ICICI Lombard partners with Microsoft to automate audits of service calls

Country’s largest private sector general insurer ICICI Lombard has tied up with Microsoft to strengthen and automate the quality control processes. The insurer will make use of Microsoft’s Azure Speech Services and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to screen its daily service calls made by customer service reps.

The deployment of Azure’s artificial tools has, among other things, allowed ICICI Lombard to improve the accuracy of its quality audits. According to Girish Nayak, ICICI Lombard’s chief technology officer, the use of cognitive intelligence technology will automate quality checks which will in turn make their service more efficient.

The earlier process required the company to manually screen a sample of 20% of the over 1000 calls a day that the company made for potential improvements. The improved efficiency will enable ICICI Lombard to improve its customer service, said Nayak. The new system allows Lombard to screen 100% of its calls now, he added.

The technology can also solve for the multiplicity of language, with customers often switching between English and Hindi during calls, says Microsoft national technology officer Rohini Srivathsa.

Microsoft's technology is also able to automate its Quality Assurance process to remove human bias from customer calls, resulting in improved customer outreach, increased productivity and consistency across the audit system, according to Srivathsa. Further, the tools easily process customer queries in Hindi and English and detect insurance-specific keywords easily.

Azure Speech Services provide a wide range of speech recognition and generation capabilities including speech transcription, text-to-speech, speech translation, and speaker recognition.

ICICI Lombard is converting Speech to Text leading to 90% accuracy on important key phrases such as Registration Number, according to the executives. The service is enabled through a set of API protocols that allow ICICI Lombard to customise its automation processes in line with changing specifics.

Previously, ICICI Lombard has also partnered with Microsoft to automate its motor claims process using Microsoft's AI technology to settlements based on photos of the insured vehicles uploaded by the customers.