We’re excited to continue our series, “Startup Bites: Meet the Young Chefs”, where Co-Founder Sven Roehl sits down with founders of startups to chat about their exciting solutions and how they’re on track to make big waves in the insurance world.
In today’s blog, Sven sat down with Parloa, the winner of our Startup Pitch Specials: Germany and Beyond event. Founded in 2017, the startup aims to replace old touch-tone IVRs in the call center with a more natural and efficient customer experience across different channels, such as over the phone, on-site chats, and even WhatsApp. The low-code front-end design means insurers do not need data scientists, machine learning engineers, or developer resources to leverage the Conversational AI solution.
Check out what we learned about Parloa below!
How It All Began
Almost 5 years ago, the founders were fascinated by voice assistants Alexa and Google Assistant and their ability to interact with humans. Immediately, they knew that something big was happening and wanted to be a part of the change. They founded one of Europe’s first Conversational AI agencies, called Future of Voice, to work with clients to build voice interactions using those voice assistants. Within the first 2 years, they recognized 2 major challenges:
1. No low-code tool existed in the market to help companies build these voice automation experiences
2. Existing voice assistants supported daily tasks (such as to-do lists and playing music), not customer experience functions
The founders subsequently launched Parloa, which uses Conversational AI to enable companies to automate their phone infrastructure to elevate customer experience.
Their Biggest Challenge?
Moving away from voice assistants and towards phone infrastructure — it was also their best decision!
When the team finally found product-market fit, they focused their attention on the next challenge: growing as fast as possible.
So, How Does Parloa Help Insurers?
Up to 40% of a customer service agent’s time is spent authenticating the customer’s identity using details such as birthdates. Within the insurance industry alone, this adds up to 26 million minutes (50 years!) wasted per day.
Parloa gives insurers back their lost time by automating these repetitive tasks and optimizing certain KPIs. Using automated speech recognition and natural language understanding, Parloa empowers insurers to train their models using real-life interactions with customers to create a customer experience that gets better every day. This means happier customers and of course, happier agents!
3 Use Cases for Parloa’s Conversational AI Solution
1. Routing: Replacing old touch-tone IVRs with a more customer-friendly experience and the most intuitive way to express a concern: Speaking
2. Authentication: Give your agents back their time by replacing manual authentication processes with Parloa’s easy-to-use connections to your CRM
3. End-to-End Cases: Whether it’s an address or contact data change, let Parloa handle repetitive tasks so your agents can focus on solving real problems for customers
Bonus: Agents Receive Transcripts of Interactions with the AI
When Parloa routes a customer to an available agent, the agent receives a transcript of the AI’s customer interaction in order to help the agent better support the customer and continue the conversation. This transcript also provides valuable data to continue to train the system for future interactions, so you can rest assured that your customer experience is getting better day after day!