HDFC Life provides end to end mobility solutions across the entire lifecycle from lead generation to final closure of a policy. Mobility solutions iclude a content management app, a lead management app, , mobile application form app, document upload manager, sales verification app.
Introduction
HDFC Life is one of India’s leading private life insurance company, among the 24 players in India. It offers a range of individual and group insurance solutions and is a joint venture between Housing Development Finance Corporation Limited (HDFC), and Standard Life PLC, the leading provider of financial services in the United Kingdom. As of 2016 we have 398 branches, 1.17 lacs financial consultants, 9000+ partner branches, 1,400 + medical centers and 15,254 employees.
Mobility is a fast emerging space and many players in the Banking, Financial Services & Insurance (BSFI) as well as Non BFSI sector have been aggressively adopting the same. The management has identified Mobility as one of the Strategic Initiatives and to optimize the use of mobile technology in a competitive edge, building strong relations with distributors and to provide an easy and convenient sales experience to the Customer, Distributor and the Sales team.
HDFC Life is the only company in insurance sector which provides end to end mobility solutions across the entire lifecycle from lead generation to final closure of a policy.
Challenges
There were several challenges and business needs those would be addressed by going the ‘Mobile Way’ –
- Competition had moved ahead in the mobility landscape where big and small players had distributed tablets to sales teams and started doing business using the same
- Sales personnel had to carry several papers, leaflets and other sheets to the customer for sales calls
- Laptops are available with very limited sales personnel and carrying a Laptop with data card is not convenient and viable
- The sales teams had a high dependency on branch infrastructure for activities like Lead creation and tracking, logging new proposals, creating Quotes and Illustration, submitting FR’s (Further Requirements), viewing Reports, tracking the proposal status etc. One had to travel all the way to the allocated HDFC Life branch from the customer for each of these activities leading to a lot of non productive time being spent in travelling and delays in getting the sale closed.
- There was dependency on branch staff for activities like uploading documents for NB (New Business) processing
- Also there was a dependency on the Post Conversion Verification Calling (PCVC) call centre to enable customer verification post sales thus leading to further delays and leakages due to increased TAT’s
- Expert advice / help was not available for a FLS (Front Line Sales) while on a call
- Sales activities were dependent on the Branch timings while we were vying for ‘Anytime Anywhere Business’
- All put together, these issues resulted in higher processing turnaround time (TAT’s), non-availability of real-time support for FLS, higher cost of running business, higher dependency on functions like customer operations, hub operations, PCVC call centres etc.
The organisation geared up to meet these chanllenges and a very detailed mobility strategy was put in place for each stage of the ‘Customer Life Cycle’. The focus was on the New Business Process right from lead management to Policy conversion including a customer engaging unique ‘Financial Planning Tool’ on Tablet. The PCVC i.e. pre-conversion verification call is a very unique solution developed by HDFC Life. Infact some of the banks are also planning to adopt this solution. This saves a lot of call centre costs as well as time for conversion of the policy.
Also for attendance marking we have a mobile application by the name of ‘M-connect’. 90% of our workforce marks their attendance through mobile.
Mobility Suite
Mobility solutions must be agile, efficient and quick. The ‘Insta’ branding of the mobility solutions was coined keeping this requirement in mind. The following are the suite of our mobility applications –
- InstaKit: A Content Management App
A comprehensive Sales Presentation tool kit power packed with content that a Sales representative requires during a sales pitch.
- mSD: A Lead Management App
End to end Lead Management tool with Quotes and Illustration (Q&I) for a seamless experience.
III. InstaLife: Mobile Application Form app
The first of its kind, quick and paperless life insurance sales app launched by HDFC Life for its unique health product – Cancer Care Plan. The application is now being used to sell 9 products by the company
- InstaFR: Document Upload Manager
Enables faster submission of customer documents during the form filling exercise and also in case of any further requirements (FR) called in the future.
- InstaVerify: Sales Verification App
First of its kind innovative solution in the Industry enables the customer verification process at the point of sale without any dependency on call centre
Benefits and Results
While the HDFC Life mobility initiative has created a ripple in the Indian Insurance Market, our customers and partner are also taking notice this change. More importantly, this initiative has brought about a cultural shift in the sales force by giving them a sense of empowerment. This is bound to have a very positive bearing on the organisations aggressive growth aspirations.
Some of these figures speak for themselves:
- 32000+ Cancer Care Policies sourced through InstaLife which contributed to 71% of assisted business in March’16– one of its kind
- Overall TAT for Cancer Care policies reduced to minutes which was in days earlier
- The project has already delivered a net benefit of .38 Cr HKD in FY16 and expected savings of 0.86 Cr HKD in FY17, against a cost of 0.22 Cr HKD.
- 99% Further Requirements (FR) upload is now done only by Sales – no support staff dependency
- ~60% Sales force now own a Tablet for business purpose – new age sales team
- 3000+ proposals logged in on Tablet – End to end digital experience to customer
- Physical proposal form printing discounted since Sept 2015
- Access to Business information and applications through mobile technologies from anywhere without being tied to a single location increases the productivity
- Leaflet & Brochure printing reduced by 50%
- We saved 18 Lacs forms & 1 form has around 8 pages i.e. 1800 Trees (1 Tree makes 8000 sheets of A4 paper)
- Saved 14 Lacs brochure & each brochure has around 3 pages i.e. 525 trees
- Saved 25Lacs leaflets i.e. approx. 157 trees
Way Forward
Mobility is evolving every day and new features, technology, devices, platforms are emerging. The HDFC Life Mobility team believes in being ahead of the pack and is working on 2 pronged approach i.e.
- Increase Penetration of existing apps and
- Introducing new functionalities/app
The new channel partner/distributor tie ups can be quickly enrolled onto the mobility platform and there is a whole new world of opportunities opening up through integration with some of the partners app. Further, InstaLife which primarily caters to Cancer Care at the moment has 9 more non UW products. With an integrated application [along with InstaFR and InstaVerify] the process of new business can be completed end to end without any dependency on the backend processes. Consolidation of apps, next generation UI, biometric etc. are few other areas of focus in the near future.
Further, on the Employee (non sales processes) and Customer side, there is a good story building up (Ref Fig 7 for HDFC Life Mobility Landscape). While HDFC Life has recently launched its Customer app, the Employee app is also launched with Geo sensing feature, enabling optimal usage of existing platform available with employees. In FY 16-17, the organisation is all set to take the ‘BIG LEAP’ and Mobility is surely one of the key drivers for that.
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