Digital Transformation that Improves the Customer Experience

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"Technology is really an enabler to business outcomes. If you look at the business problem, technology solutions using different levers leads to the outcome." - Shefali Sonpar

On today's episode of The Insurance Experts, we discuss digital transformation in the insurance industry with Shefali Sonpar. Shefali is based in India, but has worked on IT transformation projects for major insurance companies across the globe.

We discuss the differences between digital transformation in the US, Europe, and India. Shefali believes the differences lie in how the industries have evolved in their respective countries.

• In the US, large insurance companies dominate the landscape with the insurance agent heavily involved in the insurance buying process.
• In Europe, insurance evolved in the banking industry, so the processes reflect the banking regulatory environment.
• In India, the public sector controlled insurance until about 2000 and then became more privatized. India did not have the resources that the US market had, but needed to accommodate a larger based of clients.

All of this resulted in the digital consumer experience becoming vastly different around the world.

Watch the video above as Shefali shares a story about a project she worked on for a large annuity insurer in the US. When the annuitant would call in, on average, they would have to wait for 10-15 minutes to get simple responses to basic questions.

Clients can get nervous and uncomfortable waiting on hold for that long of a time just to hear a basic answer to a question about when, how, and how much they will get paid on their retirement income.

There was a lot of manual effort in the call center, which is why the call took as long as it did. They had to make sure the calculations they were quoting were accurate. As Shefali and her team analyzed the calls, they realized that the majority of calls were simple questions about their accounts.

So, she and her team created a portal to help answer those basic questions and they were able to bring the average call times down from 10 minutes to 3 minutes and also help with accuracy on the answers. The result was a complete transformation of both the business user and customer experience.

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