Zimnat’s New Customer Care Chatbot Makes It Way Easier To Inquire About Insurance Premiums

It’s not something you see every day when traditional companies start to use fashionable technologies. Zimnat is one such traditional company that is fast wearing the new clothes of emerging technologies. Zimnat has been one of the leading players in life assurance and short-term insurance sector since 1946 in Zimbabwe. And lately, it has been trying to penetrate the microfinance sector too.

I’m tempted to say that today could mark the beginning of a new era after the company introduced a chatbot to help its clients and prospective clients to get help in a timely fashion. Of late Zimnat seems quite interested in modern technologies considering that last month it invited people to present to them tech solutions that can help the insurance company’s business processes. Let alone the hackathon it recently held. The introduction of the chatbot coincided with also the introduction of its online-service portal. But now I just wanna talk about the chatbot.

What the Zimnat Chatbot is about?

Insurer’s world over are using chatbots to handle queries rather than web-based forms, which are often lengthy and difficult to navigate, to improve customer service. The Zimnat chatbot called Musa will essentially “make it easy for customers to obtain information or responses to their queries in real time”. That means that when you want to inquire something about your premiums, rather than enduring holding the phone for 5 minutes you will just be responded by Musa, the chatbot quickly.  Even the 24/7 availability that comes with Musa is noteworthy, instead of waiting till the next morning to make a query about your premiums.

Where is Zimnat’s Musa?

Musa is available on Zimnat’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. You simply need to say Hi to get started (make a query) with Musa. Just like any chatbot, Musa can be seen as a baby that is still learning so it still gives you a limited number of responses. But since chatbots continuously learn (machine learning), Musa will be able to respond to many questions soon. Anyway, for now, Musa can help you on the most basic, useful and common queries you want a response on. And hey, if Musa can’t answer some queries, the queries will be forwarded to a human customer care agent who will then help you. So have no qualms to use it because you will still be helped through using Musa.

While Facebook and Twitter are increasing getting used by many Zimbabweans, I think it would be most ideal for Zimnat if Musa can be integrated on Whatsapp since almost all Zimbabweans are on WhatsApp.

Zimnat’s onus

A chatbot is ideal given the ease of using it, but it calls on Zimnat top keep on training Musa so that it will be most helpful, rather having customers continuously call asking help from a human agent. That would render the chatbot useless. Having a chatbot is half a solution, continuous teaching of the chatbot is the other half solution which is must be done perpetually. So, the onus is on Zimnat to avoid disappointments on the part of customers.  Otherwise, kudos, way to go Zimnat.