Online sale of health insurance has grown by 100% vis-a-vis last year: Mehmood Mansoori

HDFC ERGO is the third largest General Insurance provider in the private sector, offering the complete range of general insurance products, including Motor, Health, Home, Agriculture, Travel, Credit, Cyber and Personal Accident in the retail space and Property, Marine, Engineering, Marine Cargo, Group Health and Liability Insurance in the corporate space.

Over the last few years, HDFC ERGO has constantly endeavoured to not just align itself to the evolving market needs, but instead be a pioneer in terms of its offerings. Having its ears to the ground has helped the company create a stream of highly targeted new products and AI-based tools and technology. Be it unique insurance products, integrated customer service models, top-in-class claim process or a host of technologically innovative solutions, the company has been able to delight its customers at every touch-point and every milestone.

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With a wide and strong distribution network, and a 24x7 support team, the company has been offering seamless customer service and offering innovative products to its customers. Digital has been their mainstay to accelerate growth. The company adopted a digital-first approach for their business a few years back and have transformed themselves as a ‘Digital Insurer’.

To understand how HDFC Ergo is leveraging digital and how the insurance sector will go the digital way, Adgully spoke to Mehmood Mansoori, President - Shared Services & Online Business, HDFC ERGO General Insurance.

What kind of policies are people looking for on your website? Any trends that were visible here from the potential customers who are surfing the site? Did health insurance get good traction? Is there any inclination shown towards motor and car insurance?

We offer all our retail products on our website. Virtually, customers can review and buy offerings such as health, motor, home, cyber, critical and travel Insurance. Although travel insurance has been a bestseller in the past, there is a decreased demand due to the ongoing pandemic.

With society adopting more and more digital solutions, the customers choose to research on their own and buy policies online with ease. It is very convenient for customers to buy low ticket products like two-wheelers and home insurance online.

The pandemic has raised awareness and demand for health insurance and Corona-specific products like Corona Kavach among customers. We have witnessed a steep increase in our website traffic and online sale of health insurance and offering has grown by 100% vis-a-vis last year. With financial uncertainty around, we have seen larger uptake for our EMI based health insurance product, myHealth Suraksha. The product provides interest-free EMI options for tenure of 1-3 years of policies. Also, the pandemic has forced the customers to think about larger sum insured policies. We have witnessed increased demand for our super top-up health product, which offers sum insured of Rs 20 lakh for an approximate premium of Rs 2,500 for customers below 45 years of age.

Your business partners and agents are the backbone of the insurance business. Digitally how have you collaborated with them and ensured that they are closely engaged with the company in the last few months? How are you keeping them motivated?

Our agents had been sourcing business digitally for a long time now and more than 90% of the business through agents is paperless and digital. In this pandemic, when the physical movement of papers and cheques is constrained, it was an advantage for us as our sourcing and processes were already digitised. Though the demand in the first 2-3 months was low, it started picking up slowly and our agents used all digital tools to interact with us as well as the customers. We use a collaboration technology platform to engage with our advisor community and that facilitates an easy way to communicate and exchange ideas. We converted constraints of physical movement into rather an opportunity as connecting and interacting with partners has now become a lot easier using video calls and webinar. Our interactions have now become more frequent and much better. We have also increased the frequency of training for our partners, which in normal times was a challenge.

A lot of focus and emphasis has been given to digital. How have you leveraged digital during the pandemic any path-breaking effort that has been done on the digital front to stay engaged with your audience?

We adopted a digital-first approach for our business a few years back and have transformed ourselves as a ‘Digital Insurer’. Not only are our sales processes completely digital, but our self-help tech platform has empowered our customers to avail more than 80% of the services digitally in a self-service mode, 24x7. It was a litmus test of our digital capabilities during this pandemic. As the lockdown began there was anxiety in our customers, and our first responsibility was to ensure that all our service channels were available. Within 48 hours we were able to shift our entire workforce to work from home. We observed greater adoption of our digital service channels like the website self-service portal and mobile app. Our AI-enabled bots like DIA, WhatsApp bot and eMail bot eRA ensured real-time servicing 24x7. Today, more than 55% of the requests are serviced digitally. Despite all constraints, our NPS has moved up during the pandemic.

Realising the society’s plight to step out of the house for medical consultation despite the need, we launched a one-of-its-kind TeleClinic Service on our HDFC ERGO mobile app; a ‘Doctor on Call’ feature, which allows anyone who has the app on their smartphone (policyholders and non-policyholders alike) to get online consultation from qualified general health care physicians free-of-cost.

The most important service one needs from an insurance company is that of claims. Our customers were able to register claims using multiple digital channels. Our servicing team working from home could seamlessly process claims with the same speed as in the pre-COVID era. Our digital ecosystem supported us in processing pre-authorisation of claims and discharge cashless claims in less than 20 minutes, provided all necessary documents were received from the hospitals.

From 2016 onwards you have been running the awareness and education campaign on the insurance more focussed towards kids. How has this campaign shaped up in the last 4 years? Is it delivering results and meeting your desired objectives?

The journey of our HDFC ERGO Insurance Awareness Award Quiz has been a fascinating one over the past 4 years. In 2016, when we started from one city, that is, Mumbai, we were not sure if school kids would really appreciate a dull subject like insurance. But as we progressed, we were surprised with the overwhelming response we got. We moved from one city, Mumbai, to 5 cities in the second year and 9 cities in the third year. The overwhelming response motivated us to go to 50 cities in the last two years. All these years we used to conduct workshops for 8th and 9th-grade students and share the fundamentals of insurance with them to help understand how important it is to have insurance as a financial protection tool. The ongoing pandemic challenged us and left us with two options, either to drop the campaign this year or find a better way to engage and encourage students to participate. Also, this year has accentuated the need for insurance, which we have been promoting all these years with the students. Our team was extremely passionate to continue with the Quiz and hence, we conducted all the three rounds of the Quiz – city, zonal and finale, over a customised digital platform.

We digitally reached out to over 1,000 schools across 50 cities. Prior to the 3 rounds of the quiz, the schools and students were reached out for their participation and given access to a microsite - https://www.hdfcergo.com/einsurancepedia - which was created to engage and help the students prepare for the quiz in a fun and enjoyable manner.

The insurance industry in India fares behind some of the advanced economies in terms of penetration and density. IRDAI’s data suggest that insurance penetration in India rose from 2.71% in 2001 to 3.70% in 2018. During the same period, the penetration of the non-life insurance sector has gone up from 0.56% in 2001 to 0.97% in 2018. Even though there has been a growth, when we look at it in the context of the penetration in emerging economies, this is abysmally low. We intend to create awareness on insurance and help our society through this platform. Today, we have reached out to 50 cities and are considering expanding to 100 cities. The most fascinating to us is that for all these years, the winners have been from different cities and more importantly, from smaller cities.

Data, AI and analytics have become key drivers for customer acquisition and retention. How is HDFC ERGO leveraging this and what is your thinking and direction when it comes to bringing in new and advanced technology to drive performance?

Data Science is core to the Insurance business. We have more than 1.3 crore customers, which means there is a huge data on policies, policyholders and claims. We use this data extensively in designing products and pricing. Using this vast amount of data we have built several AI models that are helping us in Underwriting a risk, servicing policyholders, claim assessment and fraud controls. Most of our bots are AI-powered and help us serve our customers. Our eMail bot eRA, is able to provide resolution to our customers in real-time and servicing a large number of cases. Our WhatsApp bot is capable of processing natural language and has emerged a preferred servicing platform in this pandemic. We have recently gone live with AI-based Motor Claim damage assessment which is used by surveyors. By simply taking pictures of the damaged vehicle the tool does the assessment on its own and assists the surveyor in finalizing the estimate with great ease and speed. While the technology is still evolving, we are seeing great results. We expect that soon tech will help us empower our customers to do self-assessment and get claims paid for certain types of claims. We are also moving towards pre-inspection of the vehicle in self-service mode before the customer purchases the insurance. Pre-inspection is required if the existing insurance has expired. In such a situation, insurance companies send their surveyor to assess the vehicle and submit a report basis, which decides if the risk can be written. Today, our customer can self-survey their vehicles using our mobile app, but it still requires the company to approve the assessment before the customer can buy the policy. With the help of AI, we will be able to approve pre-inspection in self-service mode, enabling the customer to get a decision and buy a policy immediately. We are investing heavily in voice and imaging tech as well. With the help of AI, we have been able to approve cashless claims with no document deficiencies in less than 20 minutes.

We have always been leaders in adopting new and emerging technology and are constantly evaluating the same to build value and offer satisfaction to our customers and partners alike. We are among the very few companies which have dedicated innovation labs, staffed with Tech and domain experts, whose responsibility is only to explore technologies, conduct POCs and if we have appropriate use case hand-over to the technology team to take that forward and implement. This way, they being uncluttered with day to day work pressure and complexities are able to think out of the box, not constrained with business peculiarities.

Customer centricity and customer experience matter a lot in financial brands. Digitally how are you bringing in the difference and delighting the customers? What was your strategy managing customer experience during the last 6 months when you had restrictions to run the helpline centres?

We observed unprecedented anxiety in customers as the pandemic hit us and the lockdown was implemented. We were confident about the digital service architecture that we have put together, but we also knew that this is the time when our customers’ needs us most. And the very first thing we did was activate call centre services from home overnight and we take pride that we are there with our customer as always in this need of the hour. We communicated to our customers about the host of services that are available digitally. Our digital service architecture provides a paperless process, be it sales service or claims. Our online sales platform, where customers can buy most of the retails product, is among the best in the industry and our agents too are digitally enabled. A large part of the payments are received digitally. This is why our ‘Digital First’ approach, which we adopted a few years back, has borne fruit and enables customers to reach out to us through various digital platforms which are easily accessible to all.

On the service front, more than 85% of the service needs can be availed by our customers through various means like web portal, mobile apps, WhatsApp, IVR, chatbots, email bots. We have also seen a large adoption of these services by our customers, as they connect with us directly for the fulfilment of their service requests. The request could be for registering or filing a claim, policy renewal, purchasing of a new policy, changes to be made to an existing policy among others. The total share of service requests has now surpassed the manual volume of calls and our call centre setup is fully operational from home.

Furthermore, we have launched various services through our digital platforms for our policyholders to ensure seamless service as well as ensure their well-being while they stay home in this pandemic:

Offering TeleClinic Service on mobile App: Understanding the constraints and fear individuals may have while visiting a Doctor during the pandemic, we introduced the Tele Clinic Service (a Doctor on Call feature) allowing anyone with HDFC ERGO app on their smartphone avail free of cost consultation from qualified general health care physicians’ for basic illnesses.

Online submission of claim documents: Relaxation has been given to customers with regards to the documentation required and also, the claims are being settled basis the submission of scanned copies of the documents, uploaded by customers on our website or mobile app.

Encourage digital payments: Customers were encouraged to use digital wallets and platforms to make premium payments in place of cash and cheque payments.

Services made available on my:health app: Local pharmacy contacts for delivery of medicines, online counselling on health, fitness, diet have been offered to customers from certified professionals through our my:health services app on their mobile phones.

Motor Self-inspection: Customers seeking to renew, port or purchase a new motor policy may opt for self-inspection through our website or HDFC ERGO mobile app. Through this, the customer is only required to share photos and videos of their vehicle for the renewal, purchase of the new policy or to port the policy from another insurer.

Pre-repaid motor claim settlement: In case a car is damaged during the lockdown, then the customer may share the photos of the damage and the amount of the claim will be paid directly into to the customer in his bank account.

Claim registration on WhatsApp Business: Customers can chat with us through our WhatsApp number and register a claim. This has been made to simplify the claims registration process.

Digital campaigns and online engagement have been used aggressively by Insurance brands. How much of your budget was diverted towards digital? Did you notice attractive returns and what were the methods and techniques used to evaluate the digital performance?

Amidst this new era of marketing with limited budgets and higher digital adoption, the customer base has shifted from traditional channels to digital. This has coerced marketers to be innovative and adopt digital media intelligently, with the understanding that the investments in digital media too, could be expensive.

For us, the pandemic is not an opportunity to encash. We have chosen to be quiet and focus on the service paradigm. Our communication and tonality, though largely digital, is all about servicing our customers, be it free TeleClinic service for customers and non-customers, the Insurance Awareness Quiz and the free jump-start service. Just a few months back we had done a massive campaign with Nawazuddin Siddique as our brand ambassador and had planned a second phase of the same. In doing so, we questioned ourselves on how we want to present ourselves as a brand – would it be by pushing products for sale or by going out of the way to invent and provide services which will offer comfort to our customers. And trust me we were rewarded by our customers’ word of mouth effect was way too big.