In today’s digital era, leveraging data is key for marketers: Rakesh Wadhwa

With rapid changes across the entire business of insurance, marketers need to utilize data better than ever before. Rakesh Wadhwa, CMO, EVP - Strategy & Retail Assurance at Future Generali India Life Insurance, shares his thoughts on the best way to do it.

A: The Marketing practice is undergoing a rapid change owing to transformational changes that digital and data technologies are bringing about across businesses. As Marketers, we need to recognize and embrace this paradigm. Customers today follow a non-linear journey often discovering, researching and seeking reviews online before making a purchase decision. Therefore, a brand always needs to be visible, available and accessible to their customers. This needs to be across all platforms that customers may choose to engage with them on. If we miss the moments of truth with our customers, we are not going to be rewarded by them. This requires marketing professionals to work with the broader organization especially the technology teams in order to simplify customer journey and constantly re-define customer experience. Therefore, I recommend CMOs to upskill themselves and further to hire the required skillset in their department.

A: Data, if leveraged appropriately can be the source of great competitive advantage for companies. When it comes to data and analytics, we must look at Big data with Small data (Insights) wisely as otherwise it can prove to be counterproductive for your strategy. Insurers traditionally generate a lot of data which is then used for pricing and underwriting purpose. Still there are not many use cases that help design new products, opening new market segments and broadening the demand for existing products.

In the digital world, a customer gives us a lot more insights about their preferences such as content they like, devices they use, communities they belong to, causes they care about, channels they prefer to engage on etc. They are constantly voting with their visits on your website. Marketers must make judicious use of this information to personalize their proposition and offer customers greater value while constantly enhancing customer experience.

A: We have been sharpening our analytics practice constantly to strengthen risk management, improve customer retention, targeting & segmentation, augmenting X-Sell and transforming the way we service our customers. We have created multiple customer personas with the help of analytics. This is being used to score leads, create targeted promotions and optimize advertising spends such that our cost of acquisition keeps improving. Proceeding on the continuum, we have risk models that help us identify suspicious cases that are investigated deeply before on-boarding. This results in an improved claim experience. Another use case is for customer retention, where predictive models help us identify customers on their likelihood of lapsing and their preferred channel of communication. This has improved our customer retention significantly in the organization.

At the end of the day, we want to make the best decision for the customer at the same time make sure that the business is making the right decision for its own interests. That is where data plays a transformational role for a company like ours.