Digitization at Max Life: Digital platforms see more than 80% of the increase in online interaction

Digitalisation is changing consumer’s patterns of brand selection, buying, consumer’s patterns of brand selection, buying, and consumption even in the life insurance category. In an exclusive interview Manu Lavanya, Director & Chief Operations Officer, Max Life Insurance says the company is committed to simplifying the entire customer life journey from buying life insurance to settling a claim seamlessly in the digital era

Please elaborate on the core pillars of Max Life’s digital journey

Max Life Insurance has made considerable investments in developing innovative digital platforms over the last five years. At Max Life, digital platforms account for more than 80% of all business transactions, with almost 100% of our business prospecting, recruitment, onboarding, and skilling happening online.

We use technology and digital interventions across the value chain to build intelligent digital recruitment and agent onboarding, frictionless customer onboarding journeys, AI/ML-enabled intelligent underwriting and risk management platforms, and responsive and empathic customer support.

Max Life’s digital strategy is based on a mix of vertical and horizontal capabilities. This includes:

• Deep consumer insights driving intelligent prospecting and customer segmentation
• Creating an effective and risk-avoidant customer onboarding process by balancing intuitive customer experiences with AI/ML
• Building omni-channel, self-service, and analytics-driven customer service experiences aided by intelligence-driven renewals procedures and responsive and risk-mitigated instant claims employing cutting-edge AI for fraud detection
• Enabling the digital sales process through intelligent nudge and gamification-enabled procedures offered by cutting-edge lead management platforms
• Increasing our digital enterprise footprint by providing employees with 100 percent self-service while improving the company’s security and compliance posture through automation

Max life Insurance is using several AI technologies including vision, speech, and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Can you tell us how this is helping in rolling out better services?

Building an intelligent enterprise is one of Max Life’s strategic pillars, and we are continuing to develop AI/ML-powered digital solutions across the value chain. AI technologies such as vision, speech, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) are used to construct a variety of prediction models and cognitive applications via digital interventions. At the same time, it has helped us increase our process efficiencies while also providing a hyper-personalized and frictionless consumer experience.

We started building a dedicated and specialized team – AI Works, as early as 2011 and this focus has allowed us to stand out from the competition and build swifter AI/ML solutions for all new business prospecting, sales, issuance, service, and retention activities. This team has embedded Intelligence across all key processes with use cases like Cross-selling recommendation, Renewal Propensity models. Vision AI based fraud detection and mortality Forecasting. We have also created an omni-channel customer experience by: a) integrating an intelligent chatbot (MILI) with Google Assistant, b) WhatsApp support, c) creating an easy help centre on the website, and d) automating response to enquiries and emails using bots. The same has resulted in a 50% increase in overall conversational interface usage by customers while servicing their post-pandemic queries.

With reference to social analytics and machine learning to segment customers – how does it help in scalability and cost efficiencies?

Committing to data and social analytics at scale is also a key imperative in developing an intelligent organization. Max Life is converting its data to the cloud and constructing a futuristic foundation layer that will enable enterprise-grade analytics via elastic infrastructure. This renewed focus helps us with building agility on, sentiment analytics, customer segmentation, cross-sell, UW Mortality, and risk analytics, among other things. We employ social analytics to customize our customer offerings that helps segment our customers using smart algorithms and machine learning.

How do you see the adoption among customers in submitting claims using self-service options – website, digital bots, and AI-driven Interactive Voice Response? How are you easing the customer experience?

We believe that one of the biggest levers for empowering our customers is self-service adoption and we have seen our customers asking for more in terms of digital enablement. Given this self-service adoption, we have realigned our customer services with an enhanced layer of digital agility that assures customers the convenience of quick query resolution and a swifter service experience. We have developed a suite of self-service options available through our website, digital bots, and AI-driven interactive voice response mechanisms, that help the customers avail easy solutions with minimal interventions. Additionally, we accept all claim documents online, thus empowering the customers to submit their claims without any hindrance. This enables us to maintain the promise of providing a hassle-free customer experience.

In the entire digital journey of Max Life Insurance, how much work is still offline.

While some areas are yet to be digitized, we have streamlined a larger part of our business operations over the last three years. The number of self-service workloads has increased almost 400% in the past three fiscals. While more than 80% of our business transactions are self-serviced, our next goal is to fast-track 90% of our self-service business transactions by 2023. Alongside, we have seen a significant uptake of bot interactions that solves significant portion of our servicing transactions today.