Poppy is a cute name for a pet — and maybe for a voice AI agent, as well.
Pet insurance company Pumpkin launched its voice AI agent Poppy in January to contact prospective customers and expedite customer access to human agents.
Pumpkin prides itself on providing “a white [glove] level of service and support,” Lior Keren, president of Pumpkin, said at the Regal Rise conference earlier this month. “It's all about the care and the moment of interactions customers have with our team.”
The company implemented Poppy to “automate the path toward the important conversation — the sales conversation,” where human agents can converse about options for pet insurance and the why behind it, Keren said.
Human interaction is critical in the pet insurance market, as obtaining insurance comes down to awareness and relevance, Keren said. Only 4.3% of the roughly 164 million dogs and cats owned in the United States have pet insurance, according to the North American Pet Health Insurance Association.
“We've seen a lot of first-time pet parents that just cannot fathom the cost of [having] a pet as part of their family,” Keren said. “We call them pet parents for a reason. Pets are a part of the family — and all of our customer care team members are pet parents themselves, so they can relate to the customer on the other side.”
Many pet parents are unaware of the illnesses likely to befall their furry friends. Many are similarly unaware of what insurance options exist to help them through a pet’s sickness. During the initial interaction, then, human agents focus on that educational piece — the health conditions that could occur during the pet’s lifetime, the cost of treating them and how insurance might help.
Pumpkin built Poppy to replace an outsourced contractor who employed people to manually dial customers who expressed interest across a variety of channels, whether Pumpkin’s site, paid media, social media or veterinary clinics.
Keren noted several challenges with the manual approach: capacity limitations — people can only make so many calls — and matching the availability of live insurance agents to the outbound dialing activity.
“More importantly, the quality of the consistency of what we were getting from the human dialers could vary depending on who you're dealing with, time of the day, accent, you name it,” Keren said.
Poppy is now that dialer. It contacts the potential customer, asks them questions to assess their interest, gathers their details and obtains consent for a warm transfer to Pumpkin’s licensed insurance agents. Poppy is always consistent in how it speaks with customers which, Keren acknowledged, took some iteration.
“The same way we train our team members about being empathetic, knowledgeable, warm, but not too cheesy, is the way we address the training of Poppy,” he said.
Pumpkin also didn’t want to see a huge difference between a customer’s conversation with Poppy or with a human. “They need to operate under the same, let's call it, tone guidelines,” Keren said.
Another design consideration involved keeping Poppy constrained in what it could say, as the insurance market is so regulated.
“We keep Poppy’s conversations to areas where you’re not required to carry an insurance license,” Keren said. “That is reserved to our licensed agents.”
The end result was an AI agent that Pumpkin was proud to put before its customers.
“I want you to talk to this AI agent, which is warm and on point with respect to the brand guidelines,” Keren said. “But it will get you to the human at the end of the line.”
From a productivity standpoint, Keren said that Poppy has driven five times the number of sales as the human dialer channel. More broadly, the company is also seeing a higher rate of customers transferring to a licensed human agent.
NPS and CSAT on these Poppy-involved interactions have also improved compared to when people dialed, Keren said.
Pumpkin designed Poppy to be iterated upon, as well, much like human agents who receive ongoing coaching and training. Pumpkin tracks customer satisfaction regardless of the channel or journey the customer traversed, and the company can differentiate between customers who had Poppy-involved interactions and contrast them with those who didn’t.
“We measure satisfaction scores across the different steps of the journey to make sure that if we need to make any corrections or adjustments, that's the case,” Keren said. “Poppy's sole purpose was to get [customers] to talk to a licensed agent. And so, from that perspective, she's doing her job.”
