We are automating our customer service processes: CTO, Aegon Life

With a presence in more than 20 countries, Aegon - the parent company of Aegon Life currently serves more than 30 million customers and manages investments worth 743 billion euros. Its Indian subsidiary, Aegon Life that offers term insurance for up to 100 years is strongly focusing on automating most of its customer service processes in order to enhance efficiency and boost customer satisfaction. Douglas Kennedy, CTO, Aegon Life, spoke to ETCIO on how the company is using technologies like AI, ML, and analytics to get the best business outcomes.

Edited Excerpts:

How are you leveraging technology to create a competitive differentiator for Aegon Life?

All our new engineering solutions for emerging businesses are built on cloud, leveraging cloud-native services. We recently developed and launched iAssist - a Progressive Web App (PWA) to allow our customers to perform self-service endorsements on their life insurance policies in real-time across all devices and platforms. iAssist allows all customers to manage, view, share and know about their policies at the touch of a button through their preferred channel. Real-time analytics and recommendations would work as a major differentiator for us.

Technology innovation is at the core of our engineering solutions which powers our business today. We are investing in technology more than ever to automate our business processes, gather more data, and process it for better insights, make data-driven decisions, growth and digital transformation. We continue to adopt emerging cloud patterns for infrastructure elasticity and cost optimization for handling ecommerce scale production workloads.

What do you keep in mind before investing in any new technology?

More often than not, investing in some technology is based on the opportunities it creates. It is measured against the ROI (cost, benefit and value) that the investment would create at present and also in future. It’s mostly a cost-benefit analysis based on business priorities which drives the mapping and decision making in terms of technology adoption. AI/ML is one such technology that will help us make targeted product recommendations to customers based on data that we have.

How do you ensure regulations and compliance needs are met?

We have built our systems in a way that it helps us change quickly, scales as per demand seamlessly and it’s easy to run and operate. Regulatory compliance and audit are an important aspect of our business which we consider while designing and implementing them. We have created an API based ecosystem to facilitate integrations and re-envision our business processes to allow end-to-end automation for a speedy and efficient resolution to customer needs.

Where and how are you maximising automation and analytics?

We are in the process of automating most of our customer service processes making it easier and more efficient for customers to get things done faster, anytime, anywhere. Analytics is helping us make more efficient data-driven decisions in terms of prioritizing our backlog and also helping us gauge the effectiveness of our offerings.

How do you keep yourself motivated?

It’s all about keeping business and technology working together hand-in-hand, creating a culture of challenging status-quo with innovation and change, pushing the boundaries for both technology and people and bringing thought leadership to solving problems. All of the above are quite exciting and draining in their own ways. The key is to celebrate our success and learn from our failures and maintaining relationships as we go along.

Source: The Economic Times