One simple way to increase your lead generation by 33%

One large, multi-location Canadian brokerage saw a 33% increase in leads generated through their website, simply by introducing a chatbot to provide instant home and auto insurance quoting, the CEO and founder of a Kitchener, Ont.-based insurtech said Friday.

ProNavigator joined forces with Applied Systems Canada to use ProNavigator Virtual Assistant to provide quotes 24/7 on the broker’s website, Joseph D’Souza, CEO and founder of ProNavigator, told Canadian Underwriter Friday. Leads generated from the chatbot would be integrated into the broker management system.

The large brokerage, which D’Souza did not name to maintain client confidentiality, was looking to revamp their website because although they were getting traffic to their website, people were dropping off.

“They saw people were exiting when they were looking at their analytics, so they put our system on the platform,” D’Souza said. “And they saw a 33% increase in new leads without changing anything on their website, without increasing their traffic, without redesigning their website, just because people were navigating towards this chat interface to ask questions and to get quotes.”

The increase refers strictly to quotes that were generated, not service requests or questions asked – new leads generated without redesigning their website.

“We’re kind of branding this as a ‘sales assistant’ living on your website to coach users to get answers to the questions and take them through the quoting process,” D’Souza said.

D’Souza reported that about 65 brokerages across Canada and the United States are using ProNavigator’s platform, roughly half in each country. It works for brokers leveraging Applied Rating Services, Applied WebRater and Applied Epic. ProNavigator is finding that 30% of conversations are happening after regular business hours and on weekends, and 70% of traffic on all of the chatbots across all clients is comprised of new business leads.

“Customers want answers to their questions in real-time, when they’re live on your website, not when it’s convenient for the business, but when it’s convenient for the customer,” D’Souza said. “To be able to do that with a virtual assistant is a huge value proposition.”

The chatbot works by using natural language processing, a subset of artificial intelligence that understands the intention of a sentence or phrase. It is 100% insurance focused, customizable and has been trained on thousands of conversations. “We are able to get much higher results than an out-of-the-box solution or a generic model… because it’s been trained explicitly for insurance.”

While many brokerages recognize they have to be digital and attract users to their website, when users do get to the site, “they are kind of left on their own to figure things out” through a web form or quoting engine, D’Souza said. “Now you have this virtual assistant or a coach who is there to guide you through the quoting process. The result is that we are seeing really good conversions, more engagement, people are preferring to use this conversational interface versus a static web form or typical way they interact to get quotes.”