Max Life Insurance adopts digital sales processes successfully
In an interview with Express Computer, Aalok Bhan, Director & Chief Marketing Officer, Max Life Insurance reveals the digital initiatives to ensure that new policies can be issued to customers during the time of lockdown, with no physical contact. The company has digitised its sales processes to accommodate social distancing and has managed to sell close to 24,000 policies digitally in the month of March 2020 alone
What is the CMO’s digital strategy for 2020 and beyond? How is digital transformation driving strategic goals at Max Life Insurance?
Our digital strategy for 2020 is based on three distinct pillars focusing on customers, sellers, and employees. For customers we are leveraging technologies to deliver superior customer experience, instant gratification, and an omni-channel experience. For sellers, we are helping them with intelligence to sell better and helping them to serve customers better in onboarding and servicing through digital assets. For employees, we are enabling more self -service and engaging with them more digitally.
On a macro level, digital transformation is enabling the organisation to meet its eventual, strategic goal of having a state-of-the-art customer onboarding and policy issuance platforms that will in turn support effective remote work, recalibrate ecosystems with digital technologies and help maintain business continuity in the long run.
How are you leveraging digital and social media to lure customers?
We are focused on living up to our key responsibility of providing financial guidance to customers and therefore are leading our communication strategy with care and empathy. As new age marketers, we’re also staying on top of the latest trends, watching the data for insight, and understanding new consumer behaviours that will be key in driving successful conversations moving forward.
For instance, new consumption patterns during the period of lockdown reflected an increase in smartphone consumption, from 20 minutes to 32 minutes per day. At Max Life Insurance, we quickly adapted to change by channelising our resources onto social media and digital marketing. Recent efforts include accelerating campaigns and being creative on social media, where we drove engagement on the back of a 21-day quarantine challenge through which we hope to stay connected with our social media audience.
Do you face challenges with emerging tech?
The challenge lies in changing things that have been there for years and to make sure that new technology perfectly integrates with the legacy systems, some of which cannot be replaced easily. As this phase required social distancing, the biggest challenge was to nurture an ecosystem of contactless servicing that could only rest upon strong digital fundamentals.
At Max Life Insurance, we have been very open and quick to adopting latest technologies in the arena of customer facing conversational interfaces such as chatbots and backend improvements to mitigate the challenge. We are leading with agility and transitioning our processes onto digital channels to promptly service our customers in a contactless manner. Right from sales to new policy issuance to claims management – operations across the entire value chain have been digitised. To ensure that new policies can be issued to customers during a time of lockdown and no physical contact, we have also digitised our sales processes to accommodate social distancing and managed to sell close to 24,000 policies digitally in the last week of March alone.
How are you making the best use of user-generated content?
User-generated content from social media helps us typically drive consumer insights and deliver marketing campaigns around current consumer sentiment. The user-generated content on the website is used for customer awareness, education and eventually getting higher website traffic via search engine optimisation. Lastly, user-generated is used to design tailored customer selling pitches and scripts.
How are you using data insights for generating campaigns for a specific audience?
Data insights have an instrumental role to play when it comes to personalising user communication for prospecting from different target audiences, for instance, insights help us target women, affluent, lower income audience differently than say, smokers, finance aficionados and frequent travellers. Data insights also help us customise the user buying journey by introducing product intercepts based on popular actions by similar audiences.
