Think about how much of a hassle it is to buy insurance for yourself. You’d probably google search “insurance”, click on the first link (maybe skip the ads out of an irrational disdain for them) and fumble your way around.

Do you need a quote or do you need to talk to an agent? Looking for car insurance? What is the exact model number of your car? Looking for health insurance? What exactly do you need covered and which packages cover it?

Now imagine doing this for a whole company. That’s health insurance for a hundred people all with different needs. The model numbers and makes of a hundred cars, trucks and vans.

This is where SecureNow comes into picture. As commercial insurance broker, SecureNow sells insurance catered to companies. Without a service like theirs, finding insurance for your company would be a nightmare.

The Problem

The problem that insurance brokers face however is that potential clients need to be aware of a significant amount of information on their end before they can even begin to think of buying insurance from brokers.

While many know exactly what they need to know to make the right choice, many others do not and conveying information to this group of users is a significant point of friction.

Websites can only take you so far. Try to explain too much on a single webpage and the UI gets cluttered. Add the ever shortening attention spans of your average CFO who has 100s of other decisions to make and it becomes increasingly clear that a human interaction is required at some point to ensure the conversion of less informed potential clients.

Of course unless you are a massive corporation, this interaction is not always viable. Human labour is expensive, slow and generally unscalable. Insurance agents can fall sick, face traffic on the way work and be rude to clients, their cousins get married and they need to take days off. Worst of all, they indulge in the dreaded natural process of sleeping, putting 24/7 access out of the question.

So how then does a company like SecureNow confront such problems?

The TARS Effect

This is where TARS came into the picture. SecureNow aiming to get around the shortfalls of human behaviour experimented with our conversational interface on their webpage to see how many users actually clicked.

Together with SecureNow, we created a scripted chatbot interact with potential clients as a real human would, to collect basic information about their level of knowledge and stage in the buying process. Thus, when a human does eventually get in touch with each potential client they don’t need to waste time figuring out what the client knows and can begin helping them immediately. Plus, chatbots don’t need to sleep, so no matter what time a user tries to interact with SecureNow — a real human interaction is available.

The experiment was a success!

Today Tars automated conversational interaction is a mainstay of the SecureNow website, allowing them to more efficiently allocate their limited human resources.

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We are always looking for interesting people to work with us at Tars. If “what we do” seems like fun to you, drop me a line at ish [at] hellotars [dot] com 🙂

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