Devendra Rane, founder & CTO, of Coverfox.com, an IRDAI authorized insurance broking firm, outlines the firm’s business strategies:
Ravi Lalwani: Which customer segments are showing maximum growth?
Devendra Rane: Our customers are millennial, urban and tech savvy; they mainly use the mobile platform to buy insurance policies and for claim settlements. We mainly target people in the 28-35-year age group and we get good business from this segment. As you will know most of the people of this age bracket in India own bikes and cars.
Which new customer segments are you planning to tap in the coming years?
We have launched an app, ‘Coverdrive’, last year and around 60,000 customers have downloaded it. The app helps insurance agents to sell insurance products on behalf of Coverfox. Most of our agents in the tier 2 and 3 cities are using the app to sell insurance products. It helps faster decision-making as all the available options to the customers can be shown on the device. Car dealers also use the app to sell car insurance policies.
What are you plans to tap HNI customers?
We have been organizing special campaigns for this segment of customers to give details of the products that are available. ULIP and term insurance are the popular products among HNI customers. India-based HNI customers and NRIs are the two segments we are targeting. It is difficult for us to target Indian HNI customers online, as mostly bankers and their own finance managers take decisions on their behalf. Most often they purchase insurance policies through these sources. However, we have special sales processes for the NRI customers. We have a team that works in night shifts to target NRI customers. Our experience has been that most of the NRI customers buy health cover or term insurance for their parents in India, where we help them select the
right products.
Which are the popular insurance products in tier 2 & 3 centers? Do you see any difference in the purchasing behaviour of rural and urban customers?
Motor insurance is popular in metro cities while ULIP and term insurance get sold in the tier-2-3 centers of India. Customers in metros know about us and our services, while customers in the tier 2-3 centers are familiar with our activities. Our experience has been that people in the metro cities are largely law abiding; but there is lesser observance of mandatory laws in tier 2-3 centers when it comes to issues like buying motor insurance. So, for us more business comes from the metros.
In terms of product capabilities, how different is Coverfox from competition?
We are a technology-driven company. Most of our competitors focus on call centers to offer their services to the customers. Also they are more focused on ULIP products and on operation-driven sales and services. They are also using traditional business models, as they are getting scalability in it.
How often does your organization convert leads into actual sales?
In traditional insurance sales, it often takes 3 days for motor insurance and 15-20 days for term and health insurance leads to get converted into actual sales. But, our sales team takes just 30 minutes on an average to convert bike insurance leads into actual sales.
How are you ensuring loyalty of your existing customers?
We have introduced an express claims facility for our customers, in which the customer claims are settled within 72 hours. We have also introduced a nominee assistance program for our customers, in which we collect all the documents of the nominees of the insurance policy upfront and in unforeseen circumstances, it becomes easier for us to connect with the nominees and help them secure the claims. We have a very simple and easy claim process. We also offer emotional and psychological support to the bereaved nominees through our tie-ups with leading psychologists.
Can you give some instances of innovative products and services you offer?
We are focusing on data as there is lot of disruption happening in data-related technologies. We are figuring out how technology can be effectively used to offer new services to the customers. We largely focus on the acquisition side, for which we are getting a lot of help from the insurance companies. We are also focusing on creating faster claims settlement processes. For example, in the Coverdrive app, we have introduced self-inspection service for our customers, which has poved to be very helpful. Amazon is a long-term technology partner for us. We are also using blockchain technology to check the authenticity of customer data.
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