Introducing Frankie, the AI chatbot

Chatbots are easy. But developing chatbots powered through artificial intelligence that learn from each interaction is something else entirely.

Yet that is what BizCover has achieved with its latest innovation Frankie, the AI chatbot as the insurtech platform looks to pursue efficiencies through technology.

“It feels like you’re chatting with a human. And over time our customers will help Frankie learn and improve,” says Brad Hoyle, Operational Excellence Manager at BizCover.

The automated software application, used in place of human conversation, has several advantages over its mortal counterparts.

“Firstly, Frankie connects directly with our customer relationship management system, which allows us to personalise and deepen the customer experience,” says Hoyle. “It opens another path for our customers to interact with us and can run 24-7, whenever our customers need help.”

But not all chatbots are built the same. Rules-based chatbots often cannot pick up grammatical errors. Any improvements will also need to be inputted manually, since it doesn’t learn by itself.

Frankie will not have these problems. Rather than just using rules to formulate an answer, Frankie will use supervised learning – an AI methodology – to logically organise future tasks.

“It takes all of the free-text questions from customers, and you help it put things in different boxes and it’ll begin to learn,” he says. “Most of Frankie’s human-like responses are powered by a technology called natural language understanding (NLU), which allows it to comprehend questions.”

Powered by Einstein Bots, a part of the Salesforce Service Cloud, Frankie will add to the efficiencies achieved through automation by providing an additional channel for self-service processing.

“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, claims, cancellations – those sorts of things,” Hoyle added.

“No matter how our customers choose to interact with BizCover, we want to be there in their channel of choice, providing the same fanatical customer experience, each and every time.”

Frankie is currently being piloted and will soon go live on the BizCover website. Hoyle hopes the AI-powered chatbot can be rolled out into other areas of the company to optimise further efficiencies.

Other sectors are already cashing in on the benefits, with the adoption of chatbots expected to save healthcare, banking and retail $11 billion annually by 2023.

“There’s no reason why the insurance sector can’t be a leader in both AI and automation. BizCover has always led from the from as an insurtech pioneer and we want to continue that trend into the AI-driven future.”