Max Life’s digital push yields results

Insurers have moved beyond website and aggregator selling to explore new channels including WhatsApp, embedding their offerings into fintech products, etc. Max Life Insurance, a joint venture between Max Financial Services and Axis Bank, has been successful in building digital capabilities to drive growth for its insurance business.

“We are getting aggressive on e-commerce growth, targeting a 50% three-year CAGR going ahead,” said V Vishwanand, deputy managing director, Max Life Insurance. “We have 30% share estimated through all online brokers and partnerships and 34% share in direct website business. This has helped us retain number one position in the online protection space,” he added.

According to Vishwanand, around 26% of new customers have come via the online route. These customers are stickier, wealthier, and are about four years younger. “Two-thirds are customers who have gone to insurance comparison sites, partners’ or aggregators’ sites and found us while the remaining one-third are people who come directly to us,” he added.

As part of expanding its in-house digital capability, Max Life has utilised data science in the back end to capture fraudulent diagnostics centres in its partner ecosystem. It found that people who had good health reports were dying really early. “Either there was something wrong in the tests being conducted or there was something wrong in the reports. We used our health AI protection programme to identify fraudulent diagnostic centres,” said Viswanand. “Out of our network of 4,000 diagnostic centres in the country, we identified 300 with malpractices. We saved almost Rs 1,300 crore of the sum assured being paid to fraudsters,” he added. The frauds were then reported to the Insurance Information Bureau.

Further, the company has worked on improving voice assistance and voice data analytics to improve customer acquisition. “We used intelligent speech analytics to extract insightful customer data and information from voice calls and then worked it out into hyper personalisation of the customer experience,” said Viswanand. Through this, the tele-caller gets details such as how much time the customer has spent in their insurance purchase journey, or what were the quotations generated before the final quotation was given to the customer. “The contextualisation of the entire call centre became very high and hence our sales conversion rate has improved,” he revealed.

WhatsApp integration has also been aiding digital sales for Max Life. “We have nearly 10,000 unique conversations happening every month and payments also made through WhatsApp. 10% of all our payments online have come through WhatsApp,” he said. The investments in digital are a result of the company’s post Covid-19 sales experience.