5th October 2017

Insurance software house, CDL, has unveiled its latest chatbot initiative, making its Jay chatbot available via Facebook Messenger.

The project sees CDL work with insurance retailers, including iGO4, to bring to market a chatbot accessible via Facebook Messenger, to allow customers to generate car and home insurance quotes through a conversation-styled interface.

Nigel Phillips, CDL Commercial Director, commented: "Making insurance accessible via Facebook Messenger is key to reinventing a consumer-focused shopping journey as it offers a more 'chat' styled approach and centres around emulating conversation between two Facebook users.

"With 1.2 billion monthly users actively using Facebook Messenger, the platform is perfectly placed to allow insurance chatbots, such as Jay, to be an even more accessible, intuitive way of managing insurance quotes."

The bot builds on data, and uses Hummingbird, CDL's data intelligence solution, to automatically fill input fields. It draws information from a photograph taken by a mobile device, due to its integration with image recognition technology. Users can upload pictures of items, including a driving licence, a car or even the family pet, to automatically complete relevant input fields.

Targeting its key demographic of users aged 25 - 34, Facebook opened its Messenger platform to chatbots in April 2016 and since then more than 11,000 bots have been added to Facebook Messenger.