Lic Plumps For Savvier, Palmtop-Totting Agents

Winds of change are blowing through the corridors of Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC). The next time your life insurance agent comes to you, he will not sift through old tattered pages of the LIC manual "ready reckoner" to calculate the premium payable on insurance plans. The IT savvy agent will have information at his palmtop.

LIC agents are being made better equipped in servicing customers as all the necessary information will be made available to them in the palm of their hands.

The gameplan at LIC is not limited to computerising its own infrastructure set up. It has gone a step forward in its hi-tech plans "to make agents IT savvy", said LIC chairman G N Bajpai.

 

LIC has endorsed the product by offering its agents and marketing employees soft loans at the rate of 12 per cent to buy the palmtops. "The idea is to give them easy credit facility, wherein the amount is deductible from the salary or commission payable," said Bajpai.

The minimum cost of the palmtops based on the expected volume of sales stands at around Rs 13,000, said Ingram Micro India's vice president marketing P G Kamath.

The palm handheld tools ecMobile Life Insurance Companion are being distributed by Ingram Micro India Ltd, in joint initiative with Solutions Center. "We have specially tailor-made the solution (hardware and software) to meet the requirements of LIC. We have also opened dialogue with new companies but their requirements will be different because they are not as mature as LIC," said Kamath.

"It is a joint marketing effort between us, the solution provider and LIC. LIC has provided the database of agents and has endorsed the product by way of loans," said Kamath.

Ingram Micro is targeting the agency and marketing force of LIC together with its dealers in a phased manner. LIC will send out mailers on the company's behalf to educate the agents on the use of the product, said Kamath. In the first phase, 63,000 agents and marketing employees have been targeted.

A "palmtop committee" was constituted by LIC as not all agents have the necessary IT expertise, said Bajpai. "A technical committee was appointed by LIC to evaluated the required hardware and software in terms of usefulness and cost," he added.

Fifteen months of research and development jointly done by Solution Centre and LIC has worked out the modalities of the software solution. The ecMobile helps calculate the premium for the insurance plans and acts as a marketing tool providing the necessary information on the spot. In addition, it can store more than 1,000 prospective client details.

Emphasis at LIC is clearly on information technology. The IT platform for the year includes networking of LIC's 2,048 branches, setting up Internet information kiosks and installing a system for online collection of premiums.

Plans are also afoot to set up an IT subsidiary together with its strategic partner, Corporation Bank.