Indraneel Chatterjee is the Co-Founder and Principal Officer at RenewBuy. With more than 18 Years of knowledge and expertise in the Product, Pricing, Strategy and Sales domain, Indraneel is an alumnus of Symbiosis, Pune. In his career span, he has worked with reputed organizations holding leadership profiles. His previous stints include working as a Product & Strategy Head – MetLife, Business Head – Motor in Reliance Retail Insurance, Product Manager – American Express & Product Manager – ICICI Prudential Life Insurance.
In the last decade, the role of the insurance advisors has changed enormously. The traditional insurance agents were more product-centric, where the key objective of the agents was to push the products of their respective insurance companies. The mode of communication was face to face, and buying and selling of one insurance policy was a tedious process.
With the advent of digitization, the role of insurance advisors has undergone revolutionary change. Insurance advisors are now more customer centric. The focus has shifted to building a relationship with their customers and serving them a trusted advisor, who can guide them with the right insurance products as per the needs and benefits of the customers. Insurance advisors are more transparent than ever and help customers with right products, which goes beyond the objective of selling insurance only. This has become possible majorly due to the digitization of the insurance sector.
There are innumerable examples of how digitization has transformed the role of insurance. Operations are simplified, customer interactions are conducted via chats, claims can be processed seamlessly, and agents can accumulate all information more accurately and quickly.
Insurance advisors have become efficient
Digital insurance has made the entire end to end process seamless, leading to increased efficiency for insurance advisors. Insurance process related to buying a policy, claim settlements, renewing of policies have all become optimized and real time. With digitization, insurance agents can help customers understand and buy the right insurance products at the click of a button. This has also led to increased productivity and income earing potential of the insurance advisors. Digital transformation has also accelerated customer service, where live chat, whatsapp chats help in addressing the issues of customers in minutes.
Enhanced consumer outreach
Insurance companies have witnessed the benefits of technology in increasing consumer outreach. Branchless offices, digital-driven insurance work structures, app-based models have not only contributed to saving infrastructure costs but have also helped insurance reach out to consumers in Tier 2 & 3 markets. There is a huge need and demand for insurance in the smaller cities, but the demand supply gap in those cities have always been matter of concern for the insurance companies. Digitization has helped mitigate the demand supply insurance gap by 15-20% in the last few years.
More Personalized
Consumers have registered around 40% rise in their satisfaction due to the personalized experience offered by insurance companies, post digitization. Insurance companies have built credibility, which is leading consumers reach out to the same insurance advisor for their policy needs. Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning have played a major role in providing customized and personalized experience.
Understanding Consumer Requirements
With increasing numbers of users purchasing insurance policies online, insurance companies and advisors are using the big data for understanding consumers’ needs and requirements. Companies can predict the kind of insurance policy, claim management and customer profiling to achieve full transparency through advanced analytics. For example, a family of four would have different insurance health insurance needs than a family of two members. Advanced analytics help in providing such information to companies which further help advisors reach out to consumers with more accurate products. The data is usually guided by cyber security and ensures confidentiality and information protection of consumers.
With the world turning towards digital, especially post the Covid era, insurance is one sector where digitization is the future. The issue of under penetration of insurance, lack of consumer awareness, high time consumption for selling of insurance products, can only be solved through insurance digitization it the country.