Mahesh was on a train journey to his hometown. He happened to get into a conversation with his fellow passenger named Dinesh. Mahesh introduced himselfas MaxLife Insurance employee. Hearing this, Dinesh said that he recently bought a life insurance policy from XYZ company. Topic being from same industry, Mahesh got curious to know how was Dinesh’s experience. Dinesh complained that he got the policy in 15-days which is not expected in this digital age. Every industry be it e-commerce giants like Amazon, Dominos, banking, everything is instant. Even in insurance sector, general insurance is available Instant. Without being in a defensive mode, Mahesh tried explaining as to why it takes so long to issue a life insurance policy. He added that issuance of life insurance involves, risk assessment, underwriting, tele-verification etc. and hence it is a time intensive process. To which Dinesh said if it involves so many steps, if not instantly, it should not exceed 1-2 days.
However, Mahesh’s mind was stuck on the question which Dinesh had raised “Why can’t we issue life insurance instantly”?
After returning, he had a long discussion around this with the Policy Issuance Head who appreciated his idea and took it forward to the senior management. The idea was well accepted by all and with this MaxLife embarked on a journey for issuing life insurance policies in 1-day. This project was sponsored by Chief Operating Officer (COO) of MaxLife.
While the journey was kicked off, but the reasons cited by Mahesh to Dinesh were the actual road blocks in achieving the vision of 1-day issuance and a lot of work was to be done.
With the help of brainstorming, team came up with possible causes of delayed issuance viz. movement of application in physical form, incomplete documentation and delay in closure of customer verification call.
Core team was formed and Maheshalong with the team started working on arriving at solutions for all possible causes.
One major roadblock was high discrepancy rate for customer’s identity and address proofs etc. To resolve this, MaxLife introduced online validation of PAN and Aadhar card.
Another roadblock was delay in completion of pre issuance verification call. There were many customers who were non contactable.Digital modes of verification were introduced, like resolving pre issuance verification though SMS (iSMS) and introducing the feature of inbound call, i.e. customer can call up MaxLife at his convenient time to complete pre issuance verification process.
One big roadblock was that the application used to travel physically. To address this, MaxLife brought in digital application submission workflow. This was another big step for faster issuance of application.
MaxLife was issuing 37% policies in one day that too with no structured approach.With the help of above initiatives, MaxLife was able to issue 63% more policies in 1 day.
This also helped in improving the customer loyalty index and MaxLife moved from 6th position (2016-17) to 1st Position (2017-18).
This initiative gave a boost to Mahesh’s morale. Now company is working on issuance of policies in 4 hours. This initiative also helped the sellers to spend more time on new business sourcing instead of spending time on resolving discrepancies.
Lessons Learned
- It was such a learning experience, if we take up something it is possible.
- Customer’s had reported trust in us.
- Replication is not just the copy & paste of learning from one region to other, it needs thoughtful planning & structured approach to reach to the last mile of the organization.
- Frequent goal setting & involvement of leaders to encourage the achievers, aids the performance