How SBI General Insurance is looking to cut the need for offices

If every aspect of customer engagement can happen remotely, companies can completely eliminate the need for customers crowding their offices, effectively helping in maintaining social distancing while at the same time improving business efficiency.

For SBI General Insurance, the focus has been in making better use of digital information and using the data points to be able to service the customer better. For this to happen, the company is extensively working on AI and ML projects.

"Areas such as AI, ML are on the charts. We have done some experiments and POCs, which were successful. And now we are looking to put them to use for customers," Atul Deshpande, COO, SBI General Insurance, told ETCIO. Deshpande aims to provide the customer with an option to easily choose a product. Another option is to deliver customer services without actually getting the customers into the offices.

Talking about one of the PoC's, Deshpande, said it is a time consuming process when someone is trying to claim health insurance through a cashless facility. "When there is an emergency, the hospital concerned captures the information and sends it to SBI General Insurance. We, then evaluate that information, check for the coverage, and admissibility of that particular case. This is a time-consuming process," Deshpande said.

But the use of AI and ML is set to change the process forever. "What would happen going forward is that the information will directly flow in our databases interfaces from the hospitals and diagnostic centres' systems. We will then run that information past all our algorithms, which will define what kind of elements and operative procedures are required and what is the expenditure to be likely incurred in that particular hospital by the particular surgeon and so forth. Within a fraction of a minute, we will be able to get back to the hospital with the response helping them the further cause of action," he further explained.

Deshpande believes that technology makes it possible to reduce the time to spent on these things and give a faster response to the customer. "AI and ML are two major innovate that we are pushing right now. And this is one of the use cases that will be going into the production very soon," Deshpande said.

While commenting on the benefits of this deployment, Deshpande said, "This will certainly help us reduce the response time. Though the response times are going to be different for a different number of cases as we start getting and perfecting the tools, it will reduce further. It is not just an improvement in response time but also the quality and spread of services," he said. Deshpande spoke of a very recent digital project which is helping them sustain the business operations while the lockdown still continues.

"We were looking at how our KYC process can be a seamless affair for our prospects. We were also exploring how analytics can help us to reduce the cycle times and delivery times," said Deshpande. In a pre-Covid era, SBI General Insurance had its touchpoints with the customers in the form of distributors and policy aggregators. And there was a traditional system of getting the documentation for getting the KYC done.

"Post Covid the situation has changed," Deshpande explained. "The way that technologies work today is that your PAN Card will be read by an OCR-based tech and converted into a right data set. The data sets will be verified from the authorities website and even before you are our from the webpage, you will get a confirmation that KYC is done," he concluded.