Bajaj Allianz Life sustained a holistic biz growth during the pandemic: Chandramohan Mehra

Bajaj Allianz Life is one of the leading private life insurance companies in India. The Company is a partnership between two powerful and successful entities in their own right – Bajaj Finserv Limited, one of India’s most diversified non-banking financial institution and Allianz SE, one of world’s leading asset manager and insurer.

Commencing its operations in 2001, Bajaj Allianz Life has in less than two decades expanded its presence across the country. It serves millions of customers through its 509 branches, 96,000+ agents (as on 31 March 2022), and comprehensive set of trusted partners and via its online sales channel. The Company’s brand promise of Life Goals Done drives it to launch innovative insurance solutions, including the revolutionary RoMC (Return of Mortality Charges), a feature in some of its new-age ULIPs, and thereby becoming the first company to do so. Bajaj Allianz Life has constantly transformed to offer tech-enabled state-of-the-art services to enhance customer delight. The Company continues to engage with customers through several unique platforms, and has secured a place in the Guinness Book of World Records with the Bajaj Allianz Life Plankathon 2020.

In an exclusive interview with Adgully, Chandramohan Mehra, Chief Marketing Officer, Bajaj Allianz Life, speaks about their various initiatives and how the company is confident of sustaining a robust performance during the new financial year, enhance customer experience with rapid digital adoption, which will  strengthen the equity of the brand further, and more.

The overall situation has returned to normalcy. What has been the bounce-back strategy and what kind of goals and milestones have been set in the year 2022?

Thanks to the digital transformation journey that was activated much before the pandemic, Bajaj Allianz Life sustained a holistic business growth during the two years of the pandemic. During last financial year FY 2021–2022, we were consistently clocking an impressive business growth of almost 50%, month on month, one of the highest growth rates in the life insurance sector. We are confident that during the new financial year, we will sustain our robust performance across multiple parameters including new business premium, further improved persistency ratios, enhance customer experience, rapid digital adoption, and stronger brand health.

The pandemic has brought a shift in consumer behaviour. As a brand, how have you adapted to the new consumer behaviour and what kind of trends have you noticed in the Life Insurance sector?

Largely perceived as a “push category”, the customer journey when it comes to insurance is aided by nudge or assistance, dependent on physical interaction. However, we witnessed tremendous adoption of digital, accelerating the DIY behaviour across the entire journey cycle. Search during pre-sales and more specifically, self-servicing during post-sale phase – customers became extremely comfortable managing all the post-policy transactions on digital assets.

We believe that during the pre-sales journey, a human intervention or assistance along with digital enablement, provides comfort to the customer. To this end, Bajaj Allianz Life innovated and introduced one of the most relevant digital tools – Smart Assist. This breakthrough innovation allows both customers and the sales intermediary to interface through co-browsing and provide all necessary assistance and advisory to the customer. As part of our customer obsession initiative, we are continuously enhancing our tech interventions, processes and products to simplify lives for both customers and business partners.

Tell us more about your latest campaign – ‘Ye Bhi Sahi Hai’ – on guaranteed return plans. What was the objective and how did you arrive at the creative thought?

In context of potential market volatility, the idea was to impart authentic advisory about balancing investment portfolio with less risky, guaranteed products. Also, the objective was to draw in conservative investors who are not comfortable with the risk associated with equity linked products. Through peer-to-peer conversation, we wanted to build the proposition keeping the established narrative as a frame of reference. We were mindful of keeping the co-existence dimension intact.

How do you bring in differentiation in your communication strategy for your various products that you keep introducing? Is there any particular approach you follow for financial brands?

Our strategy is guided by the “Life Goal Enabling” promise delivery to the customers. To build relevance and resonance, we are mindful of simplifying the proposition in context of the perceived complexity associated with the category, specific to communication and processes. Hence, we make conscious attempt in our development efforts to have the tonality of “not-like-insurance”. Further, understanding the ever-changing life goals of customers across different profiles of age, income and geography, and providing them with the relevant solutions – right from pure protection or wealth creation or annuity – forms the backbone of our business strategy. This, coupled with providing a frictionless experience on the back of tech, data and analytics, and sharper insight-led communications makes for an engaging connect with the customer.

Advertising is an expensive affair. How do you set expectations on campaigns when you launch them and how do you measure the ROI on the campaign?

We make relevant investments based on the business task at hand. A combination of objectives that entail long-term brand building, and impacting business in short and medium-term, allows us to maximise the ROI on marketing investments. The metrics of campaign efficacy encompasses multiple data points that make impact on the entire sales funnel.

What has been the track record for Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance when it comes to bringing in Innovation in your products and services and what has been the frequency of the same?

One of the most relevant service innovations rolled out by Bajaj Allianz Life during the pandemic has been Smart Assist, which continues to see huge adoption by customers and partners. All the products introduced in recent years have had compelling differentiators that has helped them gain huge customer acceptance. For example, the recently launched Bajaj Allianz Life Assured Wealth Goal plan has long-term guaranteed income that caters to multiple life goals. We were the first in the industry to introduce the Regular Pay feature in annuity products. Other differentiators like zero allocation charges, return of mortality charges make our ULIPs provide a value-packed proposition to the customers.