DIGITISATION

Digital makeover

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Businesses should take the big leap and imbibe new technology in their DNA

32sureshagarwal

IN THE LAST decade or so, the proliferation of handheld devices—constantly improving internet bandwidths, and various other factors related to technological advances—has resulted in generation-defining alterations in consumer behaviour. Search for new products, payments and servicing are all demanded online, in express mode.

As consumers, we have seen how our own expectations of product searchability, pace of delivery and effectiveness of servicing interactions have grown by multiples. The best tech organisations have kept pace remarkably well. However, it is now imperative that businesses attuned to seeing themselves as tech-light urgently take the big leap to imbibe new technology in their DNA. Digitisation is definitely a new opportunity to relook at business models, customer engagement, and internal processes in the light of ever-changing technology. It must be said that there might be no non-digital enterprise anymore.

USAGE OF DIGITAL SPACE IN TODAY’S WORLD

From buying groceries to booking a cab to trading shares to buying life insurance, a growing number of decisions and purchases are now happening digitally. Since set-up costs for completely-digital enterprises are lower, it is only natural that new, agile players will challenge the incumbents or the so-called old ways.

INSURANCE INDUSTRY IS TAPPING THE SPACE

The first step for the insurance industry was to improve discoverability and to provide offerings that could be easily understood, played around with, and ultimately purchased online. Across the industry, insurers have provided offerings to that effect, focusing heavily on user interface, articulation of product features and benefits, and ease of payments. As a product category, since we rely on large amounts of authenticated customer information (for underwriting the risk), it has pushed us to be innovative in designing our online forms, and to look at unique ways of customer authentication (Aadhar-based verification is an example).

The next step is to incorporate the benefits of technology through digitisation. This includes automation of key process, both on the sales side and in internal operations. As an industry, while we have to constantly improve our engagement with direct customers, the distributor (or the agent, in common parlance) will always remain a key figure for us, and will continue to be responsible for the majority of our customer interactions. Technology has to be employed in facilitating these interactions as well. Sales enterprise mobility is therefore a critical point of innovation among insurers.

Distributors need to have access to our product collaterals, our benefit illustrations and our forms on their mobile devices, so that these can be shared on the point of sale with the customer as well. The distributor-customer interaction is also thus digitised. A corollary to it is that we effectively introduce a greater degree of standardisation in these interactions. This is a huge plus for insurers. We, at Kotak Life, have already taken big strides in this journey, and are committing to digitising nearly 100 per cent of our customer interactions in the medium term.

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As far as internal processes go, some revisions in new business and servicing processes are also in order. Since our industry manages many customer documents (like KYC and income proofs), we need to provide for mechanisms where the customer/ distributor can simply take a photograph and submit the images to us. The old way of collecting physical documents and scanning and storing them doesn’t appear efficient anymore. We have introduced substantial changes in this area as well.

All servicing touchpoints have also seen digitisation. Most insurers today provide portals where existing customers can view the status of their purchased policies and also initiate any alteration through the same. Some insurers, like Kotak Life, also provide this as a simple mobile application.

Apart from the benefits mentioned earlier, the digitisation of the sale process has also helped increase the amount of data we generate in each customer interaction. This data can be used for further analytics, so that insurers like us can have an even more minute understanding of customer/distributor behaviour. The important thing is to then close the loop. This can be done by using analytics to design smarter offering for customers who prefer to interact with us directly. We, at Kotak Life, today have systems that allow us to utilise analytics to experiment with various campaign options and arrive at offerings that match our customers’ expectations. On the distributor side, analytics can be used to provide feedback on predictive or reactive basis, so that distributors can in turn use the information to modulate their interactions with the customers.

ADVANTAGES & DISADVANTAGES

The key challenge to the entire digitisation journey is the pace of change in the underlying technologies themselves. Agility and flexibility have become key ingredients for success. While tech companies have the luxury to be born with these in their very DNA, companies from other sectors like insurance have to transform their cultures to correspond with the environment quickly. Like all enterprise-wide transformations, this has to be carried out diligently and after taking the stakeholders into confidence.

Agarwal is chief distribution officer, Kotak Life Insurance.

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