Ablera and IBM Improve Insurance Customer Experience with Virtual Assistant

IBM announced that Ablera, a Bulgarian company specialized in developing AI/ML powered digital services for businesses, chose IBM Garage to co-create “Beth“, an intelligent multilingual and multichannel virtual assistant for insurers, powered by Watson on IBM Cloud.

A Minimum viable product (MVP) of a virtual assistant has been developed in two weeks. Further built on this base, Ablera’s Intelligent Virtual Assistant Beth supports insurance companies’ interactions with their customers, agents and employees and assists them in processing quickly and easily general and specific tasks such as quotations, the first notices of loss (FNOL), automatic claim processing in real time 24/7/365, emulating human communication with the end user.

Beth will walk customers through the insurance process to complete their requests and tasks within minutes, eliminating points of friction in the customer experience. The customers can instantly chat with Beth in their native languages and obtain support via different channels (messaging platforms, web, apps) from any device. Beth is trained to understand various kinds of questions asked in different ways, to recognize intentions and to provide personalized and customized answers and advices, extracting the necessary information from various sources with which it is integrated (insurer’s core system, financial system, Customer Relationship Management, etc.).

Beth is trained and can be already used for all personal non-life insurance business lines (Motor, Home, Travel) while Health and Commercial insurance is in Ablera’s roadmap for the next year. “IBM Garage shaped our process and product to scale at speed. With our expertise in the European insurance market paired with an idea for an AI-driven product, we needed a trusted partner with resources that would help us to turn our idea into reality.“, Anry Levy, founder and CEO, Ablera.

Beth uses IBM Watson Assistant and IBM Watson Language Translator. All IBM Watson services are hosted in the IBM Cloud using enterprise-grade toolchain and logging offering this way high levels of security and protection. Ablera and IBM professionals including domain experts, engineers, researchers and developers built together the minimum viable product (MVP) in an IBM Garage Style engagement followed up by Consult on Demand approach. Together with Ablera and IBM experts, the team from ALSO Bulgaria, an IBM Value Add Distributor partnered on the project offering support services during the whole engagement.

“IBM is pleased to support Ablera on its journey to provide this solution and advanced services to its customers globally“, said Johannes Maurer, General Manager, IBM South East Europe. “Practically overnight, the spread of COVID-19 changed the entire landscape in which organizations worldwide operate. To accelerate their digital transformation journeys, a growing number of organizations have turned to IBM Garage: IBM’s approach for fast-tracking innovation, at scale, to transform organizations from the inside out. Since the beginning of the year, the number of IBM Garage engagements has climbed from nearly 300 to over 1,500, across industries“.