“A personalised insurance engine is being developed to meet new customer demand”

Bharti AXA Life Insurance is a joint venture between Bharti, one of India’s leading business groups with interests in telecom, agriculture business, and retail, and AXA, one of the world’s leading organizations with interests in financial protection and wealth management. The company has a pan-India presence through its 254 offices and offers a wide range of value for money and need-based insurance products targeted at individuals and groups.

Being one of India’s leading life insurance providers, they offer different life insurance products to a diverse set of customers across different life stages including those who have recently started working, single working professionals, married couples, new parents, parents with teenage children, senior individuals who are 45+ or on the verge of retirement, self-employed individuals and women. Their biggest USP is that they provide the flexibility to customize insurance solutions.

In an exclusive conversation with Adgully, Geetanjali Kothari, Head – Marketing and Corporate Communications, Bharti AXA Life, speaks in depth about their future plans and as a company how they countered the challenges during the pandemic and were constantly engaging with their customers with cutting edge technologies and  addressing their service requests and grievances.

Post the pandemic what are some of the changes in the behaviour you have noticed with consumers in the Life insurance category? Has it impacted your business?

The ongoing pandemic is forcing people around the world to adjust to a new reality. Earlier, most Indians considered insurance to be an extra cost to add to their monthly budget; however, the pandemic has increased consumer awareness of insurance and instilled a sense of urgency and need to purchase life insurance.

Indeed, pandemic-induced awareness increased demand for pure protection term plans and guaranteed return plans based on guaranteed financial protection for future money needs. There has also been a significant shift in mindset and how the insurance industry functioned. Traditional insurance is becoming obsolete as people prefer smarter insurance solutions over complex paperwork and prefer to buy protection and life insurance online. This has prompted insurance companies to provide digitally enabled omnichannel systems and enhanced online capabilities. To meet the new customer demand, some insurance companies are on the verge of developing a "personalized insurance engine": a fully automated customer journey, from initial product research and sales to claims, that guides each individual customer through a convenient, data-driven experience that feels fully tailored to them and comparable to interacting in person.

According to IBEF, the life insurance industry recorded growth rate of 5.8% in the first half of FY22, compared with 0.8% in the same period last year.In September 2021, new premiums of life insurers registered 22.2% growth in September 2021, up from 2.9% in September 2020, indicating a revival in line with an increase in economic activity. Many insurers have rapidly advanced their digitization efforts over the last two years, allowing them to pivot to effectively address customer needs virtually by offering digitally enabled omnichannel systems and improved online functionalities.

We believe insurers can capitalize on this momentum to accelerate innovation and significantly close the coverage gap in the long run.

Insurance is a low involvement category. With so many players in the business how have you positioned your products? What is that differentiation you bring in for people to buy your policies?

Our biggest USP is that we provide the flexibility to customize our insurance solutions. Therefore, our customers can enjoy tremendous value by being associated with us. Recently, this was recognized by the industry as well since two of our products won the product of the year award by NeilsenIQ in 2021 .

Overall, the insurance industry is plagued with the challenge of building awareness of the need rather than communicating about their differential positioning in the category. We, at Bharti AXA Life Insurance, are tackling this challenge by providing new value propositions that can help us differentiate significantly and reach customers at various touchpoints in relevant and compelling formats.

Digital has transformed every other industry. How has Bharti AXA adapted to the digital transformation and how has it helped the brand?

Insurance companies today are building complex business processes in all aspects of operations. Data, applications, and infrastructure are being moved to the cloud from legacy systems to become more customer driven.

At Bharti AXA life, our aim is to migrate all workloads that are strategic in nature to cloud, leaving behind the ones with legacy mainframe technology platforms. Our most recent digital transformation initiatives were:

• Transforming seller experience by bringing in digital tools & technologies for sales & service
• We revamped our website & purchase experience for the customer & digital partners

Our next priority is to transform customer service and drive personalization by using state of the art Omni-channel communications platform along with a CRM and leveraging Customer 360 that has been built on Data Lake.

What has been your approach on the marketing campaigns to keep the brand top of mind? How has PR helped to bring in credibility and strengthen your equity?

Consumers today are inquisitive and spend a lot of time educating themselves about multiple options that are available. They are well-informed and clear about their requirements. They are vocal and don’t shy away from voicing their opinions on social media platforms and are unlikely to be swayed by aspirational advertisements and would rather depend on credible reviews shared by other customers.

Therefore, there is a huge opportunity for brands to adopt an approach that would provide relevance to consumers by being contextual to their lives, rather than simply spreading awareness about the brand, cultivating a marketing strategy that provides authentic insights for consumers, enables them to make the most suitable decisions and offers optimal value, can go a long way.

This ethos has been at the back of all our campaigns and PR efforts. We aim to build a distinct positioning for the brand and leverage unique formats that resonate with our target audience.

Customer service is very pivotal. How have you beefed up your customer service to address all grievances?

At Bharti AXA Life, we are constantly striving to improve customer service by deploying cutting-edge technologies and leveraging integrated omni channel customer communications for onboarding and servicing customers via WhatsApp, Email, and SMS. In fact, majority of customer servicing requests are addressed through WhatsApp.

We are enabling customers to use new age tools for searching, discovering, and purchasing, such as video-based sales enablement tools. We have also begun deploying NLP-based chat-bots and voice-bots to provide real-time solutions to our customers. Furthermore, we choose to maintain a unified customer view to enable accurate and timely decision making, effective cross-selling and up-selling initiatives, profitable marketing campaigns, thereby delivering an optimal customer experience.

How have you engaged with your audience and what has been your overall media strategy for all your campaigns to stay engaged with your target audience?

Throughout the year, we continue to engage with Indians through collaborations, partnerships, social media campaigns, and opinion pieces on relevant occasions and observance days like the Women’s Day, Cancer Awareness Day, Army Day, Children’s Day, etc. to promote the importance of securing one’s life and future through a right insurance cover.

Last year, we launched our new purpose – In a complicated world, we make insurance simple. To extend our purpose of simplifying insurance and providing innovative solutions to the consumers, we partnered with Ankur Warikoo ,the co-founder of nearbuy.com, an angel investor, entrepreneur, educator, and influencer, to launch a six-part knowledge series – ‘Plan Smart With Ankur’ aimed at answering key consumer questions around life insurance, simplifying financial jargon, and helping Indians make smart financial decisions.

We launched a 360-degree multimedia campaign across television, print, digital, and social media platforms to build awareness about meeting different financial needs at various milestones of life by removing uncertainties with guaranteed returns on investments. We signed off our campaign with “Do the Smart Thing”.

This slogan emerged from a compelling consumer insight that customers could get lured towards financial investments that carry a risk or uncertainty of returns. Our Pan-India product-specific campaign reached millions of insurance intenders through impactful media properties such as India vs. England T20 Cricket encounters on television, print, and multiple roadblocks on digital websites.