Lemonadeはいかにして AI で顧客の信頼を築くか

Hello, welcome back to VOX on the road here at CCW Europe in Amsterdam with Bogdan Tancic from Lemonade, Director of Customer Experience. Keen to get your thoughts on a bunch of things because I've been following Lemonade from afar for a long time. And we kind of mentioned earlier on, I'm sure that Lemonade was the brand that originally was pretty much only available to interact with via SMS or something like that. I don't know how true that is and I'll have to dig out the thing to find out. But essentially, long history as a company of leveraging AI, would you say? I would completely agree with that, Ken. And if I may take you a step back there and ask you a question back, what's your feeling about traditional insurance companies if you were to compare Lemonade with the others, right? Like Lemonade, when you say, is fairly new on the market comparing to the traditional insurance companies. And it's actually built on the premise of that insurance can be about trust and not mistrust. So there is this perception of people having insurance written as a mistrust element with a lot of complexity and et cetera, right?

Therefore, Lemonade was actually built to disrupt that whole perception and making sure that technology can amplify that, right? So Lemonade was built, I think, more than 10 years ago to actually disrupt that original, traditional insurance space around the technology, right? So it's basically the AI-nated company which built the insurance around it. Interesting. So another question there that sort of stems from that is that today there is this kind of like, almost like a tension when it comes to trust of AI. Because on the one hand, you've got certain media outlets talking about it being a doomsday scenario. A lot of the researchers from a lot of the frontier labs are talking about it could take over the world and annihilate humanity. at the same time those same people are also saying that it could be the best thing for humanity ever because we can cure all kind of diseases it'll be really beneficial for us so like the general public if i think about my mom for example are kind of in this weird position those that are not in the industry are in this kind of weird position where either ai is oh i don't know about that

or it's kind of like positive as a company that's built on technology that's infused with ai how do you handle that whole kind of trust question because the trust that you want to establish is built in those little tiny interactions that you have with customers over time. So is there anything you can share in terms of how do you go about building trust? Definitely, and I think that's going to become an even bigger topic in the future and we can discuss more about that. Trust is a big factor of consumers that we have. Part of that is earning trust in small points of interactions with customers, right? One is whenever they need you so that you are there, so that you can quickly and to the point resolve their issues that they have. And I think you earn trust over time. It's not a thing that you get or lose. Basically, you can lose it pretty quickly, and that's a big thing, right? But you earn it over time. You earn it at every point of interaction that you have. From the moment you quote, right?

At Lemonade, we can talk a little bit about how we leverage AI, right? From the moment you quote basically to get you the best pricing for the best coverage right That all powered by AI right And then the moment you onboard right And then the most important part when you claim right When you're actually there for the customer when they really need it, that's where you want to show that you can quickly resolve the problem for when they actually need you, right? And so those are the moments when you actually gain the trust and earn it with the customers that you have. And AI definitely amplifies that And gives you ability to be The most accurate To the customers that they have Nice Can you share a little bit in terms of where you're Leveraging AI and types of use cases That you have live and things like that Yeah, definitely I was mentioning about starting with the onboarding We have AI walking you To the onboarding so that you kind of see What are you getting into What are you going to be underwritten for What are you going to get covered for? What's going to be the price?

And so that we collect the right type of data, right? And that we can actually get you the right quotes. And then once you get the policy, then you get kind of the whole post-sales journey also powered by AI. What does it mean? Like on the background, we have also the pricing, which I was just mentioning. We have the underwriting covered by AI. We have also the fraud detection, right? So we are able to be super accurate about giving you the best price and the best coverage ever. Interesting. Curious to get your thoughts on this kind of emerging kind of trend, if you like, around personal agents. You know, GrokBot, Dot, Muse, these things have been kind of released fairly recently. you know we had claw open claw before it where you know there is an emerging group of people that have their own personal agents and those agents are going to be the ones going out and getting renewing their insurance or making the claims on their behalf and stuff like that um obviously it's

early days for that but the evidence i'm seeing so far is that businesses are telling us that actually we get interactions like that how are you thinking about that in terms of as a business this emerging thing is happening what's kind of going through your mind definitely it's happening it's starting to kind of evolve and we need to recognize that more and more people are leveraging their own personal ai agents uh i can personally argue that ai agent can buy things but only a person can have a feeling or a troubled time where they actually need to claim like that that the difficult day in their life like that's what they are going to And that's where you're going to, speaking about the trust, as you said, that's where we really want to be there, right? So speaking about the agents, I think the landscape is going to shift in what the companies need to cover in terms of their distribution and how they service, right? What does it mean? Like the agent in itself, it doesn't matter about UX that you have, right? It doesn't matter about the website, Polish website they have. You need to have like a very accurate APIs with the machine possible language and the data that's exposed to those agents.

So that's kind of a completely, I would say, a new landscape, how to service those agents so that they can make the most informed decisions, whether it be a purchase or explanation, etc. Going back to the trust of AI in general as a concept, right? I would argue that even if you were to employ an agent right now today maybe over time it will change and evolve But the trust that you put in your own agent you will still like to verify the very end so maybe right now the agent what they can do they can search they can search like a number of insurance companies out there and see like what the price comparing to the coverage and etc and give you kind of the final recommendation based on what they have i think that's gonna be a distribution game for sure like so that we can be there with the right pricing, with the right coverage. But then also very much important what happens after that, right? How do we treat those customers? How do they get the level of service that they deserve? So in the time they actually need us so that we are there. So I think that's still going to be heavy on that element of earning trust while actually

there with us. So I think those are kind of maybe two distinct journeys that we are yet to see. Like one is agentic buying at the very beginning. And that's also very, I would say, still questionable in a way. What are you allowing agents to do? Like on whose behalf? Is it regulated or not? So I think regulators today even are a little bit lagging behind and learning together with us, you know, what's allowed? How are we going to regulate the space and et cetera? So I think we still have a fairly long runway there to go and learn, right? But I think that's definitely a field that we are exploring. it's interesting isn't it because you know hearing you speak there it's like yeah there's like layers to it one is kind of like getting a presence in those agentic platforms if i'm doing a comparison i use claude to go out there and scour the internet for all the best insurance deals give me them all on my on my plate sort of thing you want to be you want to be there at the same time then i might have news or what have you go to a comparison website or

Lemonade's website directly, do some research on that, or even actually go ahead and start getting me a quote or something, and all that lot, and then the level beyond that is that actually the agent makes, has a live interaction, either with one of your agents, live agents, or with one of your AI agents sort of thing. It seems to me there's kind of like levels to it, and what you're saying there in terms of like, how do you authenticate? How do you know that this is Cain's agent or this is Bogdan's agent. It seems early days, but I mean, this thing could, we don't know what, ChatGPT took off in a month. So this stuff could potentially happen pretty quickly. I mean, it's interesting to figure it out. I agree with that. And one can argue, like, what matters in that space, right? Does empathy matter? Do agents matter about the empathy or how they are treated? Or do they matter about the pricing? Or do they matter about the coverage? Like, what elements would actually go in a buying decision right now if that will be an agent right like we know humans actually are buying based on their feelings and emotions more often than like on a rationale right one can argue

like what happens with the agent right how are they going to buy like how are you going to instruct your agent agent team to say hey my agent please buy because based on this set of criterias right so that's going to be very interesting to see what are the buying decisions and criterias for what does agency do? And I might not know why I buy as well. And then secondly is, you know, businesses have spent a lot of time and effort and a hell of a lot of money competing on the experience layer. So where, you know, insurance companies, they all insure people. So fundamentally at a fundamental level there a lot of similarities between insurance companies but everything we been talking about here so far has been trust Exactly That a differentiator for Lemonade is the trust that we have the interactions we provide What happens to the interaction if the interaction is happening between my agent and an AI agent that Lemonade provide? Does the interaction matter? Because the agents will probably just figure it out anyway. You know, it's interesting. Yeah. I would say like there is always going to be a downstream kind of,

to a certain level of human element of that, right? So maybe the transaction will be closed at the beginning based on the best price, the best coverage, and et cetera. But it's going to be very important what happens also downstream. And that's what I'm trying to put a focus on right now is what actually happens after, right? When you actually need... Insure tech companies are not traditional software companies, right? You don't need to be tied to an app, right? It's a service-oriented business, right? So you actually need to interact, let's say, with a company when you need to download your policy, right? When you need to know to add someone else to your policy, right? When you need to claim something, right? So AI has been like significant help in providing, for instance, that level of safety, like peace of mind, so that you know that you are covered and you are actually going to be treated well when you need it. Let's say you have a pet, right, at your home and you are at the veterinary and unfortunately you need to pay for something and you recover for that, that's not the moment when you want to have a friction, right?

And that's when you earn trust with your customers, right? So, again, not saying that it's not important, like, how you compete on the upfront, in the top of the funnel, right? When you say, hey, how are my agents going to trade? Like, I think it's a fairly big distribution game over there. Like, how are we going to be compared to the others? Basically, AI will help us be a little bit more, not a little bit more, like way more precise who we cover, how we cover, right? And then to which price elements or price points, right? But then very important what happens, maybe because it's close to my heart and I'm living that world like a post-sales world, like optimizing that journey. Very important how you retain trust and even kind of continue having your lifetime customer, if you will. Yeah. I think the challenging part of insurance is that if you're one of the customers who's fortunate enough to not have to claim, you probably have a worse relationship because if I do have the claim, you have an opportunity now to really build that trust. If I have a claim and it goes through so swimmingly

and there's no problem and I'm treated really, really well and all that kind of thing, the chances of me saying, well, regardless of the price stops being a problem then because the renewal is when I like the company and I trust the company. So maybe it's when I don't have a problem, that's where the issue is because I might be more fickle then. and I'm just looking for a cheaper deal sort of thing. So it's, you know, where in that post-sale relationship can we build a trust? It's an interesting question. That's true. And again, like, just because our ability to work with the latest models, with the latest language models as well as the machine learning models, allows us to be even more precise for you, like, when it comes to, let's say, for the renewal time, right? To be more precise, be competitive with the market, and give you the best price ever for the coverage that you need. Yeah. brilliant well done appreciate your time thank you so much thank you really appreciate it nice one thanks very much