Insights

For the Indian private life insurance industry, and ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, the journey over the last two decades has been both exciting and challenging. What has always differentiated ICICI Prudential Life Insurance is our unbending focus on customer service. We call it ‘Customer First’. Pre-empting the stated or latent needs of customers is vital for us to ensure that they remain with us for the long-term. As we look back, we feel proud of the journey of the last two decades of earning the trust of our customers at every step of the way.

It’s always important to first understand what the customer wants. Therefore, we as an organisation, listen patiently to our customers. We capture, analyse customers’ interaction with us, and based on the feedback, keep improving upon our service quality. Not only do we listen, we also anticipate and pre-empt their needs based on how the external ecosystem is evolving, and provide need-based propositions that are most suited for them. Addressing their concerns is also critical and we, therefore, have a multi-tiered customer grievance redressal system to promptly address any issues.

At the very base of this strategy is to design customer journeys that deliver a superior experience. In line with that, we have built an integrated customer service framework based on the four promises of being ‘Fair’, ‘Transparent’, ‘Empathetic’, and ‘Responsive’.

We deliver on these promises through our multi-channel service architecture comprising both new-age and traditional touch-points, enabling us to provide anytime, anywhere service. Considering that our customers are present across the globe, we reach out to them where they are and at the time they want us to. The intention is always to provide a ‘First Time Right’ service experience.

What’s more, we are also working towards developing a 360-degree customer view, which will enable us to identify and merge various interactions the same customer has attempted with us on different platforms and intervals. This will help us pick up the conversation from where the customer had last left, and provide them with appropriate solutions, making the process more efficient.

As a customer-centric brand, we always strive to provide customers with a delightful experience. That’s why our customers have stayed with us for the long-term. In FY2021, we had an industry-leading 13th month persistency ratio of 87.1% up from 72.7% in FY2010. We also had one of the lowest grievance ratios of 46 in FY2021 as against 361 per 10,000 new retail policies sold in FY2011.

From the time we started operations till March 2021, we settled over ₹ 155.87 billion in maturity claims and other payouts helping customers realise their long-term financial goals. Benefits paid (net of reinsurance) and interim bonus paid increased from ₹ 193.77 billion in FY2020 to ₹ 226.41 billion in FY2021. Providing financial security to families of our customers is a key proposition for us and in line with that we paid out death (mortality) claims amounting to ₹ 27.29 billion in FY2021.

According to a Bain & Company report, winning companies - those that truly make the world a better place - often have one thing in common. They put their customers first, ahead of all other stakeholders. We couldn’t agree more. In the last two decades, the Company has introduced many innovations in customer service which have simplified processes and transformed the way life insurance is sold in India. Eventually, these have gone on to become industry benchmarks. For instance, we introduced tele-medical eight years ago and facilitated conducting home medicals for customers unable to travel to diagnostic centres. More recently, we have also started conducting video-based medical underwriting.

Leveraging technology to serve customers seamlessly

Leveraging our technology strengths, we were also the first to use Instant Optical Character Recognition, launch the Customer Profiler, integrate Aadhaar and PAN services in our operations and officially offer WhatsApp as a customer service channel. Recently, we deployed an AI-speech recognition conversational Humanoid chatbot for renewal premium reminder calling. Our Humanoid Avatar LiGo is also available to resolve customer queries. In addition to the exhaustive list of digital modes of payment for customers’ convenience, we also have over 2 lakh physical touch-points covering about 95% of pin codes in the country for customers to make renewal premium payments.

Today, the convenience offered by our device-agnostic digital platform is unmatched, especially in these challenging times, where social distancing has become the norm. The platform offers our customers various self-service options through digital enablers such as WhatsApp, Mobile App, Chatbot LiGo and the Company Website. Now, over 90% of transactions are self-help in nature and approximately 95% of new business applications are received digitally. On the other hand, our visual IVR enables customers to access policy information on their smartphones almost instantly.

As technology helps in making service smooth, secure and safe, we have used it effectively to go where our customers are and in the form they want it. Video, Voice and Vernacular are the three pillars of personalisation on which we have built our customer engagement model.

Our digital platform ensures that we can engage with our customers where they want, when they want, and in the language they want. Our technology also enables scale. For instance, our Humanoid calling solution can make calls to 50,000 customers in an hour to remind them of their premium dues, and approximately 87% of customers contacted agreed to make their renewal premium payments. We are now evaluating a proposal to deploy Humanoid in other areas of operations too.

Our Pre-Approved Sum Assured offers ensure that partners’ customers are onboarded without any medical tests and in a virtually paperless manner. The journey is also faster with customer data pre-population. For customers of some partners, Certificate of Insurance (COI) is issued within 5 minutes, and in case of cancellation, an instant refund is processed. Besides, policy documents are made available to customers digitally in their Electronic Insurance Accounts (eIA) as well as in the DigiLocker App.

Claims settlement - The moment of truth

As a life insurance company, the moment of truth is when a claim comes up for settlement. During FY2021, we settled 98% of claims received (as per the Latest Annual Audited final figures submitted to the Authority). It gives us a lot of satisfaction that with the use of technology our average claims settlement turnaround time has reduced from 11 days in FY2002 to just 1.4 days in FY2021 for non-investigated claims. We endeavour to make our customer’s maturity claim experience simple, convenient, intuitive, and satisfying.

Besides, our ‘First Time Right’ motto has also ensured seamless and quick claims processing. Since 2002, we have settled ₹ 95.48 billion in death claims providing financial security to the loved ones of our customers. By virtue of our digital strengths, we launched the ‘Claim for Sure’ service initiative in July 2019 with the promise to settle all eligible death claims in one day after receipt of all documents. As of March 31, 2021, we settled 14,252 claims, amounting to ₹ 8.77 billion under this service initiative.

A company can always pat itself on the back for superior service but an external endorsement from a credible platform, adds more weight. We, therefore, take immense pride in the fact that we were awarded the ‘Claims and Customer Service Excellence Award’ by FICCI consecutively in 2020 and 2021, and for ‘Innovation during Covid-19’ in 2021 - a testimony to our commitment to serving customers. Recently, we also won the ET BFSI Excellence Award 2021 for ‘Excellence in Innovation’ under the category ‘Best use of Emerging Technology for business growth’ for the use of Humanoid (Voice bot) for renewal premium reminders.

As we move ahead, we will continue to keep our customers at the core of all that we do. By adopting state-of-the-art technologies, we will keep enhancing our customers’ experience by offering them need-based solutions, simplified onboarding, flexible payment modes, easy-to-use self-service options, and a seamless claim settlement process. We at ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, are committed to making our customer’s journey smoother by being true to our vision ‘to build an enduring institution that serves the protection and long-term saving needs of customers with sensitivity’.