Maturity of customer data: Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Company
KV Dipu is President and Head of Operations & Customer Service at Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Company. He tells Qorus and Wavestone how they utilize data in order to enhance their customer experience.
KV Dipu is President and Head of Operations & Customer Service at Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Company. He tells Qorus and Wavestone how they utilize data in order to enhance their customer experience.
In your opinion, how do the use of data and the personalization of offers and paths respond to development or loyalty issues for your organization? What transformation does this evolution presuppose?
Data and personalization respond to loyalty issues in a significantly positive way! The availability of a 360 degree customer view, driven by the use of data, to enable customer-facing associates to offer real-time solutions to customers, is a default standard for most firms today. A highly effective use case, which we have deployed, illustrates the power of this theme. For instance, when customers click on Google maps to locate our branch, while the modus operandi hitherto has been an effort to have real-time updates of branch addresses and co-ordinates, in our case, we added a significant differentiator by having a bot pop up to ask the customer if he or she can be serviced digitally, thereby obviating the need for the physical visit to the branch!
This transformation presupposes (a) an excellent understanding of customer needs, (b) more importantly, their latent or unstated needs vis-à-vis their articulated needs, (c) an Ockham’s razor approach – the simplest or the most straightforward approach is the best one, and (d) a good understanding of the suite of digital tools available to offer the most effective one (not necessarily the most glamorous one) as a solution to customers.
What types of data are your personalization use cases based on? How do you enrich them?
Our personalization use cases are based on myriad forms of data. From a form factor perspective, it is a rich mix of paper (involving both handwritten and printed forms), soft copies, email, text messages, voice data, videos and so on. From a data classification point of view, it encompasses demographic data, behavioral data, transactional data, legitimate third party footprints, etc.
We enrich data in a variety of ways. When customers interact with us throughout the lifecycle, we leverage every touchpoint to enrich the data provided to us at the stage of origination. Also, legitimate third party data (given the increasingly high digital footprint of customers) aids this process.
Which data use cases are you particularly proud of? On which customer/employee situation? What are the expected/measured ROI elements?
The data use cases which make us proud are the ones wherein customers have given us feedback about the care we have demonstrated and they have experienced. In the area of health, our app which goes beyond illness to look at wellness, and our man & machine combo christened ‘relationship manager @ hospital’ (human empathy coupled with digital servicing), have resulted in great customer satisfaction. ROI elements include the financial payback, impact on customer feedback and brand image.
What are the main obstacles and/or key success factors you are facing in their development and/or deployment?
There are two key obstacles.
The most important one is mindset! It is important to involve all stakeholders upfront, understand their concerns, show what is in it for them, and then involve them as you go about the deployment journey.
The other is the perennial challenge of balancing speed to market with perfection. Experience has taught us that the optimal way is to launch a MVP (minimum viable product), learn from customer feedback, perfect it and then go full throttle with a feature-rich version.
More generally, what is your view of your organization's maturity with regard to the personalization of paths and offers? For example, is it ahead of the game or at the state of the art? What are the possible projects that still need to be carried out?
We are a digitally advanced company, ranked #8 among the top 100 global digital insurers with the highest NPS (as per third party research) and one of the lowest grievance ratios (as per the regulator).
Customer-centricity is an evergreen focus area, given that the ground beneath us is constantly changing. Our current focus areas include hyperautomation and keeping pace with the latest trends to be ahead of the curve on innovation to continuously provide our customers the best-in-class products and services.
Is there anything else you would like to highlight?
Farmitra, which won the EFMA Accenture award in 2020, has gone from strength to strength. It is an industry first mobile app for crop insurance, wherein farmers can avail our services, interact with the government, and receive information regarding the weather and other important variables in agriculture via app notifications. The app has been launched in multiple languages which farmers are conversant and comfortable with, and, through sheer word of mouth, has seen both app downloads and app ratings rise in tandem. This is an example of how customer-centricity, combined with sharp digital transformation strategy formulation, with a flavour of localization, can yield astounding results in the (seemingly) unlikeliest of areas!
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