All technology is finally about customers: Byju Joseph of Future Generali India

Q: What has been the digital strategy for life insurance future as far as you are concerned? What technologies have you used to create the best customer insights needed?

A: At Future Generali, we are immensely focused on delivering the brand ideology of Simpler, Smarter and Faster to our customers. Towards, this objective the company has rapidly adopted Digitalisation and Automation to enhance overall customer experience. We have adopted a "Digital First" strategy deploying a combination of technologies in areas of database, cloud, mobility, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning to augment speed and accuracy at every touch point of our customer service value chain and to reduce human intervention in repetitive, low value transactions

Our starting point in this journey was Voice of customers – Using mobile based App to track Net Promoter Score (NPS) and get instant feedback from our customers on their transaction experience. Through NPS, we deeply analysed the voice of customers to identify critical pain points and address them swiftly through use of technology. Basis the feedback, over the course of last one year, we have launched of a plethora of digital initiatives that has not only improved our customer KPIs significantly, but also earned us accolades from the industry and set a solid foundation for us to build upon.

We launched an ‘industry first’ solution, Customer service on WhatsApp. WhatsApp for Service is a unique bot-based architecture to leverage the most popular customer service conversation platform in the country. Apart from receiving policy bonds on WhatsApp, we are currently offering 13 services on this platform. Customers can avail of all post sales transactional service requirements on this platform.

Apart from these two initiatives, we also undertook the transformation of service stack. A total of 15 large initiatives have been launched to redefine customer experience including many payment options, wallets etc. We have automated our customer enrolment for corporate master policy, ECS clearing process and bank reconciliation using UiPath RPA Bot. The RPA solution solved the cost and complexity back office issues with unmatched, non-invasive Citrix, mainframe, and legacy automation technology. Moving forward, we are focusing on leveraging the power of data and predictive analytics to build differentiated services and proactively create unique experiences for our customers.

Q: As a technology leader, what role do you think a good analytical platform plays in market traction?

A: For any marketing strategy to succeed you need to have a strong vision backed by organization alignment, business IT, partners, scalable data technology and a robust analytical platform implementation strategy. The Analytical platform needs to be enabled right from integration with multiple data sources (internal and external) in the business. Organization must ensure access to large data with quality and finally, a good strategic model to derive insight from the data. Having said this, the most important factor for any analytics platform to deliver is clarity of what goal we are seeking from it.

These insights must be rendered to very interactive and powerful business ideas for business user to consume and formulate a better marketing strategy. So, having a clear focus, well-articulated goals / business problem that the company wants to address through a data driven market strategy, is the key. I would say that putting any data model or analytics platform in place is not going to deliver without this.

Q: What role do stakeholders play in this? When you were adapting to this platform did you face any questions by the leaders in the organization?

A: Implementing such platforms are a large investment, high commitment programs involving multiple stakeholders. Therefore, one decides to move in this direction it is important to articulate the vision, strategy and business outcomes very clearly. Once done, stakeholder communication and alignment becomes necessary and then comes the choice of platform etc. In my opinion, if we follow this order and take engage with stakeholders proactively, you will get more collaboration than questions.