For Effective Digital Strategy, Put Customers First

Latha Ayyar, COO, Bharti AXA Life Insurance

At Bharti AXA Life Insurance, a multi-pronged approach has been taken for a focused digital strategy, and this has encompassed digitalizing sales, new business and customer servicing processes.

For example, the e-application portal and sales portal enables both distributors and customers to buy policies online. These portals are integrated with Aadhar, CIBIL, payment gateways, Insurance Repository and backendprocessing engine to make the process simple for customers to help them buy policies in few steps.

The e-app application and process was built keeping in mind customer and sales staff in mind. It provides better sales and buying experience for customers and sales staff alike. Amongst all our digital initiatives, the e-application can be termed as the most successful with 100 percent of our proprietary channel business logged in to use the e-application portal.

Bharti AXA Life Insurance is also about to launch marketing and persistency initiatives based on a cloud platform. The entire financial planning and thereafter the application process have been digitized. So when agents interact with customers, they are able to have a meaningful conversation.

“We are aggressively forging ahead in establishing the online digital channel where we get online sales. On the product side, we are improving our product suite. On the agent side, we are developing agent empowering tools based on digital technologies. Also, we are investing in partnerships and online marketing to ensure that we set up digital sales as a separate channel”.

Another key area of focus is around developing a ‘mobile first’ strategy. This includes solutions to do simple product illustrations and need analysis on the mobile and tablets. The Distributor Self-Service (DSS) is on mobile, which comes handy for sales personnel and makes business solicitation easy.

An intelligent tool has been adopted that helps manage algorithmic lead allocation for our sales channel. When the agent is on the field, an appointment can be set, basis the geo-location. We have made this tool responsive to ensure that it can be used across all form factors.

In terms of other digital technologies and their impact, blockchain has a lot of potential. There are numerous pilots on blockchain by insurance companies, globally. The smart contract bit of the blockchain is going to be more attractive, and much more innovation will happen around that. It is a technology which has high potential not just in private sector and financial sector but also the government sector.

Additionally, usage of IoT and telematics for dynamic pricing and usage-based pricing will be important in the insurance industry.