How Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance uses digital assets to reduce business inefficiencies

Goutam Datta, Chief Information & Digital Officer, Bajaj Allianz Life, focuses on leveraging intelligent and connected applications to ensure crucial decision making in a smarter way.

In an interview with ETCIO, Datta provides insights into the company’s digital journey fuelled through mobility and next-gen technologies.

Edited Excerpts-

How are you using technology to enhance CX?

We have created a mobile-based application known as Insta-App for customers. The interface of the application allows users to run the entire goal-based journey that includes policy booking, uploading relevant documents and information, etc. At the onset of the cycle, the system has integrated with a tool known as PIVC, (Pre Issuance Video Confirmation), which reads out the parameters that the customer or the sales manager has selected in the journey, connects with the customer and allows the customer to understand in his preferred language.

Taking the context of customer facing technology, we have developed a chatbot called BOING, which has interacted with 3 lakh unique visitors till now and supports five different languages. The AI-driven chatbot understands the context of the question and has the capability to respond to the employees or customers in a contextual manner. The chatbot is integrated with all customer-facing channels and internal functionalities as well.

The interface is developed for the customers to choose a vernacular language in which recording can be done. This voice-based recording done by customers helps to get insights on customer requirements which turn into a lead for our sales executives.

How are you streamlining business functions through IT?

There are multiple elements of technology that we are leveraging in our core functions.

‘i-Smart’ is a comprehensive portal available on mobile and tablet devices. This portal enhances customer relationship with policy updates, renewals updates and etc. It has been downloaded over 25,000 times. Over 3,000 agents are using it on a daily basis. Through this app, the company has been able to renew over 15,000 policies and acquired more than 500 new customers.

To counter the challenges of hiring agents, we have developed a tool known as i-Recruit, which assists us to recruit an agent. Earlier, the onboarding process used to take weeks. With the new app, the company is able to process more than 5,000 applications per month, and the TAT has been reduced by 60% i-Manage is the most recent intervention for the company’s sales force which helps to keep all the data about sales agents with their manager. The sales managers use i-Manage on a daily basis to track their productivity, calendar, including their renewals, their IPs renewal, and their business mix. Another business driver is i-Serve. It is an application which extends services from branch systems to the customer desk.

How do you manage end-to-end bank account integration?

In insurance companies, managing end-to-end bank account integration is very critical. Earlier it used to take three months for bank account integrations, but in the past one year, we have integrated this process in the company’s onboarding kit for enhancing banker relationship.

We have developed a compact ACI catalogue with all products in a structured manner. This has led to streamlined functions such as product sales, analytics, on-boarding stage, customer nominee details and etc. For this, we have separate APIs and phases of different services and call for action buttons. It has helped both the company and partners in building communication and transparent hygiene. Most of the apps and tools are developed in-house including Insta-app, i-Smart, i-Recruit, i-Manage, and BALIC onboarding kit.

How is a data-driven model helping you in claim settlement?

There are multiple channels to gain insights on utilising data to optimise the customer experience. We have observed that with data touch-points and insights, we can understand customer needs and feedback towards our existing claim solutions. We have a full-fledged data warehouse platform which provides all sorts of descriptive reporting to all the business leaders.

With the understanding capabilities of data-driven insights, we focus not to avoid claim rather reach out to the customer to give clarity on possible ways such as partial withdrawal, etc. Data-driven insights help in decision making for internal and partner strategies.

What is your cloud strategy?

We have invested in cloud but on partial functions. The need of the hour is to invest in hybrid cloud models that can support assets functionalities such as security, on-prem while giving control with agility to scale problems and resulting with benefits. There are several workloads and VMs which are migrated to cloud but the fraction of computing still do not rely only on the cloud. We are getting benefits of collaboration, extensibility of data channels, hence we are planning to keep the balance of cloud and data centre for the coming future.

Change management and evolving needs of technology is a challenge for every frontier in the industry. We are also capturing this challenge as an opportunity to leverage more technology to ease our business pain-points. There are challenges such understanding customer requirements, product delivery and balancing technology with new business trends. Another challenge is getting the right collaboration with relevant partners to stay ahead in the industry.

Source: The Economic Times