With a similar objective and to reduce the mundane and repetitive tasks for its salesforce, Exide Life Insurance is innovating the sales journey and processes. In conversation with ETCIO, Ashwin B, COO at Exide Life Insurance shares further details about this innovation.
“We are still a brick and mortar organisation so our lifeline is the tied agency that contributes almost 60 per cent to our total revenues. We still are heavily dependent on that channel for our distribution. So our innovation is largely around further enabling the tied agency. We had launched a mobile-based platform that provides a seamless experience to our sales team. As we are progressing in our journey we are adding new bits and pieces to this application be it Aadhar E-KYC or digital forms,” he said.
During the course of next fiscal, Exide is looking at re-architecting the entire platform to make it more seamless and embed some amount of AI, ML into that. This is being planned with the objective of minimizing re-work.
“To fill up a form, people need to submit an income proof or an identity proof and instead of putting the same document, the salesperson by mistake has uploaded some other document. Today, this mistake is not then and there because it comes as an attachment. But with help of AI and ML, we will be able to figure out what is the document that has come in and if it is as per the expected one or not,” Ashwin explained.
“If we are expecting an E-KYC document and a blank paper or the income proof comes up, the system will reject the document directly saying that this is not the standard document that is expected,” he added.
According to Ashwin, with every other effort, the company is trying to make the user experience better and simpler. He further claims that Exide was the first company to adopt the mobile-first approach for its sales team where the company did not go the tablet route but directly went mobile.
“The whole idea is now to make this faster, minimize errors and re-work so that we improve the throughput,” he said.
On being asked why the company is not working on the consumer journey application to make it more accessible, Ashwin said, “Exciting features like biometric login and others work beautifully on a banking application. Coming to insurance, just think of how many times would a customer want to login in to his insurance application. How often would you want to reach out to the insurance company application? That is the fundamental difference between a transactional relationship with the bank or broking company. You, as an insurance customer, pay your premium once a month and then you don’t have to do anything else unless something happens.”
“Our focus as an organisation continues to be able to optimize the digital journey for our internal stakeholders who are the distributors or the tied agency or the partners with whom we work,” he concluded.