• By Mr. K V Dipu - Senior President  & Head - Operations & Customer Service, Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Co. Ltd.

Opening Note

“When you lose, don’t lose the lesson” goes one of the famous quotes by the reverted Dalai Lama. In this context, the Indian insurance industry, even as it grappled with the overnight challenges thrown up by the pandemic, has applied the lessons learnt, and is marching steadily towards the digital transformation of the industry at large.

Pre pandemic hesitation

Since insurance is a conversational sale, and the industry is distribution-led, there was a latent element of hesitation in terms of a digital push prior to the pandemic era. Even as customers shared their rising expectations, driven by their increasingly convenient, digitally driven experiences in other industries, the insurance industry had pulled a few punches given the above context.

Pandemic driven push

The pandemic, given the way it ushered in a digital way of living (not just working) ensured that digitization permeated virtually every nook and corner of the industry. When employees were working from home & were socially and physically distanced, firms ensured they were digitally and emotionally connected via digital employee engagement, and even family engagement(!), programs. When distributors were confined to their homes or immediate vicinity, the born-again utilization of paperless processing ensured that distributors could issue policies using the devices at their end, be it portals or apps. When customers wanted their claims to be processed, the upload of scanned documents via apps ensured seamless processing. Aiding all this is the rise in digital payments across the economic landscape, thereby ensuring seamless payment of commissions, claims and refunds.

Use cases

Let us examine this digital revolution in greater detail.

AI driven bots v/s call centre. Hitherto, the ubiquitous mode of connect for customers was the call centre executive. Now, you have a bot popping up on the screen the moment you just start typing! Indeed, even as bots have become passe (such has been the scale of adoption), differentiating factors, which lent firms a competitive edge, include the use of languages beyond English and the integration of man & machine to ensure one-click resolution in cases wherein bots could not comprehend human utterances.

 Customer empowered, AI & photogrammetry aided, claim processing. The motor insurance is the dominant form of general insurance in India, given the legal mandate for customers to have one while buying a car. While traditional claim processing, in the unfortunate event of a crash, involved the use of a surveyor, the introduction of a 2-click claim process, wherein the customer performs the role of the surveyor, via (a) clicking of photos of the damaged car and (b) upload of these clicks via the mobile app, ensured a dramatic reduction in turnaround time from days (the customer calls the firm, the firm sends a surveyor, the surveyor conducts an assessment, he then files a report, the firm examines it, the decision is communicated to the customer) to as low a time as 20 minutes (the AI engine examines the uploaded images and conveys an amount to the customer, the customer gives his consent, the money is transferred digitally) up to certain amounts!

Telemedicine. When firms had to issue health insurance policies, the pandemic came in the way of customer visits to diagnostic centres for health check up and assessment prior to issuance. This is precisely where telemedicine came to the aid of the industry. Firms conducted electronic or telephonic assessments of customers and issued policies. Also, IT integration of systems across the ecosystem (distributors, insurers, diagnostic centres et al) ensured paperless flow of information across the spectrum.

There is a plethora of use cases, as can be seen from the above illustrations, across the landscape which have digitized touchpoints and made the journey more comfortable for employees, distributors, firms, ecosystem partners and customers.

Going Forward

As the pandemic era has morphed into the post-pandemic era, wherein we see a hybrid approach (return to physical in many areas and the sustenance of the pandemic-induced digital shifts in many other areas), the digital revolution brought about by the pandemic is being recalibrated as well. While digital payments, digital issuance of policies, acceptance of digital versions of policies et al continue, in terms of voice, multi-lingual digital capabilities & a slew of new-age technologies, the industry is on the threshold of yet another shift. Suffice to say that the shift from the physical to the digital is now a shift from digitizing the physical to humanizing the digital, given that the evergreen customer needs of empathy and a healing touch (especially when they need it the most) continue to dominate customer facing touchpoints.

Also, as firms deal with voluminous amounts of data, the rise of the cloud platform has given firms a host of benefits. The ability to coalesce siloed data marts scattered across the firm into a single data lake allows firms to take a single view of the customer and generated opportunities for cross-sell, upsell and personalized servicing.

Again, the huge momentum and excitement generated in the industry, thanks to the massive and pathbreaking reforms initiated by the regulator, banks on the underlying usage of digital technologies, be it in terms of outreach to every nook and corner of the corner or the ability to the expected spike in volumes, be it issuance of policies or processing of claims.

Closing Note - Speed

The massive digital transformation that lies ahead of the industry assumes that speed is a given. Agility is the need of the hour, as the pandemic clearly highlighted, and the rules of the game have changed as a result – it is not about the big beating the small, but about the fast overtaking the slow.