In the new avatar, the app can be looked upon as one integrated power hub, helping the field sales to meet their numbers:
Anjana Rao
The power of digitized sales process enabled via a mobile application built on robust mobile platforms is now known to all. The benefits are an instant shift to a paperless process resulting in reductions in turn-around time and improvement in sales productivity.
IndiaFirst Life Insurance Co launched its first mobile sales app 4 years ago. Today, the obvious benefits realized, according to Anjana Rao, Chief Strategy Officer, 95% paperless sales process, and cutting down on the processing times which has helped enhance sales productivity. “Our mobile sales app, in line with our digital strategy, is designed to accomplish all activities related to sales and servicing. It encompasses automation of the end-to-end sales process from target allocation to target planning, activity management, lead management, and sales fulfillment for all channels in online and offline modes. Over the last 3-4 years, with an increase in adoption and acceptance, enterprise mobile sales apps have become an integral part of the armory of the field sales representative and enterprises,” she says.
FIN HEALTH CALCULATOR
IndiaFirst Life Insurance has an inbuilt financial health calculator in its app, which helps in identifying customers’ financial needs and goals and savings required to meet the same. The system has been tuned to identify the potential of a lead and allocates conversion score so that high priority leads can be taken up on priority. Anjana Rao explains: “We have empowered our sales team with a mobile e-Learning solution using which the staff member can learn and gain knowledge while on the go. Sales representatives have access to a 360-degree view of a customer and can see all their interactions. They have also been enabled to service customers without any dependency on the back-office team thus establishing relationships for life.”
DEVICE AGNOSTIC
The system has been built on microservice-based architecture, which facilitates ease of reusability and integration. It helps in exposing the application as a collection of small, autonomous services wherein each service, is self-contained, independently deployable, organized, and lightweight. Anjana Rao says the app is device agnostic and it does not require to be installed on tablets/devices provided by the company. All services are exposed via an API gateway, which acts as a single, unified API entry point across one or more internal APIs to ensure that the system is scalable and can be extended/integrated with various channels including third-party aggregators, banks, corporate agents, etc.
EASE: ADOPTION, NAVIGATION
She maintains that the goal has always been to identify synergies between the underlying device’s abilities and with emerging technologies and infuse the solution in relevant steps in the overall process to create a positive impact on the sales process, which in turn drives the acceptance and adoption of the app.
She cites some examples in the accompanying table.
Ease of adoption is a direct outcome of the ease of navigation provided by the app. “We had a dedicated team to define the UX based on the inputs from stakeholders, including the end-users, which helped charting out the journeys,” says Anjana Rao. “Assessing the prototypes with sample field force and incorporating their feedback also help in getting it right the first time, minimizing the cost of rework and having a solution which is intuitive and simple and easy to use, thereby helping with instant adoption without much training interventions,” she adds.
USING AI BASED LEARNINGS
Another big shift which the insurance company plans is to leverage the data and use AI-based learnings to provide contextual insights to field sales representative, which are specific to a particular person, related to his territory, leads, pipeline, and closures. The aim is to move from a zone of generic alerts to personalized alerts specific to the sales rep and have a clear and identified call for action for him. The company is working on enabling these alerts throughout the sales journey to make the overall process more predictable and effective.
In the new avatar, the mobile sales app can be looked upon as one integrated power hub, helping the field sales to meet their numbers and enable seamless end-to-end fulfillment in a transparent manner.
IMPROVING PROCESS METRICS
In this transformation journey, the company has made efforts to bring certain back-end processes like risk scores, underwriting decisions, scrutiny of supporting documents, etc to the front-end to improve the metrics of the sales process like FTR ratio, quality of the leads, predictive sales pipeline for faster closures. Anjana Rao says the attempt is to diminish the front office and back office boundaries and make the mobile app a robust sales platform that is equipped to service the customers and drive the overall productivity levels of field sales – as we get prepped up for the RESET.
