How ICICI Prudential’s digital thrust is yielding rich benefits

As a leading firm in the insurance domain, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance has been leveraging technology to achieve scalability, cost efficiencies and deliver enhanced customer experience. AI plays a huge role in a number of areas. One such area is the ‘Renewal premium reminder’ calling. The company invested in a speech recognition and conversational AI tool (named Humanoid). The humanoid can converse with customers in multiple languages (currently English, Hindi, Hinglish, other languages like – Tamil are being developed) and can reach out to over 50,000 customers in an hour. It has enabled the company to reach out to customers, deliver superior experience along with scalability.

Says Ganessan Soundiram, Chief Technology Officer, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company Limited, “We have used technology to build our customer engagement architecture through the 3Vs i.e. video, voice and vernacular which are also the three pillars of personalization. With an aim to drive efficiencies, provide a safer and contactless service and support our customers better we introduced an AI-based speech recognition and conversational tool, Humanoid, for renewal premium calling during the last financial year. The results were gratifying as 87% of customers contacted agreed to pay their renewal premiums through this route.”

Another major initiative is the bulk policy issuance solution. The company created a new flow in the policy administration system to issue policies to customers in a fully automated manner (without any manual intervention) thereby achieving drastic reduction in turnaround time. It took the company 45 days to implement the entire process. The innovative solution proved its capability when one of India’s largest micro-finance companies wanted to insure a large portion of their loan book covering approximately 6.5 million customers. Their expectation was a fast turnaround time. This was an unprecedented volume of policies that had to be processed in a very short span of time.

“The bulk policy issuance solution enabled us to issue 6.5 million policies in just 3 days, which would have otherwise taken 130 days if done manually,” states Ganessan Soundiram. ICICI Prudential Life is the only life insurer in the country to achieve this milestone.

To provide visibility to the sales team on their fingertips, the company created an app, called INEOTrack. This gave the sales team visibility into real time business numbers for themselves and their team members with respect to value and volume. This was the first time any system gave real time data to all the sales team and the same was available in form of an app hence the adoption was pretty fast. In just six months, most of the sales team was using the app on a daily basis. “The i-Neo Track App enables our salesforce to view, track, measure and manage business volumes on a near real-time basis and has aided enhanced efficiencies and productivity,” says Ganessan Soundiram.

The application has made a major impact into how the sales team manages the daily business. The app gives the team a 24 hours heads-up, which helps the team to track their business more efficiently. The frontline team used this application to effectively close pending requirements such as documents like PAN card, Aadhaar card etc that were left to be uploaded. This freed up time for them to focus on new business.

Today, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, has built a robust digital foundation thanks to its continued initiatives for using technology for creating efficiency, improving productivity and increasing business value.

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