Zuno CEO Shanai Ghosh unveils innovative campaigns driving customer engagement

Zuno General Insurance, formerly known as Edelweiss General Insurance, is one of the trusted insurance providers in India. In this exclusive interview with Adgully, Shanai Ghosh, MD & CEO, Zuno General Insurance, shares valuable insights into her leadership philosophy, the evolving landscape of the insurance sector, and Zuno’s innovative approach to insurance. The conversation also dives into Zuno’s core values, its latest campaign, and the agency behind it, highlighting the company’s commitment to customer engagement and road safety. 

As one of the prominent women leaders in the BFSI sector, Ghosh provides an intriguing perspective on her leadership style and offers a glimpse into her experiences, challenges, and career highlights. Furthermore, she discusses the transformation of the insurance sector and how Zuno has adapted to these changes, emphasising the importance of a digital-first approach and customer-centric innovation. She also sheds light on Zuno General Insurance’s core values and what sets the company apart in the insurance market. The interview delves into Zuno’s latest campaign, which aims to shift the insurance industry from a transactional approach to a more engaging and preventive one. Ghosh provides insights into her personal leadership style, emphasising attributes like effort, attitude, fairness, transparency, and a detail-oriented, data-focused approach that has contributed to the culture and direction of Zuno General Insurance.

As one of the women leaders in the BFSI (Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance) sector, could you please describe your leadership style and provide insights into how you operate in your role? It would be insightful to learn about the challenges you face and the significant highlights of your career.

I have never looked at myself as a professional from the lens of gender. So, while people say you’re a woman leader, I feel proud about that, but when I think of myself, I don’t necessarily think of myself first as a woman leader. It comes somewhere down the line; so I always think of myself as a professional and ambitious-driven person, and that’s how I’ve always worked.

It doesn’t matter what other people think about you as a woman leader or if they think that you have a handicap or an advantage as a woman because it swings both ways. When I entered my working life, being a woman was considered to be a handicap because you didn’t get chosen for certain roles.

Now we’ve come to a situation where diversity has become such a big thing that sometimes people say that you’re getting a job because you’re a woman. So, I’ve seen the entire spectrum and it doesn’t bother me because I believe what I’ve got this on my merit. I’ve never let the thought of a bias or an advantage even get to me because I think I’ve been working the same way that I have worked in the last 20 years, and that is something that I would want to live by. You can only control what you can control and that is how you work and bring your 100% every day, not just every day but to everything that you do. That is really important to me, and I have a sense of pride in my own work and in the quality of the work. And that I think eventually I feel it pays off.

How have you seen the insurance sector evolving and how has Zuno adapted to these changes?

In the last five years, the BFSI industry has become increasingly digital. We have become far more of a level playing field.

Newer people are getting opportunities. I have seen customer perceptions changing, where customers are giving newer brands an opportunity because they expect better experience from them. And I think Zuno has benefited from these changing perceptions and behaviours because we started out as a digital-first organisation. And in an environment where digital is an advantage, we were well placed to capitalise on it because we set up and we were by design digital while for a lot of companies it was a pivot or it's a transformation.

I would say that the openness of the customer as well as the larger insurance ecosystem which comprises partners, agents, etc. to digital also has changed dramatically.

When we started out, we had to convince people that we will work only digitally, but now we don’t have to convince people. They expect it from us given that we are digital. Our systems processes and internal frameworks are all set up digitally. So, Zuno has taken advantage of this shift in customer and partner behaviour within the entire ecosystem. That is reflected in many milestones that we’ve crossed in our five-year-old journey that is reflected in the kind of growth that we have seen.

Could you provide an overview of Zuno General Insurance and its core values and what sets it apart from other insurance companies in the market?

Zuno General Insurance was founded about five years ago, and when we started out, we were the 33rd company in the market. And while we were excited about the opportunity of growth that the insurance company provided, we were more excited about the gaps that we saw in customer experience, because it gave us the opportunity to come and transform insurance.

It was in product innovation and the efficiency of the platform, and seeing all of this, it helped us craft our aspiration, which is to re-imagine insurance and make it easy, friendly and transparent. Adjectives are not at all used in the context of insurance, because what drives us is not just financial objectives, but a purpose beyond financial objectives, and this is what our aspiration is, and as we set out to achieve this aspiration, we’ve taken three pillars to differentiate ourselves in the business. The first is customer experience. We truly believe that customer experience is the only source to sustainable advantage, not pricing, not anything because these are all temporary. Customer experience that can be institutionalised, and that is possible only by leveraging data and insights and by using technology.

The second important pillar for us is innovation, and that’s what we’ve demonstrated in the past five years. We innovated during the height of COVID and brought out a switch policy which allowed customers to switch off their car insurance and save on premium, which was a very relevant benefit to give customers at a time when they were not driving.

The third pillar is an efficient digital delivery platform, because this efficiency doesn’t just translate into better costs for us as a company and eventually we’ll translate into better value for customers, but it also translates into efficiency of service delivery to customers, which is in terms of accuracy, certainty, convenience, and speed.

We were set up as a digital organisation, and in the last five years we have done many things that are first in the industry. First is cloud-native; we were the first to launch an open API gateway. So, our entire team and our partners talk to us through APIs. In fact, internal systems also talk to each other through APIs. We have a microservices-enabled platform. We were the first to launch an on-demand product for motor insurance, which is a huge innovation and nobody has been able to replicate our product yet. We were the first and we are still the only one to have a mobile telematics integrated app. We were the first to do behaviour-based pricing. We were the first to create a product that incentivised health customers to join early and to stay healthy, and we were the first to integrate with the Ayushmann Health digital platform to generate Abhay IDs for customers.

In terms of experience, we’ve been paperless from day one. We’ve not printed a single application form in our five years. So for us, during COVID everyone had to sort of scramble to do business in a digital manner, but we had already been doing it for two years in that manner. We introduced the Net Promoter Score (NPS) on the very first day. NPS can be quite critical, and we understood that launching it so early, even when our processes were not fully stable or mature, would expose us to criticism. However, we embraced that as an opportunity to enhance our processes. Today, our Net Promoter Score stands in the late 50s, which is considered an excellent range.

Our claims organisation has a Net Promoter score as KPI. Normally, most insurers have loss ratio or claims ratio as a KPI for claims teams, but we also have Net Promoter score because they have to achieve that balance.

Thus, we are walking the talk. We don’t just say customer experience as a buzzword, but we genuinely mean it. We make decisions every day that help us stay true to it. Innovation is in our DNA.

Our deliveries, made through a digital platform, benefit from our in-house engineering team. All the products we create are developed internally, with the exception of the ERP system. This approach allows us to maintain control over our code, fostering agility and flexibility, qualities highly essential in today’s environment.

Could you tell us about the campaign which you’re launching now and what it will showcase and how it addresses the need gap which you think is in the industry?

Insurers have been very transactional. You buy a policy, you renew a policy, and if you have a claim, you pay a claim. Now in this transaction, the relationship with the customer is not really being built and there is almost no room for engagement with the customer. So, that’s one big problem that we felt existed in the industry.

The second thing was, as you are an insurer, your relationship has to transcend from just protecting to even preventing and you have the ability to do that because by preventing you're not just helping the customer, you will eventually help yourself also.

So, we wanted to move the relationship that we had with the customer from purely transactional to a much deeper relationship, a more engaging one and to help them actually live safer and healthier lives. That was the idea behind this initiative. When considering motor insurance, we asked ourselves how we could make it work. To answer that question, we conducted extensive research and also examined international case studies. Our findings revealed that a significant number of car accidents were attributed to poor driving behaviour, either by the driver themselves or by others. Now you can control only your driving behaviour.

Everyone should drive well so that we will have safer roads. But it’s easier said than done. If everyone could drive well or knows that they should drive well, they would drive well. The fact is, how do you move the needle? How do you actually influence this behaviour? That’s what got us thinking about behaviour-based pricing and behaviour-based pricing. You actually incentivise customers to drive safer and it’s not just about incentivising them, but it’s also about creating an objective way of saying that you’re a good driver.

We did this research about six months ago, where we found that everyone thinks that they're good drivers. Nobody thinks that they’re bad drivers. Even those individuals who believed they were good drivers were eager to obtain an objective certification of their driving skills, and the Zuno driving score helped us move our relationship from just being an insurer to someone with a deeper engagement with the customer. It helped us interact with the customer more frequently because they will check the score. It helped us incentivize the customer to drive safer, have less accidents, and therefore benefit us also by lesser claims. It helped make notes safer, which is one of the things that we wanted to do in the industry.

So, it takes several boxes and internationally we found that there were these products that were there in the market and which were selling quite well. Finally, the reason that we thought of this was that in India, motor insurance is very commoditised. It’s just a price-based discussion and everyone has a particular type of car driving in a particular city; you get pretty much the same pricing irrespective of what your driving style was. So, what was happening is good drivers were cross-subsidising bad drivers.

We need to offer a more personalised experience. There shouldn’t be a one-size-fits-all approach. If you’re a good driver, you should receive rewards and incentives to encourage you to continue driving well.

Very often we would get to hear that, I haven’t had an accident in the last seven years. I had one accident in the last year, and you adjusted my pricing, but that's how the industry typically determines pricing. So, we decided to have a much more nuanced understanding of the risk that this presents and give a more personalized solution. So, that was the last driver for us to develop this. To popularise this, we created the Zuno driving score, which not only creates the objective value of the driving ability or driving behaviour safety, but also has a very transparent equation to say that if you drive well you will save on your premium and incentivise people and they’ll also feel good about driving well.

Finally, it’ll help us make roads safer because with clearly safer drivers; the roads will be safe. So, that was the entire thought behind this campaign.

Which is the agency behind this campaign?

The thought of Zuno Driving Quotient was internal. We wanted to create a 15-day driving challenge, so the entire concept was created internally, but to execute it in terms of a creative it went through BC Web Wise.

What’s the media mix for this campaign?

We are a digital company. So, it’s largely digital, because it also provides a lot of room for interaction and gamification. Thus, it is going to be largely digital, but we will also have some surround media like radio or OOH. We look at innovation even in the media. So, I can promise you that in the campaign you will definitely find some very innovative elements in both creative and the media delivery as well.

Could you share some insights into your personal leadership style and how it has influenced the culture and direction of Zuno General Insurance?

I value effort. So, people who work with me have to be high on effort. That’s something I place a lot of premium on. I also place a lot of premium attitude. I believe I am a fair leader. I will give everyone a chance, I don’t play favourites. What you see is what you get. I hope and I believe that we’ve created a very apolitical environment, where people can focus on their jobs and not look over their shoulder.

I would like people to be able to work without fear, because I want to create an atmosphere where people are allowed to experiment and be innovative, and in terms of my personal leadership style, I am straightforward, transparent and very detail-focused and data-focused, and I like to lead by example.

So, usually I will never ask my team to do things that I believe I can’t do or I can’t contribute to and I would like my entire team and all my leaders to work in a similar way.