• Effect of COVID-19:
The COVID pandemic forced businesses to change the way they interact with their customers. With face-to-face meetings being restricted, and a pivot in customers’ preferences from in-person interactions to virtual engagements, the pandemic had begun impacting the overall sales force across the industry. More importantly, customers across the globe are now more aware and understand the importance of owning a life insurance policy to safeguard and protect the lives of their loved ones.
Given the urgent needs of both the customers & the sales force to stay & operate in a quarantined fashion due to Covid-19, the innovation was fast-tracked in April and May to help customers secure the lives of their loved ones & protect the livelihoods of sales representatives given the variable nature of their pay.
• Innovation Pilot:
In June’2020, Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance Company Ltd. carried out a pilot with 200 members of the Salesforce. The pilot entailed these sales experts using a virtual engagement platform, built to enable customers and sales experts to connect virtually to complete the insurance purchase process without downloading any new apps or software
• Innovation Go-Live:
In August’2020, based on the success of the pilot, Bajaj Allianz Life introduced a revolutionary, cutting-edge technology service: ‘Smart Assist’ a Virtual Assistance platform, which empowers all frontline sales teams to connect with their customers virtually and carry out a screen-to-screen conversation on a highly secured digital interface, handholding customers in understanding the products and further providing online purchase assistance.
This innovative 1st of its kind tech enabled service in the BFSI space is designed to deliver a superior service experience and play an essential role in keeping the life goals of our customer on track. The interaction is on a completely secure online portal that comes with an end-to-end encryption where only the sales agent’s application screen is shared with the customer at the same time ensuring the customer’s screen or device remains inaccessible to the agent.
• Resultant Benefits:
This solves for issue of time, distance and availability for customers and sales representatives alike. It has helped reduce instances of mis-selling of life insurance products, with customers getting the chance to understand products with greater clarity & virtually seeing their application form being filled real-time.
The initiative has been a huge success across all users, with both customers and sales representatives giving positive feedback on the service.
