Best Practices for Annuity Chatbots

Users on public and account owner annuity sites seek out chatbots for quick and efficient access to personalized information and support without navigating through exhaustive pages or waiting to talk to a firm representative. To effectively address these needs, annuity providers should strive to implement these three best practices into their chatbot designs, ensuring the chatbots are easily usable and capable of handling a wide range of inquiries efficiently:

• Implementing chat history retainment
• Enabling task completion in-chatbot
• Transferring to a live agent transfer upon chatbot response failure

An example annuity providers can use is Erica, the gold standard chatbot of the Bank of America mobile app. Erica boasts strong language comprehension even when the account owner makes typos and can complete nearly all in-app functions and actions. Despite being out of the annuity industry, Erica demonstrates how a well-designed chatbot can simultaneously be easily usable and address complex requests.

Retaining chat history

Annuity providers must ensure conversation continuity with chatbots and allow users to reference previous information with chat history retainment. With viewable chat history, users can seamlessly return to prior conversations for context while browsing public and account owner sites and troubleshooting. Annuity chatbots with chat history retainment allow for more detailed browsing experiences using past discussions to develop more relevant and tailored responses. Fidelity’s account owner stands above the rest in CI’s Annuity Monitor coverage group, boasting a chatbot that deftly retains conversation history even while users refresh and browse different pages.

In-chat capabilities

The best-designed annuity provider chatbots enable users to complete various tasks directly within the chat window. Presentation of this feature can vary: Some chatbots simply tell the user how to carry out a task, while others offer links that navigate to different pages on the site. The chatbot should seamlessly perform common tasks and queries, such as contract management and providing product information. An underrated component of this feature is that, upon task completion, chatbots should ensure that the site provides a popup informing the user that they will navigate to a new page instead of automatically redirecting them, which can cause confusion and frustration. Unfortunately, none of the major firms contain this feature, signifying a big opportunity for a proactive firm to gain an advantage over competitors.

Connect to live agents

While the ideal chatbot should answer users without needing a live customer service representative, annuity providers must ensure that the users can still connect with one if the chatbot fails to deliver a response successfully. Currently, most annuity provider chatbots do not meet this standard, as all chatbots within CI’s Annuity Monitor coverage group firms cannot accurately respond to queries beyond basic website usage. Users who require more complex information will need live customer service support. Due to this lack of capabilities, connecting to a live agent becomes a very critical feature. Firms should avoid directing users away from the website to contact a live agent by phone. Instead, they should provide the option for users to connect with a live agent through an online chat tool to ensure a top-tier user experience. Below, one can see how Fidelity’s chatbot can smoothly transition into a conversation with a live service representative.

For more on chatbots in the annuity industry, Annuity Monitor subscribers can access our Chat Tools report on the client portal. Otherwise, learn more about our subscription annuity research service and check out our Insights section for more previews of the latest trends and best practices across financial services and healthcare.