Enrolling in Medicare isn’t always a smooth process. And Daniel Petkevich, co-founder and CEO of Fair Square Medicare, got a taste of this before starting the company when his parents became eligible for Medicare.
“My parents turned 65 and they had to choose one plan out of 50, and they had to navigate a total alphabet soup of Medicare stuff. What is part A? What is part B? What is part C? What is a Medicare supplement plan? What is a Medicare Advantage plan? How do I choose one? And they talked to about 10 different local brokers before they found one that they trusted and thought knew his stuff. And I looked at this and I was like, this is totally broken,” Petkevich said in an interview.
Fair Square Medicare was born out of this experience. The San Francisco-based company creates tech-enabled services to help seniors find health insurance options and offers concierge support. On Wednesday, the startup launched a new generative AI platform called Vox to further support seniors enrolling in Medicare.
Vox is meant to be used by Medicare carriers and brokerages and has three main features: AI voice agents, generative AI-driven insights and AI-powered coaching. The first AI voice agent to launch is called Sophia, which screens customers before they talk to a sales agent. It answers calls from potential customers, asks questions to understand their eligibility for Medicare and collects insights to direct them to the best plan for them. Fair Square Medicare is developing additional voice agents, including for enrollment script reading and conducting health risk assessments.
The generative AI insight feature tracks every customer call and gathers data. It has a searchable interface, which business leaders can use to ask questions like what callers’ main frustrations are and what benefits gain the most sales.
With the coaching support feature, agents at Medicare carriers and brokerages can get real-time feedback while on customer calls on how they can better the experience for customers. It can offer specific examples of successful outcomes achieved by other agents and deliver immediate feedback on any incorrect information given to customers.
Petkevich noted that Fair Square Medicare’s ultimate goal is to make an AI insurance agent, and Vox is a step in that direction. While he doesn’t foresee an AI insurance agent taking the place of local agents, he thinks it could help support large Medicare distribution centers.
“We find that these scaled Medicare distribution centers have this really difficult challenge where most of their sales happen in Q4 because of the [annual enrollment period],” he said. “It’s basically impossible for them to invest long-term in their teams. So it’s really challenging for them to get folks who are thinking about their clients in the long term. And that’s why some of the NPS and retention scores at scaled call centers aren’t as good as what it is for local field agents. We think having an AI agent could actually be in those cases better than a human agent.”
When asked what he expects this AI insurance agent to look like, he said he thinks about what his mom and dad would want out of their agent.
“They usually have some question, and they want to get on the phone and they want it simply answered by something or someone that they trust,” he said. “Then they want to get off the phone and live their lives because nobody wants to spend too much time thinking about health insurance.”
Photo: metamorworks, Getty Images
