Kotak Insurance to grab new use cases post-Covid
Kotak General Insurance seeks to provide a differentiated value proposition through customized products and services leveraging state of art technology and digital infrastructure. It understands the importance of digital and has been steadily building its digital capabilities. The company believes that digital is not just a medium, but an enabler of doing business.
The company’s MD and CEO Mahesh Balasubramanian describes digital as a backbone across functions, be it in acquisition, policy issuance, servicing, claims and even employee engagement and training. He believes in the post-covid world, digital and technology will play an even bigger role. “A classic example is the use of digital to enable work from home for all our employees, which was implemented in the early days of the lockdown and this ensured that they cater to all customer requirements remotely,” says he.
ONLINE BUSINESS
The company has been equipping all its partners with digital means to help them offer better experience to their customer segments. It has created customized journeys on the mobile and web for its distribution partners to help them issue policies to their customers electronically. Balasubramanian says these platforms are integrated with the company’s core systems and using these platforms, the distribution partners can issue policies remotely from anywhere. “Such initiatives improve partner experience and efficiency greatly. Pure online business contributes around 16% to our top line and we are looking at doubling this number in the current “financial year. If we look at electronically issued policies, it would be more than 90% of our volumes,” he says.
FITNESS TRACKER
Kotak General Insurance intends to offer wearable fitness trackers to its existing and new health insurance customers to help monitor their mobility and fitness pattern. “We have recently launched a unique sandbox initiative based on the essentials of the preventive healthcare ecosystem in association with leading Indian healthcare start-up GOQii,” says Balasubramanian, adding: “The fitness tracker will constantly measure the customers’ vitals like step count, quality of sleep, etc. and help them maintain / work towards a healthy lifestyle.”
DIGITAL MARKETING
Kotak General Insurance has presence in virtually all the social media channels. It is focussed more on performance related marketing initiatives. According to Balasubramanian, such marketing initiatives have a direct impact on revenue besides working on enablers like online customer j ourneys aimed at making customer experience better.
He adds: “Last year, we launched a first of its kind social media campaign themed #DriveLikeALady aimed at celebrating women drivers on the road who have typically been subjected to deep rooted societal biases. The campaign was very well received, and so far we have won 1 international and 7 national awards across digital marketing forums.”
CRM, ENHANCING CE
Analytics is at the core of the general insurance business, especially for Kotak General Insurance, since it believes in the philosophy of prudence. Customer experience is extremely important, given the little differentiation in products in its category.
Says Balasubramanian: “Rich insights emerging from our analytics practice help us shape our product, distribution and risk management strategy. Our CRM platform works towards giving a single view of the customer, which equips our serving teams with better knowledge and history of the customer, helping them provide a seamless experience. We also run NPS practice across the company to understand customer feedback and work towards improving customer experience. Apart from this, we have launched multiple initiatives such as tablet- based claims processing for convenience and TAT, integration with vehicle databases to reduce customers data entry steps, online claims submission, online renewals and end to end automated policy issuance systems. Our digital and technology initiatives have been implemented keeping the complete customer journey in mindfrom acquisition, onboarding, to servicing, claims and retention.”
Company already issues more than 90% of policies electronically
POST COVID PLANS
The company’s digital initiatives and platforms existed during pre-Covid days as well. However, Covid has exponentially increased the pace of adoption. Technology and digital initiatives will, understandably, play a larger role in the post covid scenario and Balasubramanian feels there will be new use cases emerging from the Covid crisis. “For example, customer solicitation for traditional channels will also deploy digital means and can be done remotely, or contactless. Imagine, your trusted advisor sends you a video on WhatsApp explaining the features and benefits of a product in an easy to understand format. On expressing interest in the product, the advisor can guide you with the required data and documentation to buy the product online. As a company, we will continue to invest and build capabilities in these areas,” says he.