A WhatsApp chatbot for insurance: policy enquiries, renewals and claims
Insurance is a good test of whether chat automation is serious, because the cost of a confident wrong answer is a complaint, a regulator, or a policy someone thought they had. The design question is not how clever the assistant is. It is what it refuses to do.
The questions that repeat
Most inbound volume is a small set of questions asked endlessly: what does my policy cover, when does it renew, how much is my premium, what is my excess, what do I need for a claim.
Every one of those has a correct answer sitting in a document you already have. The work is retrieval, not judgement, which is exactly what automation should be doing.
Answers have to cite their source
An assistant that answers insurance questions from general knowledge is a liability. It should read only the documents you loaded, answer from those, and attach where the answer came from, so a customer and a compliance officer can both check it.
When it is not confident, the right behaviour is to say so and bring in a person. Guessing is the failure mode that matters here.
Renewals and premiums in the thread
A renewal is a reminder, a figure, and a payment. All three fit in a conversation: the customer gets told what is due and when, and pays through a checkout link that settles into your own account.
The receipt lands in the same thread, which means the customer has a record without you issuing one separately.
Claims capture, but people decide
The assistant can run the intake: identify the policy, capture what happened, collect photos and documents, and route the file to an assessor. That is the tedious part and it is well suited to a guided flow.
Approvals, declines and binding quotes stay with your authorised staff. The AI captures, validates and routes. It does not make regulated decisions, and any vendor comfortable letting it should worry you.
And a record of everything
Staff actions that change state, such as approving a claim or issuing a refund, should require confirmation and be written to a log that cannot be quietly edited. In a regulated business the audit trail is not a feature, it is the point.