From 6 Hours to 6 Minutes – How We Reduced Turnaround Time for Insurance Agents

Insurance sales are heavily dependent on insurance intermediaries – individual agents, corporate banks, and brokers. As intermediaries, they are required to respond to their prospects’ inquiries, provide advice in their interests, deliver quotes and premium rates, and process payments. After acknowledging their prospect’s objections, they negotiate with the insurance provider and customize insurance programs to suit individual customer needs.

Once the customer decides to insure, the agent releases physical forms for the proposer data collection and manually enters the data collected into siloed systems. Once the proposer data is vetted, the intermediary starts the payment process. When it comes to premium payments or renewals, they process payments via limited options like collecting cash, and checks, using EFTPOS devices, etc. This is finally followed by delivering physical policy documents in person or through the post.

The above sales process for an intermediary to convert a lead into a customer takes a minimum of 6 hours, from addressing objections to closing a sale.

Our client, a leading insurance provider, wanted to reimagine their approach to its intermediary sales cycles through digital transformation. The following were the requirements for this project:

1. A tool to track prospects, send quotes and follow proposal statuses
2. An approach to verify proposer data and confirm consent without a wet signature
3. A digital payment gateway with multiple payment aggregators
4. A system to share acknowledgments, receipts, policy documents, and subsequent renewal reminders, follow-ups, product revisions, and further policy changes.

At purpleSlate, we proposed a mobile-pocket-office solution named as ‘a Digital Office’ that seamlessly integrates the siloed interfaces and unifies all agent tasks down to one platform. Here are some of the use cases we were able to achieve:

• Dashboards – Insurance intermediaries can access a comprehensive view of their overall progress through personalized dashboards where they can analyze earnings, annual targets, number of new customers, renewals, churn rate, and more meticulous information in one place.
• Tracking Prospects – The application was equipped with a feature where intermediaries can track all of their leads and potential business, respond to queries, share quotes, and organize their tasks and appointments with the help of a built-in calendar.
• Customer 360 – The portal was equipped with a data repository that include the details of all of the intermediary’s customers. Through the customer database, they could access information about individual buyers such as their contact information, policies purchased, renewals, claim information, and other details the intermediary might require.
• Product 360 – Intermediaries could access benefits, eligibility, general terms, advantages, and quotes regarding the products offered by the insurance provider by accessing a database of product information built into the portal.
• Co-browsing – The digital office enables intermediaries to collaborate with their clients’ browsers and guide customers and work in synchronized tasks in real time.
• Onboarding – Through an e-KYC authentication facility, intermediaries could collect and verify the basic credentials of the proposers once they accept the quote, instead of demanding them to fill out the physical documents. Intermediaries could also obtain confirmation of consent from the proposers through an OTP verification initiated from the portal. The portal could also be connected to external facilities such as Digilocker and e-Insurance Account (eIA) to store policy documents.
• Online/Offline Payment – The portal was provided with an online payment gateway with multiple aggregators offering all possible payment options. Intermediaries could initiate payment by sharing payment links with the proposers at the click of a button. Offline payments could also be initiated with the help of a feature where the intermediary can generate token numbers and follow the settlement.
• Renewals & Claims – Through the digital office, intermediaries could track all of their insured customers’ upcoming renewals and claims. They could prompt reminders through email or SMS to their clients about their renewal dates and updates about their claim statuses.
• Smart Marketing – The portal enables intermediaries to create bulk as well as targeted advertisements, flyers, birthday/anniversary cards, digital campaigns, new product information, and other terms and conditions modifications with their customers.
• Notifications – Intermediaries could receive notifications on the statuses of their leads, renewals and claims, documentation, and other key operations.