Abstract
Advances in artificial intelligence have renewed interest in conversational agents. Additionally to software developers, today all kinds of employees show interest in new technologies and their possible applications for customers. German insurance companies generally are interested in improving their customer service and digitizing their business processes. In this work we investigate the potential use of conversational agents in insurance companies theoretically by determining which classes of agents exist which are of interest to insurance companies, finding relevant use cases and requirements. We add two practical parts: First we develop a showcase prototype for an exemplary insurance scenario in claim management. Additionally in a second step, we create a prototype focusing on customer service in a chatbot hackathon, fostering innovation in interdisciplinary teams. In this work, we describe the results of both prototypes in detail. We evaluate both chatbots defining criteria for both settings in detail and compare the results and draw conclusions for the maturity of chatbot technology for practical use, describing the opportunities and challenges companies, especially small and medium enterprises, face.
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Acknowledgements
The work is partially based on work carried out in the project ‘Business Innovation Engineering Center’, which is funded by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Labour and Housing Baden-Wuerttemberg under the reference number 3-4332.62-IAO/56. The hackathon itself was conducted within the ‘Innovationsnetzwerk Digitalisierung fuer Versicherungen’ [35]. The authors want to thank all participants for their contributions and feedback.
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Koetter, F. et al. (2019). Conversational Agents for Insurance Companies: From Theory to Practice. In: van den Herik, J., Rocha, A., Steels, L. (eds) Agents and Artificial Intelligence. ICAART 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11978. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37494-5_17
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