Over the last five years, Max Life Insurance has invested significantly in creating innovative digital platforms. More than 80% of all business transactions at Max Life are done via digital platforms, with almost 100% of its business prospecting, recruitment, onboarding & skilling done digitally.The insurance provider is currently leveraging technology and digital interventions all across the value chain including Intelligent Digital Recruitment and Agent onboarding, Frictionless Customer Onboarding journeys, AI / ML-enabled intelligent Underwriting and risk management, and responsive and empathetic customer care.
“Going forward, we see the digital dimensions of experience, intelligence, and business process automation become more prevalent in the enterprise processes and workflows,” Manu Lavanya, Director & Chief Operations Officer at Max Life Insurance.
Building AI backed solutions
According to Lavanya, building an Intelligent Enterprise is one of the key pillars of Max Life’s organizational strategy, and the company continues to build digital solutions backed by AI/ML across the value chain.
Digital interventions such as AI technologies including vision, speech, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) are leveraged to create a host of predictive models and cognitive applications. The same has helped improve process efficiencies and deliver a hyper-personalized and seamless customer experience at the same time.
“At Max Life, we invested in creating a dedicated and specialized team – AI Works as early as 2011. This enables us to differentiate ourselves from our competitors and build AI/ M solutions across all processes of New Business Prospecting, Sales, Issuance, Service, and Retention,” Lavanya said.
A few examples are Speech Recognition based cross-selling with propensity & Product recommendation, Upfront policy UW with OCR and Vision Analytics, Customer 360 Risk Assessment, Fraud Prevention, and Mortality prediction, Computer Vision-based automated UW, Intent prediction in customer service, and renewals through AI conversational BOTS and many more. Max Life’s policy issuance.
An omnichannel experience has also been enabled by using an intelligent chatbot (MILI) that has been integrated with Google Assistant, WhatsApp servicing, an intuitive help center on the website, and automation through the use of bots to answer queries and emails. The same has resulted in a 50% increase in overall conversational interface usage by customers while servicing their post-pandemic queries.
Max Life is in the middle of an extensive program driving Data transformation on the Cloud and building a foundation layer that will support enterprise-grade analytics through an elastic infrastructure.
These analytics contribute to persistence and renewals enhancement, Fraud Detection, Sentiment analytics, customer segmentation, next best action, and cross-sell and UW Mortality ad risk analytics.
“Today we also use social analytics to personalize offerings to the customers. We also use Smart algorithms and machine learning to segment our customers and depend upon AI models for correct risk selection and pricing. We also undertake real-time integration with bank assurance partner CRM’s, industry databases to offer customers the right product. It, therefore, helps us lessen friction and shorten journey time for new customer onboarding to less than 10 minutes with no / minimal documentation,” Lavanya added.
Insuring on Cloud
Max Life Insurance is on a multi-year cloud transformation journey that will enable the company to be more agile & resilient through elastic on-demand infrastructure, according to Lavanya.
“Most of our customer-facing assets are already on the cloud, especially for customer onboarding and underwriting. Currently, we are in the process of transitioning key enablers like CRM, workflows, and rule engines to the cloud. We have already started a project to transform our investment management systems and Human Resources systems to the cloud,” he maintained.
Finally, the organisation is building a data platform on the cloud that will help its data science team discover data seamlessly. Over a 2-3-year period, 70% of the firm’s workloads will be on the cloud. The only systems remaining on-prem will be its core insurance policy admins systems.
Max Life Insurance has already invested in data center transformation a few years back and co-located its infra at a data center.
“We have invested in remote monitoring tools and self-healing tools that help ensure very high system uptimes. We have already piloted AI Ops to optimize our data center loads using Artificial intelligence,” added Lavanya.
A cloud-native underwriting and issuance platform have also been built that helps the company reduce its issuance time by over 70 per cent.
