The State of Voice in the Insurance Industry

Last Updated : 25/05/21

Page contents

• Introduction
• Voice search performance
• Actions & Skills use cases
• Amazon / Google 1^st party
• Existing skills/actions
• Other
• Policy Restrictions
• Main takeways

Introduction to voice in the insurance industry

By 2025, the digital voice assistant software market is expected to reach over a billion users. With increasing adoption of voice interaction worldwide, and 46% of insurance seekers reporting using voice search at least once a day, there is a significant opportunity for the Insurance industry to use voice apps to reduce friction and simplify the customer experience. Several well-known brands, including Aviva, InsureandGo and Cigna and more, have already built voice apps to take advantage of the increasing adoption of voice technology.

 Key challenges for the insurance industry:

• High competition with lack of differentiation between providers
• High load on call centres, with most major insurers employing thousands of people to field questions from customers
• Lack of personalisation and low perceived value

How to optimise your website for voice

The first step in your voice optimisation strategy should be checking how your website performs for informational queries, e.g. “new driver insurance”, “what is international health insurance”, etc.

Voice Search Performance

The Google Assistant has recently become far better at answering queries about insurance, with its ability to answer improving from 61% to 75% between Q1 and Q2 2019.

This is mainly due to the Google Assistant returning more answers from standard Answer Box results.

Actions & Skills

Actions (on the Google Assistant) and skills (on Alexa) are voice-enabled apps which extend the built-in functionality of these voice assistants. While optimising your website for voice can provide a one-way snippet of information, actions and skills can allow brands to create two-way conversations with their consumers and can help them to perform tasks and activities.

Amazon / Google 1^st party

Currently out the box Google or Alexa isn’t going to get an insurance quote for you. As mentioned in the voice search ranking report data above Google will answer some questions about insurance companies directly using answer box data.

Existing Alexa Skills

Most of the insurance skills available on Alexa are also available on the Google Assistant

Voice and Insurance Insights

Using data from GWI we can see that Insurance Intenders (consumers who are looking to purchase an insurance product) are more likely than average to to be smart speaker owners.

Policy Restrictions

There is no specific rules on either Google or Alexa around insurance. However if your skill was related to medical insurance and the skill gave tips or advice it would need to have a disclaimer when the skill is opened, for example “This tool does not provide medical advice, and is for informational and educational purposes only, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, treatment”

Main Takeaways

• At a website level, insurance providers need to focus on filling content gaps by gaining Answer Box results.
  • It’s important to track your voice results over time. Assess changes in your industry by downloading our latest whitepaper, or get in touch for a custom voice search ranking report.
• When it comes to creating two-way conversations through actions & skills, some well-known brands have entered the field, but there is still great opportunity to create useful voice apps. Some use cases include:
  • Insurance FAQs
  • Get a quote / make a purchase
  • Upsell from existing policy
  • Make a claim
• A noticeable trend in the insurance industry is the shift from a product-focussed strategy to one that puts the customer journey first. To cater for this shift to a customer-centric model, we can expect more insurance carriers to make an investment in voice optimisation technology in the near future.

Want to learn more? Get in contact with the Rabbit & Pork team about voice strategy, workshops or building a voice app

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