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For Max Life covid not just a short-term discontinuity, but a long-term opportunity

Max Life reacted to the pandemic quite swiftly and this brought in dividends, says Manu Lavanya, director and COO of the insurance company:

Manu Lavanya

Mohan: It is mentioned that while the coronavirus death toll may not be a cause of trouble for insurance companies, the impact on investment portfolios, delayed premium payments authorized by the government and defaults will be. How do you comment?

Manu Lavanya: Our traditional funds are run with disciplined asset-liability management principles. These are based on long-term asset class returns and short-term fluctuations do not materially impact the longer-term outcomes. In the ULIP funds, the performance depends on the asset class chosen by the customer and we have a range of funds from pure fixed income to pure equity funds.

As a customer-centric organization, we have proactively communicated to all customers the relaxation of 60 days on premium payments as offered by IRDAI. Although in the short term while this has led to a minority of customers delaying their premium payment after the lockdown period, we do not see this having a larger impact as a significant portion of our premium payments are obtained through direct debits.

We have introduced multiple supporting communication campaigns that have been sent out to the customers to help them pay their premiums through automated digital mediums thus removing the need to visit physical branches. We have reworked many of our renewal processes to reflect a higher level of empathy with the customers while we continue the efforts to collect the outstanding payments.

How do insurance companies like Max Life Insurance stay ahead in this crisis situation?

Our response to the covid situation is an example of a deep commitment to live our values of ‘Caring’ and ‘Customer Obsession’ consistently in the face of this discontinuity. We have been able to stay ahead of the crisis by swiftly embracing a/ set measures enumerated below:

Digital for business resilience: Within a period of 2 weeks, we drove extensive digitization of sales processes including virtual customer engagement, virtual sellers training, enablement of channels with digital tools to drive distributed sales governance, and digital recruitment. On the operations front, we enabled 100% nonmedical underwriting in the post-covid era, increased leverage of TeleMER for remote underwriting and provided multiple digital alternatives to customers to drive policy self-servicing and digital payments.

Keeping employees and agent advisors first: Max Life’s scenario planning was put in place very early which allowed us to plan things better. Among the first in the industry to implement Work from Home, we took measures like reduced manpower addressing to essential customer service needs, moving all employee engagements online, leadership connect via digital mediums and frequent dipsticks to gauge stress and engagement levels. This allowed us to seamlessly move our operations digitally and ensure employee and agent advisors’ health and safety were kept paramount.

Being ready to serve customers: We believe that in the face of adversity, consistently supporting our customers through this difficult time is essential for living the value of customer obsession. Within 4 days of the announcement of the lockdown, our fulfilment team was operating at a 75-80% efficiency level. With claims management working uninterrupted, customer service operated at an optimum level to ensure the customer experience is unaffected in the post-covid regime. Also, with increased customer communication and ensuring self-service options are always-on, we were able to ensure that there is minimal impact on our ability to serve our policyholders.

Do you propose to introduce new products in the light of the pandemic?

While our life insurance policies are more than geared up to address death claims arising out of covid, we like all large life insurance companies are in the process of defining and addressing the core needs of customers with our new products and policies specific to post covid era.

We have realized that the pandemic has led to an increase in demand for pure protection products, which are expected to gain further traction post-lockdown. Consumers are banking on life insurers for assurance in times of uncertainty, and we will, therefore, be rolling out solutions and specific product offerings around protection to cater to changing needs during such tough times.

The world is about to experience a new normal. In terms of insurance industry, what could be the positive sides of this new normal?

Covid has brought over us unprecedented times. However, the whole life insurance industry is coming together in its own way to navigate these extraordinary times. While operational restrictions will have a short-term effect on growth, this unprecedented situation will create greater realization among the community and shift the focus to safeguarding the financial future of their loved ones from any such calamities in the future. From a customer standpoint, individually all the companies are making efforts to digitize all their processes across the customer value chain.

At Max Life, we realize that covid presents not only a short-term discontinuity, but it is also a long-term opportunity for permanently transforming the way we do our business through strategic digital transformation interventions. We believe that this discontinuity is helping us build ‘permanent long-term muscle’ in the form of the digital transformation of sales and operations that we will retain in the postcovid world as well. It is an opportunity to break away from the industry through new business practices based on a differentiated hybrid human-digital response.

We are currently driving multiple digital transformation engagements to permanently change many of our processes, be it digital selling, automated operations, or reimagined workplace for the future. We believe that this transformation will make our business resilient and future-ready at the same time.

Will there be marked differences in the way distribution channels operate?

For all the uncertainty about what the future will look like, it is clear already that it is digital which will be the new normal. As this phase requires social distancing, life insurers will need to build an ecosystem of contactless servicing for which digital becomes inevitable. The life insurance sector, which is traditionally dependent on bank branch walk-ins, agents and customer meetings, is now finding ways to continuously digitize operations to deliver a seamless customer journey.

In line with our commitment to customer-centricity, we realize that digital channels will play a major role in the times to come. This has led us to swiftly digitizing all our key operations across sales, policy issuance, claims, servicing, and the entire value chain, making policy buying and claims settlement possible for customers in a contactless manner. To ensure that new policies can be issued to customers during a time of lockdown and no physical contact, we have also digitized our sales processes to accommodate social distancing.

To enable transparency of digitized transactions, we have ensured that all support documents are accepted online and customers can submit claims on time, using self-service options available on the website, digital bots and AI-driven Interactive Voice Response. In addition to that, we have also installed a TeleMER protocol for policy issuance that is ensuring remote medical underwriting for new customers buying policies during this time maintaining due clarity and security online.

Can you briefly recount how Max Life Insurance initially responded to the outbreak?

Difficult times test the character of individuals and organizations. We were able to pass through the test of “Confidence & Trust’ of employees, customers and partners in these unprecedented times by creating a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) that could carry all stakeholders along with us in our growth story. The BCP team had started the scenario planning way in advance. By 13 March, work from home was implemented in most of the corporate functions and all group events were cancelled and moved to digital platforms. Manpower in sales offices was reduced significantly and only employees who were required to maintain essential customer services were attending offices. Nearly 500 laptops were hired to ensure that employees engaged in customer-facing services could remain functional. 65% of the desktops were shifted to houses of employees and in 35% of the cases, personal computers were remotely connected.

We also adapted to cutting-edge digitization avenues that have enabled seamless business continuity, even when more than 95% of its workforce has been working from home, adhering to social distancing norms.

How did you handle the workforce? Has WFH become a norm?

As the situation worsened, we triggered the BCP a week ahead of the lockdown to ensure the safety of all our employees. This enabled us to transition 80% of our employees to remote working effectively within the first 3-4 days of the lockdown announcement. Maintaining employee morale and healthy teams requires constant communication and collaboration. We leveraged tools like Zoom and Microsoft Teams to ensure seamless working across functions.

We have been able to maintain efficiency and productivity among employees. While the quick work-from-home adoption has led to a transformed HR model, we believe working in a common space keeps employees motivated and far more engaged. Having said that, there will be more flexibility, should employees choose to work from home going forward.

We have also implemented a strong learning & development program for our distribution teams to acquaint themselves with new ways of working in the digital era. This will open up new distribution possibilities and help improve efficiency.

We have completed digital training of our 10,000-strong frontline sales team while initiating a comprehensive quickresponse program to empower the sales teams to swiftly pivot to a digital operating model under distribution. Over the next few months, we will focus on introducing various training modules to further enhance the capabilities of our employees.

We have embarked upon a journey of reinventing our workplace to permanently change the way our teams work and collaborate. This transformation will mean higher virtual presence, more digital selfserve learning mediums and enabling anywhere-any device secure operations.

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