(Image source: Rakuten Life Insurance hompage.)
Rakuten Life Insurance (a member of Rakuten Group, Tokyo) reports that it launched a virtual assistant technology-based application for its new business process, using technology from Sensely (London/San Francisco), a provider of avatar and chatbot-based platforms assist insurance plan members and patients. The new capability incorporates conversational content spoken by lifelike avatar characters to bring a sense of immediacy to the life insurance application process, according to a Sensely announcement.
Rakuten Life’s application is built with the Sensely Software Development Kit (SDK), which the vendor describes as a broad development platform designed to enable enterprises to communicate with consumers in a way that harnesses the empathy of human conversations while also benefitting from the scalability of technology. Rakuten Life Insurance’s content is delivered in Japanese, using Sensely’s multi-lingual platform, which incorporates text-to-speech technology supporting more than 30 languages.
“Technology, when used properly, can help make the process of buying insurance for the first time less daunting,” comments Yasuhiko Shinkai, President, Rakuten Life. “We see significant opportunity in bringing conversational interfaces to both current insurance policyholders as well as prospective customers across multiple scenarios, and we are happy to have the Sensely toolkit to assist with our integration.”
Adam Odessky, CEO and Co-founder, Sensely.
Technology Enhancing the Applicant Experience
“We’re excited by the work that our partner Rakuten Life Insurance has done to inject a new consumer interface into their insurance application process,” comments Adam Odessky, CEO and Co-founder, Sensely. “It’s gratifying to see how skillfully Rakuten Life Insurance has deployed the platform to turn their native branded-content into a powerful customer experience. We’re seeing insurance companies all over the world being quite progressive in thinking about how to bring technology to bear to enhance the applicant and member experience, and this is a great example of matching an unmet need with a technology-based solution.”