queries with Robo-advice thereby reducing the likelihood of them cancelling the process. Floatbot’s Engage Module, follows-up with customers if they drop-off letting them continue the application from other channels.

Handling mass volume customer support

In terms of customer support and ongoing servicing, the number of agents required to manage 1000s of inbound and outbound calls can lead to high operating expenses – not to mention the time required to onboard new employees and provide ongoing training. Floatbot’s Voicebot, integrated with contact centres, enable businesses to automate low value repetitive inbound and outbound calls.

Managing telemarketing campaigns

Sales funnels with thousands of potential leads require teams of agents and advisors to manage outbound calls, generate qualified leads and convert these into sales. The subsequent conversion rate is typically low (<0.25%) leading to unsustainably high customer acquisition costs for the business. Floatbot’s Voicebot, can act as the first filter transferring qualified leads to agents. Floatbot’s Voicebot eliminate the time wasted by chasing after customers who are not ready to buy enabling advisors to spend quality time on those further down the sales funnel.

MISSION

By integrating the unified Chatbot and Voicebot conversational AI suite into the online application process, across multiple communication channels, customers are given the option to complete applications in conversational form, significantly increasing digital sales. The conversational bot also acts as a robo-advisor giving customers algorithm-driven financial planning guidance before prompting them to complete their application. The AI based ‘needs’ recommendation tool provides personalised policy options to users. This model can also be provided to agents increasing their digital reach and providing a funnel view of leads, trends and digital engagement.

USE CASES

A Conversational AI suite for Insurance Carriers, Agents and Brokers

Floatbot operates in a market where, according to Statista, revenue is projected to reach US$454.8 million in 2027, up from US$40.9 million in 2018. The customer service chatbot segment of the market, in particular, is expected to see the fastest growth with a compound annual growth rate of 31.6% between 2019 and 2026 (Business Insider 2020).

For more information on Floatbot visit https://floatbot.ai/

Floatbot Incorporates AI and machine learning into its live chat solutions. The result is that the accuracy of responses to customer queries improves over time as the AI is continuously trained by both its interactions and those of customers with human agents. Conversations become more life-like with the bot improving its understanding of language and therefore engage in more natural way with the customer.

In addition, the analytics element provides companies with data on their customers’ wants, needs, habits and behaviours which can improve future sales, marketing and product development strategies.

Digital Sales of Insurance : D2C

Automated Customer Support

A pre-trained knowledge base consisting of 1000s of contextual questions and AI rules specific to insurance sales enables the provision of a well-trained Voicebot equipped to respond to inbound calls with the option for the caller to be transferred to a human agent whenever required. With high natural language processing and speech to text accuracy, customer support cost savings can be notable.

Automated telemarketing

Mass customer telemarketing can be costly. For every 1000 outbound calls as few as 2.5 can result in a sale. The Voicebot makes thousands of calls in a fraction of the time, narrowing down the qualified leads and booking appointments with human agents who can focus on closing the sale. This increases agent productivity and reduces telemarketing costs.

Unified platform - Floatbot's hybrid Chatbot and Voicebot solution removes the operational and financial challenges of having to integrate two platforms from two different vendors. Consequently, the challenge in exchanging voice and chat data between two different systems is also removed.

Upscaled for handling Insurance Sales - The platform is both unified and optimised to manage the insurance sales journey. The knowledge base consists of an extensive library with thousands of pre-trained AI rules focused specifically on insurance with the bot using machine learning to improve interaction patterns. Voice (speech to text and text to speech) and contextual AI provide a free flowing, human-like conversational experience enabling a myriad of FAQs to be answered in real time during the sales process.

The Engagement Module, once activated, sends automated reminders in chat or voice form to customers who have yet to complete the sale, using personalised language to reflect where the customer is on their sales journey.

No-code platform - The platform requires zero coding to build (and subsequently enhance) chatbot and voicebot solutions enabling speedy configuration and launch. The bots support 100+ languages.

Use Cases - Sales & Customer Support

What does the Future Hold for FloatBot?

Floatbot is actively engaged with 70-80 insurers globally and are already working with several clients and partners across Insurance, Banking and financial services sectors. We are also working with large life insurance companies in India and Singapore to launch a conversational AI Voicebot for 500+ agencies for automated telemarketing. There is a focus on expanding the team with full-time employees in the US office by mid 2021.

Behaviour and expectations of consumers have changed significantly over the years. We want a buying process that is quick, simple and personalised, accessible across a variety of visual, text and voice channels.

However, the need for businesses to upgrade the way they interact with customers has perhaps never been so crucial as we adjust to a world post COVID-19. The pandemic has removed the 'in person' communication channel prompting an enforced shift to online working, consumption and socialising. Companies and organisations across healthcare, financial services, retail, hospitality, public services and travel have deployed chatbots at scale to help manage the thousands of queries ranging from information on COVID-19 symptoms to cancelled flights and refunds.

Even after COVID has passed, chatbots have demonstrated the ability to quickly alleviate pain points by providing round-the-clock support, minimising the effort needed by customers to find the answers they want and increasing customer loyalty whilst reducing operational costs. Businesses in sectors with high volumes of customer interaction such as BFSI and utilities are increasingly using this technology to provide a differentiated customer experience.

Floatbot - The Team

CEO and Founder, Jimmy Padia, is a tech entrepreneur with more than 15 years’ experience. An engineering graduate from one of India’s top colleges, Jimmy joined General Electric where he was placed in the company’s prestigious IT leadership programme. He subsequently led projects in Business intelligence, ERP and digital marketing in India, China, Latin America and US before setting up an IT services company which achieved 100% growth year to year. However, as client conversations turned to the need for a product to automate the customer support process, Jimmy identified an opportunity to respond to a growing universal challenge and Floatbot was launched in the end of 2017.

With its jurisdiction in the US and its core team physically based in India, Floatbot has more than 30 employees with an experienced Board of advisors and mentors which includes former GE, Microsoft and Amazon tech specialists.

Awards: IDC, Named as an innovator in conversational AI software platforms for Banking and Financial Services in India in 2019, Selected as one of 20 Insurtechs showcased during GIA’s 2020 InsurTech Week, Part of the prestigious NASSCOM Emerge 50, recognising innovative product companies with the potential to become future leaders.

DIFFERENTIATORS

FUTURE GROWTH

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