Driven by the rise in penetration of mobile phones and tablets, in the past few years, it has become ineluctable for every business, to embrace mobility. Especially any business, for which success depends largely on customers’ service experiences, must have a sound mobile strategy, in alignment with the changing customer preferences.
While mobility finds its applicability across all industries, it can play an essentially critical role in the success of an insurance organization. When leveraged across the insurance value chain, mobility can yield real business value, in terms of enhanced customer satisfaction, simpler processes, and reduced cycle times and administrative costs.
Insurers can use mobile technology to establish virtual offices for their field staff, allowing them ‘anytime-anywhere’ access to relevant information, such as customer details, new policy features, policy quotes, etc. This would result in faster sales cycles and improved revenues. Using mobile applications, insurers can enable sales agents to capture customer information at the point of contact, transfer it to the central processing office in real time, and initiate the processing of applications instantly.
Customer self-service is another area where mobility can add immense value. Today, mobile phones have become a norm, and the proliferation of smartphones is witnessing unprecedented growth rates. In such a scenario, in order to retain and expand its customer-base, it becomes imperative for an insurance organization to offer self-service tools, allowing customers to access their policy information, locate agents, pay premiums and apply for claims over their mobile devices.
Owing to the benefits that it promises to insurers, the case for adoption of mobile solutions is very strong. However, before an insurer invests in mobile solutions, it is important to outline a sound mobile strategy based on its specific requirements, in order to maximize the benefits of mobility.
Bio: Garima is part of the Marketing team at Newgen Software.
“Consumerization of Insurance” by targeting various customer segments is the key for today’s insurance organization. As rightly pointed by Beena, in her post ‘The Role of IT in Shaping the Future of the Indian Insurance Industry’, GoI has come out with a 12 point plan to fuel growth in Life Insurance sector. I would like to bring forth few of the key points that Insurance organizations should focus on high priority.
GoI’s proposal for “Use & File” approach, being considered by IRDA, is aimed towards reducing the approval cycle for a product by IRDA. It is going to be a vehement task for Insurance firms to devise a product that is best suited for a given market segment, and stay ahead of competition. This will involve high degree of customer analytics, customer segmentation analysis & targeted promotion and customer servicing through various channels of communication. Proper infrastructure has to be in place to support such an initiative.
“Bank can act as broker for selling Insurance” – There is need for integration and automation of Insurance processes along with the banking processes to have a common infrastructure for selling insurance products and services. This will directly reduce the time for customer on-boarding by having an automated and shared infrastructure between the banking and insurance divisions. Such integration would enable usage of bank KYC as a valid proof of document for issuance of policy to customers, resulting in faster & easy acquisition.
Horizontally, there is push by the GoI as well as the industry for banking and financial services to penetrate in the rural population. “Rural Insurance” is one such area. Rural areas in India are still far away from digitization and lack infrastructure. e-Mobility solution is one of the technology advancements that most of the Insurance organizations are looking forward to employ, such that their agents are well equipped to capture, acquire & process customers’ data, while being on-the move and enable for shortest possible time for policy issuance.
With its proposed plan and changes in regulations, the GoI aims at the betterment of the Indian Insurance industry, and the reach of insurance services to the uninsured rural population. Organizations need to adapt to newer technologies to provide better services and meet the demands of customers and regulators. They need to have intelligent and integrated platforms for Customer & Data Analytics, Social Media Integration, Capturing & Managing Enterprise Content (in any form), Automated Business Process (not only intra-organizational but inter-organization too), Mobile applications and integrated customer communication through various channels.
Newgen has continuously worked towards aligning its solutions with the current needs of its customers. Newgen provides an Intelligent Business Process Management platform, that allows for data processing from multiple channels on the fly, enables data analytics in real time, captures and assesses trends by integrating with social media, and provides real-time communication based on customer profiling.
Name: Benjamin
Bio: Benjamin is Sr.Manager - Products & Solutions at Newgen and part of Newgen's Center of Excellence for Insurance vertical.
The insurance sector as we all are aware is crucial for the country’s economic development. India serves as a huge market due to its significant untapped potential.
With the Government’s recently announced 12-point action plan for Insurance, the benefits to the company and policyholders will make Insurance more fundamental and relevant.
The focus on the customer oriented business model will further drive Insurance companies in embracing the emerging technologies. Due to the data-intensive nature of the industry, primarily because it involves collection, processing and maintaining of information relating to insurance policies, IT will continue to act as a critical enabler. In the volatile insurance environment where insurers introduce recurrent changes in process model, product design, IT has helped to gain through web-based, online, front-ending improvements for efficient selling, analysis and decision making. Technology investments will be crucial in the dynamic insurance environment not only to serve the competitive edge but also to maintain the regulatory obligations and hygiene required.
Name: Beena Manoj Simon
Web Site: http://www.futuregenerali.in
Bio: Beena is Senior Manager - Project Management & Operations, at Future Generali India Life Insurance Co.
Are you faced with challenge of retaining customers? Are transportation/processing delays resulting in customer churn? Are you paying huge costs to physically transfer customer information from the branches to the processing centers?
In the insurance industry, where customer service is highly document intensive and process cycles last multiple days, the importance and need for innovative technologies to gain a competitive edge is critical. Some of the major challenges faced by insurers in processing claims include:
The answer to these problems is ‘Mobile Capture’. Insurance workers in the field can leverage on mobile capture technologies to capture customer information at the point of contact with the customer and deliver this information electronically to enterprise applications for processing. Field executives simply need to snap photos of customers’ driver’s licenses, insurance cards, etc., and subsequently route the resulting digital information via a mobile app to a central site for processing. Thus, Mobile Capture enables insurance companies to connect decentralized insurance agency networks and reduce cycle times for processing claims.
Business Benefits
Bio: Garima is part of the Marketing team at Newgen Software.
“A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed.” – Eric Hoffer
Managing grievances or complaints is one of the top priorities among all private and public sector companies these days; in fact it is the ‘key’ to the growth of any business in today’s fast moving and competitive market.
Today, all major regulatory bodies are concerned about customer rights and fair trade. Almost all major regulators across industries have set up robust grievance management and redressal mechanisms to service and protect interests of end customers.
Seeing exponential growth in the Insurance domain, the IRDA recently developed their Integrated Grievance Management System. The key objective behind this development being to have a single collaborated grievance and complaints redressal system integrated with individual grievance systems of all Insurance companies. This will enable end customer to file the complaints directly on IRDA portal, which in turn will transfer the complaint to respective insurance company’s grievance system and track status updates as per defined turned around time and guidelines. With this IRDA will now be able to track the progress of complaints and overall performance of the Insurance companies.
Customer centric organizations today look for a robust complaints tracking system to ensure superior customer care support and service to their esteemed customers. Inside the organization, internal employee force, complaint redressal process & policies and automation tool together are responsible for successful functioning of the customer care function. The first two of these concerns are overcome with proper training and motivation of employees, buying external expertise or consultancy for best processes and polices, inputs from regulatory compliances etc. But the major that organizations face is in deciding right automation engine, which is robust and flexible enough to adapt to their requirements.
Some companies develop their own custom built systems, which take ages, battalion of resources and months to develop. Some go for readymade CRM tools, but such systems are rigid enough to meet: organizational needs, adherence to compliances, process flow specific requirements and flexibility. Custom changes are again time and resource consuming, and add more rigidity to future change management. Also, overheads and maintenance costs on such systems increases exponentially over a period.
There is another approach to automate these requirements over a BPM (Business Process Management) based platform. An efficient BPM engine enables organizations to automate their business processes within the time frame of readymade tools and with the flexibility of custom built systems. In terms of cost, BPM based automation averages between both and over a period has exponential ROI, when the platform is extended to automation of other processes.
BPM’s graphical process modeler enables process design over clicks as per “your organizational needs”. It enables companies to easily configure their business logics, compliances, escalation matrix, approval flows and reporting metrics as per organizational requirements. Using the graphical process modeler of the BPM engine businesses can design their end to end grievance and customer complaint management process, right from complaint initiation till capturing feedback. Initiation of grievances can be through multiple sources like email, web portal, IRDA’s IGMS system, scanning of physical complaint letters, phone etc., and once initiated all requests can be routed to the central BPM workflow. Thereafter, the requests are routed to the grievance team, internal stake holders and approvers as per the defined flow. BPM’s push based queuing mechanism auto allocates the tasks to respective users. Users will open their respective transactions and initiate the resolution process. System keeps track of the defined TATs (turnaround time). Configurable and advanced TAT management system ensures that the operations meet regulator defined TAT. System sends emails or SMSs in advance to respective users, approvers and stakeholder before crossing the defined deadlines. Based on configured rules, the system can also auto escalate cases to respective users.
“Complaining from dissatisfied consumers is considered as an indispensable tool to learn the Voice of the Customer and becomes increasingly important in many business contexts.” – (Crask et al, 1995)
BPM’s real time reporting engine, configurable report building wizards and management dashboards enable learning the limitations, monitoring the grievances and inputs for further change management of the processes. BPM’s graphical process modeler further enables the organization to adopt inputs from such reports and ensures business advancements.
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