 "Insuring consumer trust with tech")
Surveys show insurance brands are among the top consumer products that bring out the fear of being short-changed. Given a persistent lack of customer loyalty, how are insurance brands bracing up to the challenge of gaining consumer trust?
With increased digitisation and new technological tools, insurance companies are learning customer needs with greater depth as they compete to market their products. While swearing by the superiority of tech-enabled services over manual ones, they concede that placing the customer - in an age with easy access to information - at the centre is essential.
TM Shyamsunder, chief information technology officer, Royal Sundaram General Insurance Co Ltd, says technology plays a major role in keeping customers updated about products/services as well as the status of their queries/claims. Apart from a user-friendly website, customer relationship management (CRM), SMS and emails, and multi-lingual call centres, a robust social media platform helps to enhance customer experience, he adds.
"Gone are the days when a customer visited an insurance office to get her policy. Today, customers sit in the comfort of their homes and buy policies for various insurance requirements online. Ease of use and the turnaround time are factors that attract customers to this channel. Similarly, CRM-supported call centres make the company and products available almost all the time from anywhere," he says.
S Prakash, executive director, Star Health and Allied Insurance, says: "We have a fully automated claims process. We facilitate the customers to lodge their claims electronically and we have a paperless transaction where we process the claims and effect payments. When we go to the hospital, we have a software to integrate the hospital software with our IT system, so at the click of a button a patient's information can be automatically transferred to the insurance portal for verification."
Niraj Shah, chief financial officer of PNB MetLife, says, "We have designed efficient pre- and post-sales processes to enhance customer engagement using technology as the key enabler. We have empowered our sales team with a mobility solution to conduct need analysis with the customer before recommending products. This helps build trust as the customer is completely involved in decision-making." Digital solutions, he adds, have enabled PNB MetLife to expand brand presence and reach a new target audience - millennials. "We are leveraging mobility solutions to reduce our on-boarding TAT (turnaround time) and improve efficiency of our operations. We are also applying data analytics modelling techniques to improve persistency. Here, we have seen an improvement of 7 per cent over the last few quarters."
Suresh Agarwal, senior executive vice-president and chief distribution officer, Kotak Mahindra Old Mutual Life Insurance Ltd, says that in spite of the penetration of direct-to-customer technologies, the complexity of life insurance products and the inertia against a purchase means the distributor/agent has a big role to play. "We have developed an end-to-end tablet-based sales process/application named Genie. It encapsulates the modules for activity management from need-based selling to sales fulfilment. Interactive videos are aimed at enhancing customer experience so that customers belonging to different life stages see different content on the app. Quotations for premium are also generated on the fly, right in front of the customer, and thereafter the documentation have also been digital-enabled. In this way, we set the digital expectations of a customer right from the get-go."
He points out that 15 per cent of the company's renewal payments and 49 per cent of fund switch requests happen online. "Last year, close to a third of our overall individual business was through Genie. This has resulted in our processes becoming smoother and less paper dependent. It has reduced handling costs of transit, scanning, storage etc. We are also seeing an increase in sales productivity."
Similarly, ICICI Lombard General Insurance has a mobile app (Insure) that, apart from enabling customers to buy or renew policies etc, provides access to critical information such as nearest garages or hospitals on a real-time basis. Executive director Sanjeev Mantri says, "Recently, we have launched a one-of-its-kind initiative of providing customers information on the quality of health care at hospitals through an open access platform, 'healthadvisor.icicilombard.com'." He adds, "We have derived significant cost reduction by adopting technology. The cost per policy has reduced by over 50 per cent in the last five years. At the same time, productivity per head count has increased thrice."
Anjali Malhotra, chief customer, marketing and digital officer, Aviva Life Insurance, agrees that a better, needs-based selling than one driven by cold call helps in increasing persistency and thereby lifetime customer value. "Analytics models have helped in understanding the customer better, helped us to target better so there is little of cold-call marketing, especially on digital," she says, adding web analytics data helps in improving applications.
Bharti AXA Life Insurance claims to have placed "digital transformation at the heart of all our efforts", chief marketing officer Jitin Paul says. It has initiated a "customer engagement" project with the aim of creating a robust and actionable data resource. The idea, Paul says, is "to go beyond the existing demographic definition of our customers and understand the 'real' persons behind the number".
Digital technology also helps in customising offers. "A case in point is our targeted campaigns on social media where we reach out to audience with products/services relevant to their needs," Paul says.
In this digital age, customers expect multiple touch points with the insurer, with consistent services across all points - of sale, claim and renewal, according to Ashish Mehrotra, CEO and MD of Max Bupa Health Insurance. Max Bupa tried to enhance customer experience from the point of query to policy issuance through process reengineering and technology. It implemented an omni-channel CRM solution to focus on customer interactions and satisfaction, and at the same time to reduce cost by simplifying and automating processes.
Technology, as Kotak Mahindra Old Mutual Life Insurance's Agarwal points out, has helped insurers to bring the customer to the centre of all activities. "Earlier, the focus of insurers was on improvements in enterprise technology and its alignment with evolving business and operations processes." But with technology moving beyond the enterprise and becoming easily accessible in the hands of the end customer, a new set of frameworks has helped insurers to rethink customer engagement.
Enhance with online: Gunjan Ghai
For most customers, general insurance is often a new introduction among the financial services offered to them. The lack of exposure and the absence of a sustained and cohesive effort by the industry towards customer education add to some of the concerns that customers have. Technology can play a bridge between their expectations and insurance companies.
Looking at the behavioural patterns of customers, it would be safe to say that online customers buy higher ticket sizes, renew better and have an overall enhanced brand experience. A recent syndicated research has put a "customer friendly website" as the second most important driver for consideration to purchase.
Besides enhancing customer experience through empowerment, there are significant advantages of using customer-oriented technology in the areas of data quality, customer loyalty, fraud control and operational costs.
The next frontier for insurance companies in India would be to use the rich data streams emanating from platforms to not only predict customer behaviour but also move towards risk-based pricing with the use of predictive modelling and potentially using big data.
Gunjan Ghai
Senior VP, brand, marketing and product development, SBI General Insurance
Senior VP, brand, marketing and product development, SBI General Insurance
