FROM GARAGE TO GLOBAL: How CompariSure’s conversational AI is driving digitisation within the Insurance industry

How CompariSure’s conversational AI is driving digitisation within the Insurance industry

Many of today’s tech giants, think Apple, Amazon and Google for example, had their humble beginnings in garage. For Cape Town based tech start-up CompariSure, the journey was no different. Perhaps it was the austere garage environment that led to creative thinking, or perhaps it was something else, but either way, it was one night in late 2018 while working from the garage when CompariSure Founder and CEO Jonathan Elcock (pictured, left) decided to code CompariSure’s first Facebook Messenger chatbot.

CompariSure founders CEO Jonathan Elcock & CFO Matt Kloos

At the time, CompariSure was still reliant on the same “old school” digital technology that most players in the industry thought would bring a “digital revolution” a.k.a the traditional website. Fast forward to a little more than 2 years later, and over 1,000,000 people across South Africa have now interacted with CompariSure via its conversational commerce chatbot technology.

Even before COVID-19 plunged the world into crisis, artificial intelligence – and more specifically conversational AI – was fast becoming a key feature in the digitisation of customer-facing industries like insurance.

CompariSure’s focus on digital distribution via chatbots has allowed it to pioneer a new way of selling insurance in South Africa. “In one experiment we ran, we found that one of our insurance partners was able to sell 25x more policies via our chatbot than via their website,” notes Monique Elliot, CompariSure’s Head of Marketing.

“This for a traditional A/B test of course, controlling for all variables except the call to action of website versus chatbot,” adds Elliot.

CompariSure’s founding vision was always to build a marketplace that connects users with quality insurance products from South Africa’s most trusted insurance providers. The profound realisation and insight along the way was that doing so via conversational AI would yield game-changing results.

The CompariSure conversational commerce platform allows companies to have personalised engagements with users at scale, driven by machine learning and data science.

“At the end of the day, conversation is a deeply human experience and we’ve found it to be more effective and able to deliver better customer experiences than any other form of marketing or channel of communication,” notes Matt Kloos, CompariSure co-founder and CFO (pictured, right).

Conversational commerce brings forth many benefits: consumers get instant service; companies reduce costs; and human agents can spend their time solving more important issues that truly require the human touch. Despite the global industry moving in a digitised direction for some time, South Africa had been slow to adapt, resulting in an industry that is still heavily reliant on call centres to complete sales and provide customer service.

As the first and only authorised financial services provider (FSP) in South Africa to have successfully completed sales via a fully-automated Facebook Messenger chatbot, CompariSure is uniquely positioned to support the industry during this time of major digital transition.

CompariSure’s proprietary chatbot technology, which leverages popular platforms like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, has enabled heavy-weight traditional industry players like Sanlam, Old Mutual and Momentum Metropolitan to have automated, highly-personalised conversations with consumers at scale. “Insurers are choosing to “future-proof” their business by partnering with CompariSure,” notes CEO Elcock.

“After our breakthrough success in using our chatbot tech to distribute Funeral insurance products via our Marketplace, we started building white-label chatbots for insurers. Over the years, our team has perfected the art of partnering human empathy with machine learning to enable financial institutions to seamlessly integrate conversational AI into their service offering,” says Kloos.

Underpinning the tech firm’s chatbot technology is a deep analysis of reams of data being generated via these authentic conversations. To date, the company has had 10s of millions of touchpoints with end-users, with every conversation point and path being analysed in a constant and ongoing effort to improve the customer experience.

“By the end of the conversation, it appears that many end-users are genuinely unaware they were interacting with a chatbot. The chatbot often ends a conversation by wishing the user a good day further, to which many users reply Thanks so much - you too!“ chuckles Kloos. “We put significant effort into ensuring the conversation flow is natural, to the point, and even fun and entertaining – the same way a top call centre agent would operate.”

CompariSure’s proprietary chatbot tech continues to evolve with the aim of bridging the financial and digital exclusion divide in South Africa and providing end-users access to a broad range of quality products in the most natural way possible – a simple “conversation”.

To learn more about CompariSure and its tech offering, head to www.comparisure.co.za