Can Voice-Activated Devices Help Mitigate Insurance Risk?

Can Voice-Activated Devices Help Mitigate Insurance Risk?
It’s hard to ignore the growing demand for voice-controlled consumer devices such as Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri. Today’s consumers crave convenience, and voice technology allows them to perform searches online using their voices instead of needing to use a keyboard.
Currently, approximately 20 percent of online searches are performed using voice technology, and it’s estimated that voice search will account for 50 percent of all online searches by 2020.

Today’s voice-activated devices can be linked to smart home technology to allow homeowners to turn on lights, adjust the thermostat, arm the security system, and more simply by using their voices. Insurance carriers are already tapping into the wealth of data that smart home technology provides when making underwriting decisions. However, as voice-controlled consumer devices continue to become more widely used, it’s to the advantage of insurance carriers to also embrace this technology to assess insurance risk.

How Insurance Carriers Benefit from Voice-Controlled Devices
Voice-controlled devices offer an abundance of data that insurance carriers need to be taking advantage of. The current marketplace for the property and casualty insurance industry is highly competitive, and the carriers that are able to manage and understand data will have an edge over the competition.

Insurance underwriters are tasked with bringing together internal data assets, external purchased data, and data collected from the internet to make an informed underwriting decision. Imagine if underwriters could gather information by asking Alexa (or another voice-controlled device) to pull all of this information together for you. Involving voice-controlled devices has the potential to speed up the underwriting process and improve accuracy, thus helping to mitigate insurance risk.

Finding ways to leverage analytics and data will be the name of the game going forward for insurance carriers, and voice-controlled devices will be a key player in this movement.

Data Should Not Be the Only Factor When Making an Underwriting Decision
Insurance carriers have more data at their fingertips than ever to factor into the underwriting process. However, if you’re focused on mitigating insurance risk, data alone should not determine decisions. In-person property inspections have long been a part of the underwriting process, and data alone can not replace the value that an in-person property inspection provides. Insurance carriers are facing decreasing profitability, and combining data with in-person property inspections in the underwriting process is a way to overcome this challenge.

Our team at Insurance Risk Services has been providing insurance carriers in the property and casualty insurance industry with accurate underwriting support for more than 35 years, and one way that we’re able to provide value is through our in-person property inspections.

Contact us at Insurance Risk Services to learn more about how the combination of data and an in-person property inspection can help you to best determine which risks are worth taking.

We’re delighted to announce that Insurance Risk Services will rebrand to Davies in the near future.

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