Anil Kumar Aggarwal, MD & CEO, Shriram General Insurance, reveals the details of the customer-centric strategy, partnerships & engagement activities adopted by the company:
Ravi Lalwani: Customer-centric agility is now the most crowded transformation highway. But to achieve this, the organization also needs to be agile in its partner engagements. What is SGI’s roadmap/strategy to achieve this?
Anil Kumar Aggarwal: Shriram General Insurance strives to keep pace with the changing customer demands while streamlining the processes to build a customer-centric culture. Our partners are the key links connecting us with our customers. We completely understand that their level of engagement is correlated to strengthening our brand. The 2-way communication with our partner nurtures a mutually supportive environment that helps us to find quick solutions to solve any issues through real-time information sharing. We ensure timely and transparent communications with our partners and equip them with the right tools and training to motivate them to act together and keep pace with the fast-changing business environment. Our strength lies in our feet-on-the-ground teams spread across the country who help in the relationship-building with our internal and external customers regularly.
Has the pace at which the organization engages with new partners changed? Please share a couple of recent examples.
Today, more than ever, engagement with new partners needs to be agile to deliver value and gain an edge. Digitalization has facilitated seamless communication with our partners. The availability of online communication tools has enabled easy anywhere, anytime interaction with our partners. We are fast adopting the trend in integrated communication technology platforms that have benefited us by way of quick and easy sharing of information with our partners.
Compared to past partnerships, how are your newer partnerships different in terms of domain, length of engagement, speed of delivery, etc.?
Insuretechs who leverage a mix of robust technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, big data, and IoT for process automation and acceleration have undoubtedly stirred a positive change in terms of improved productivity and raised the ROI. The new environment is a lot more dynamic, and we are ever striving to keep pace with changes and challenges, nevertheless strengthening our tech capabilities to keep abreast with our new-age partners’ needs.
How are you making engagement with partners grow from person to person to org to org?
We put maximum effort towards strategizing their skill development process. We conduct regular workshops and offer training for their workforce. We schedule meetings and conferences to discuss the agenda and goals and work on towards achieving the same at both regional and national levels. Our partners showcase laudable cooperation by being receptive to our initiatives towards enhancing their brand value and achieving growth not only on a personal level but also on an organizational level.
Name some areas where you want the partnership engagement to be highly flexible.
The key areas where partner engagement should be highly variable are real-time information sharing, to improve our customer buying experience and how they adapt to technological changes.
Our partners are keen on adopting this technology shift and rely on digitalization for an easy and quick knowledge sharing than ever. Our digital distribution framework has allowed us to easily share data, making it available to the partners, and providing them access to the data, thus enhancing the transparency of communications and making them part of our process and business environment.
You need feedback from clients and the partner – how are you evaluating it?
In the digital ecosystem, the feedback mechanism is also changing and now client’s authentic feedback can be obtained from the public domain which can be a very useful tool in evaluating the partner’s service level performance. Also, we are using data analytics persistently to check the points of rejoicing and discomfort.
Do you ask for references or case studies?
We are receptive and action-driven and believe in asking questions and acting based on the responses from our partners. We discuss case studies shared by our partners and frame our strategies for the future accordingly.
Have you looked at the mission and vision of your prospective partner? How has that affected your partnership engagement?
We always take into consideration the vision and mission of our prospective partners before onboarding them. Their core team is part of our regular interactions, and we strongly believe that our mission vision, and values need to go hand in hand to achieve our overall business objective. Any contradiction will need to be evaluated carefully before progressing.
What kind of perspectives are you including in a partnership to strengthen your relationship?
We offer our partners a clear picture of our value proposition and make them understand our uniqueness in conducting business. We are an institution built on the philosophy of helping the common man achieve his aspirations and we convey this business mantra to our channel partners and their teams. We train them on our products and continuously strive to build a relationship working towards achieving a common goal. We are training them thoroughly on our products and consistently work towards building an open relationship toward achieving common goals. We have adopted a hybrid communication model to interact with our partners both online and offline.
_____________
Read more-
Moneyboxx: Branches to Business Growth
