Insurance In A Digital World

By Vijay Kumar, CEO & Principal officer, Go-Digit General Insurance

Traditionally, insurers connected with their customers once a year, more often through intermediaries than direct, either at the time of policy purchase or renewal. Once the insurance customer chose a policy, he or she continued to use same insurance provider despite an average or even negative experience and would seldom reconsider other options present in the market. But all of that is changing.

Insurance in India: A New Landscape
The insurance industry has seen several changes in the last 15 years in India. Most of the changes are related to making companies more cost efficient and improving business processes. In this changing world, a customer of today is also constantly revisiting choices. A purchase choice once made is seldom final. Many customers even consider opting for a new policy or insurer during the time of renewal. The ever-evolving information age also encourages customers to now re-compare and choose a product better suited to his or her dynamic needs. Presently only 29 percent of insurance customers are satisfied with their current providers, and 88 percent of insurance customers demand more personalization from providers. Around one-fourth of the cases in consumer courts are related to insurance companies. All this shows that customers are looking for something different from the usual.

On the insurer’s side,the tide is beginning to turn in India as well. Over the last few years, huge investments are flowing in to foster insure-tech companies, who aim at changing these statistics. The global insure-tech market is expected to grow steadily over the next four years with a CAGR of more than 10% by 2020.

Advantages of Digitisation
It’s simple: The digital push brings in many opportunities for customers in India. Rather than having a standardised product, it can be customisable and simplified for each customer

Communication is in Real Time: Another big differentiating factor would be on the processes side. Digital insurance companies will be transmitting information or communicating directly with the customer. Interactions between business partners and insurers on policy issuance, quotes, documentation, and others will be more on a realtime basis and digital, rather than paper-focused.

It’s Seamless: Now, insurance c ompanies are creating a seamless customer experience by making use of technologies, such as cloud, to store customer history and data so that all agents whether contacted by a bot, text or phone will have access to the same information. This will make enrolment and claims processes even easier.

Unique, Personal Customer Experiences: Pricing the insurance products is a tough task for the insurers. Tracking client behavioral data and activities with the use of mobile technologies and analyzing the pattern with an analytics engine to manage risk and pricing will help customers in getting the right premium solutions. Mobile technologies location services, notifications and applications are also helping determine opportune moment to sell personalized policies with real-time insurance quotes. Such services are a prime example of using digitisation purely for customer experience. Frictionless claims, efficient processes, customer ownership will further help customers in safeguarding their assets as needed, rather than forcing them into a long-term policy for items they hardly use.

The Road Ahead
General Insurance, as it grows, would be more than a $ 150 billion industry in 20 years. Instead of pushing products, it would be offering solutions, whether to an individual customer or a large corporate. Surveys and data have revealed that 77 percent of customers are willing to exchange personal data for lower premiums, faster claim settlements and more tailored insurance coverage recommendations. I foresee that with digitisation, insurance will become a part of people’s daily life helping them to live worryfree about financial risks or an uncertain future. Ranging from covering the gadgets we carry, how we commute, unexpected healthcare expenditures and risk coverage of the places where we live or work general Insurance will help us lead better quality lives.

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