Infusing life into customer relationships

INSURANCE: Reliance Life’s virtual office has become the focal point of real-time interactions for its customers, agents and employees.

It’s all about putting consumers in charge of their own data to make an insurance company succeed. Coming from C Mohan, the CTO of Reliance Life Insurance, an associate company of Reliance Capital that has crossed 1.7 million policies within two years of operation, the observation cannot be taken lightly.

“We are on our way to achieve market leadership in the private sector by the year 2009 and become a transnational insurer soon after,” claims Mohan. His claims are not unsubstantiated. Reliance Life Insurance has recorded a growth rate of over 195 per cent in 07-08 with a new business premium of Rs 2,754 crore against Rs 933 crore a year back.

How was the feat managed? “A technologically-enhanced insurance portal that also doubled up as a virtual office was designed by IBM and has helped Reliance Life to branch out its distribution and consumer reach,” quips Mohan, who has over 11 years of experience in information technology. Implemented as a comprehensive portal, the virtual office has become the focal point of real-time interactions for customers, agents and employees.

The rationale is simple. There is insurance to fret over, protection plans to ponder and retirement planning to manage. Consumers can easily find themselves awash in information. “For most, managing their healthcare and retirement planning is remarkably complex and time-consuming,” Mohan explains.

The Reliance Life portal delivers participants “he information and tools they need to manage the most important aspects of life — their health, wealth and financial security.”

India Invest Incomes and Savings Survey 2007 by IIMS Dataworks shows that a whopping 58 per cent of India’s 105.4 million insured people (out of a total of 321 million people who constitute the country’s paid workforce) are from the rural areas. Reliance Life’s growth has come from the fact that the web portal has enabled its insurance agents and consumers to interact freely, irrespective of the location they hail from.

Reliance Life offers consumers the ability to review insurance claims and manage their plans; perform online transactions, such as ordering policies; access a consolidated, interactive snapshot of their retirement plans; and receive personalised health and investment news. “A portal can put an incredible number of resources at a person’s fingertips. It can transform chaos into order,” says Pradeep Nair, director (software group), IBM, adding: “Emerging from the tangle of intranets, we could offer a straightforward way to find and manage information across a variety of systems.”

Employees, customers, and business partners armed with nothing more than a web browser and password can tap into a huge amount of data. Agents too, can manage their customer base as also their own activities. The agents get unified view of the customer and can service customer requirements intelligently by suggesting products that fill gaps in the portfolio.

The size of the Indian insurance market is about 4.1 per cent of gross domestic product, well below the global average of 6-9 per cent, according to McKinsey estimates. The $40 billion (around Rs 1.7 trillion) market is set to grow to $100 billion.

By putting customised and personalised information into people’s hands based on their role or responsibility, it is possible to achieve a level of efficiency and productivity that wasn’t possible only a few years ago, reasons Mohan.

The insurance portal has seen millions of online registrations and now hopes to drive the next million registrations from mobile phone. “By 2009, we will provide Reliance insurance products over mobile platform that would allow customers to look at new policies and pay their premiums through mobile phones,” promises Mohan.