Edelweiss Tokio Life’s NPS improves in a pandemic. Here’s how
ET CIO : 14 May 2020
The pandemic cornered businesses. In the absence of digital channels and relevant training for the salesforce, companies failed to utilize the potential of a pandemic. But not Edelweiss Tokio Life. With pre planned digital transformation and investment in relevant technologies, it managed to improve its Net Promoter Score in the midst of coronavirus.
Digital channels for interaction
Insurance industry has always relied on face-to-face interactions with customers. But Nilesh Parmar, COO of Edelweiss Tokio Life, ensured the interactions swiftly shifted to the digital channels.
“Since we already had digital solutions in place for our distributors, we were able to continue barring challenges that customers or distributors might have faced,” he says. Parmar noticed that as customer’s digital activity increased, there will be more portion of sales coming through online mode.
Back end support functions were moved to work remote mode to accustom the teams and eliminate any roadblocks when the customer service has to be operated on all engines. “We also have offered customers the option to view, transact through digital channels. Since we have enabled work from home for all the backend functions much in advance the services to customers have not been affected,” Parmar opines.
One of the primary successes for the company was enabling 100% online custom onboarding. As customers get acclimatized to digital platforms, insurance advisory would move online too. Keeping in line with this change Dial for Success was introduced.
Through digital channels like video conferencing and tele calling salesforce is being trained to build necessary skills and communicate the process of onboarding transactions to customers seamlessly, explains Parmar. It is also being utilized in providing requisite information on tackling customer concerns and queries, relating to the ongoing disruption and recommending suitable products.
“We measured net promoter score for all our interactions and what we have observed is that it is better in the second half of March than what it was in the first half of March,” he explains.
Cloud migration wins the game
Parmar attributes the credit of seamless operations to the structured BCP and relevant technologies. Parmar’s team ensured BCP was invoked a week earlier, he says, “A lot of our functions were already working from home especially in Mumbai.”
“Also, we have a good mix of inhouse technologies and cloud computing. Our backend is hosted in-house with 30% of our front-end systems hosted on cloud,”
The cloud migration journey began last financial year for the company in a bid to build an agile organization. “It helps us adopt new-age platforms with ease as cloud-based platforms typically auto-update. We are focusing on facilitating platforms rather than tools and cloud provides easy access to such platforms that can be immediately enabled for use,” he says.
A natural consequence then that the company could rein in infrastructure requirements and implement a server-less architecture and optimise cost.
Additionally, while the company has been migrating to Microsoft Office 365 in a staggered manner, over the past couple of months, the process was fast tracked to facilitate easy and secure connectivity between teams.
“Considering most of our workforce is often out of office to interact with customers under normal course, we have always had digital attendance tracking. So, this hasn’t been a challenge for us during this transition,” he concludes.
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