How AI, bots & big data analytics are transforming Max Life Insurance

In an interview with ETCIO, Manik Nangia, Chief Digital Officer & Director Marketing, Max Life Insurance shares how traditional on-ground sales oriented insurance sector is stepping towards customer ease of digital evolution. He further reveals the road map of driving the digital culture by leveraging AI and Big data analytics.

Max Life Insurance embarked on the digital journey about 4 years ago with disproportionate focus on digitizing the customer acquisition and servicing processes by leveraging AI, Big data and other evolving technologies. The Digital Centre of Excellence is driving the digital transformations across Max Life Insurance to facilitate a frictionless customer journey.

In an interview with ETCIO, Manik Nangia, Chief Digital Officer & Director Marketing, Max Life Insurance shares how traditional on-ground sales oriented insurance sector is stepping towards customer ease of digital evolution. He further reveals the road map of driving the digital culture by leveraging AI and Big data analytics.

“The moment you can reduce the distance between a company and the customer to zero, that is digital. So digital is not about technology from our point of view, digital is about the customer, digital is about reducing distance of communication and optimizing the ease of engagement. We are achieving it with the help of AI and bot capabilities with big data analytics”,Manik Nangia, Chief Digital Officer & Director Marketing, Max Life Insurance.

What technologies you are leveraging in digitally transforming your organisation and what is the business outcome of that?

We are leveraging a number of modern technologies to accelerate the business change. These include building Cloud native, mobile first and conversational UX based apps using Adobe Stack and API enabled Micro-services architecture to digitise the end to end processes of the business value chain. The digital footprint is designed to ask less and deduce more by leveraging the India Stack and other external sources of information. Additionally, we are utilising the power of user behaviour Analytics to create further differentiation and enable Cross Sell/Up Sell and targeted marketing and chase with continuous customer engagement using platforms like Netcore. Implementing DevOps has certainly brought value by enabling us to go to market frequently and faster. 

The technology has helped the business in increasing the conversion rates, ability to launch new products and features faster than ever before and continuously engage with the customer. Our approach has enabled the last mile to provide on-the-go solutions to customers at the time of sales and servicing. 

To service our customers in an instant, accurate and efficient manner, we are also leveraging Artificial Intelligence technologies. Our website offers a live chat supported by a bot that is constantly learning and providing more and more information to customers in a timely and precise manner. 

What are the challenges of digitization in life insurance sector associated with deploying next-gen technologies? How are you planning to overcome such hindrances of digitizing your business in which a majority of customers rely on human intervention?

Digitalization is not a challenge. For us it’s a huge opportunity that is now becoming a reality; one in every five new customers for Max Life Insurance is entering through our digital door. Our view is, “the moment you can reduce the distance between a company and the customer to zero, that is digital”. So digital is not about technology from our point of view, digital is about the customer, digital is about reducing distance between company and employee, company and seller, company and customer, down to zero. Digital reduces friction in processes and increases productivity through enablement. 

While traditionally life insurance has been sold with a high degree of human intervention, I don’t see this as a challenge but more of an opportunity. Today we are seamlessly integrating the online and offline experience for a customer, without him even realizing it. When a customer for example, has generated a quote online from our website, we have already captured his details like date of birth. Now when our agent goes to follow up on this request, he already has these details pre-filled in our online application form, thereby reducing time and increasing accuracy.

By giving the customer all the options in a direct to consumer journey, by giving the customer the power to choose what term, what tenure, what sum assured and what combination of riders and protection to buy, we are empowering the customer to take his financial decisions.

Please explain the working mechanism of your recent offering mPower, and how this new end to end digital solutions will revamp the sales force in insurance sector.

mPower is a virtual servicing capability that creates engagement opportunities for deep relationships. We believe that digital interventions enable our agents with the necessary information at their fingertips, to sell smart. For instance, if a customer wants to know about a new product that our agent is unfamiliar with, he would have in the past, had to wither call a helpline and wait for a response, or have to get back to the customer at a later date. Now with the help of mPower, he has access to a chat option to solve queries, a library of audio and visual content for a quick understanding of products. What this does is that it enables the agent to spend more time with the customer, and doing a thorough need-analysis, rather than doing administrative tasks. 

We are currently enhancing the tool on a daily basis and with OCR and other intelligent technologies for on-the-spot identification of issues like signature mismatch or the requirement for additional medical checks, that typically reach the customer after the lag of a day or two. 

On the agent management side as well, we are enhancing productivity by empowering them to service customers efficiently, check for any processing issues like additional documents required and close them on-the-spot, check their own performance management metrics, incentives earned till a given date etc.

How are you driving a “doing digital” culture within your organization?

We are an organization that is committed to thinking and doing digital. We have created a Digital Centre of Excellence, which is a separate facility with a cross-functional team that drives solutions such as mPower, online sales through website and so on. There is a digital solutions team, who sit with our agents, understand their journey, shadow them on sales calls, live their life and see which parts of their life can be made easy, if we offer them a digital solution. Our digital technologies team then understands how systems be integrated to provide a useful solution to empower the customer-facing agent and help him win more and win faster. 

Our Direct Consumer team drives our successful e-commerce gateway, creating customer journeys that are intuitive and friction-free, while leveraging the platform to cross-sell and up-sell. Digital Product Management creates products that are born-digital and integrates them with various fintech platforms like digital payment eco-systems, partners such as India Stack for digital identity etc. 

Together, this highly driven team is responsible for delivering outcomes that are creating value for customers, helping our agents or sellers sell smarter and delivering value to the organization. 

What technologies like (big data, real time monitoring) are you implementing and how are you leveraging available user data-analytics in integrating digital interventions to offer hassle-free customer experience?

We have implemented real-time monitoring by leveraging user behaviour data from Google Analytics for marketing and driving campaigns. Currently we are also working on enabling our call centres with tools and technology to nudge the customer and increase the conversation. 

The aim is to capture relevant data that can help then sell policies that are most needed. For instance, one could be sold a child policy if he/she is just blessed with a child. Based on the websites that they browse, we could figure out their life-stage and offer an appropriate product for them. Getting access to a customer’s health or daily activity data could be used not only for ascertaining how fit a person was, but to also give out some incentives for those who engage in some sort of a physical activity on a daily basis. Based on customer data and purchase behaviour, we have been able to create customer personas, basis which we have customized their purchase journeys.

Are you experimenting with AI, ML or any such next gen technologies?

We have been experimenting in various dimensions of Cognitive computing in delivering conversational experience to the customer via bots along with use of machine and deep learning for the underwriting purposes. Additionally, we have also invested in automating some of our processes using Robotics.

We are looking to tap artificial intelligence (AI) tools to discover customer need at various life stages and offer appropriate products at each step. A lot of experiments are being done on OCR to reduce manual interventions and enable straight-through processing of our applications. We have launched a chatbot live on our website for instant and efficient redressal of customer queries. For our employees as well, we have taken engagement to the next level with an easy-to-use interactive employee app that uses a bot to answer any queries related to HR policies or function-specific relevant information on the business.

Source: ETCIO  |  August 14, 2018, 07:34 IST