One of the biggest challenges for insurance providers in India is getting customers to retain their policies. According to IRDA release in 2015, only one insurer was able to retain half of the policies they sold five years back; in other words, 80% of customers churned in the first 5 years! It is critical for an industry in the business of selling long-term products, that customers continue their policy for the whole term. This is the key to sustainability and growth of the industry, and ensuring great investor experience (since most policies are front-loaded).
Improving Persistency Ratios by 3x for Shriram Life
The golden number – persistency ratio
How long insurers are able to retain customers is indicated by their ‘persistency ratio’, which is a measure of the number of policies that continue in the books of the insurer by the end of each year.
For Shriram Life Insurance Co. Ltd., the 61st month persistency ratio dropped from 81% in FY14 to 7% in FY15, which, even accounting for the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority’s standardization of reporting that year, was troubling.
Finding the elephant in the room
A major problem was finding out where things are going south? A large field sales team spread across multiple geographies, working almost entirely offline, meant that there was limited visibility on sales reps’ activities. Questions like –
- What were they doing?
- How many meetings did they do per day? Who were they meeting?
- Why were certain customers not renewing their insurance?
- Were reps following up with their leads?
Were largely unanswered. The only information managers received was a final cheque on conversion or when an alert was triggered on possible policy lapse. Shriram Life partnered with Vymo to bring all process online and in the hands of each sales agent.
Business Impact
With Vymo, processes such as allocation, agent on ground status, meeting outputs and manager reviews shifted online, which increased visibility to sales managers and business leaders. Managers could effectively track agent productivity and make need-based interventions to coach them on improving their conversion rates. Also, with real time funnel tracking, identifying problems and diagnosing them was simplified.
Even customer visibility vastly improved all customer related information such as details about their policy was available on their phone. With easy online allocation, customer progress wasn’t now getting lost in a sea of email exchanges.
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%
increase in leads met per day per rep
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%
reduction in time to meet a client
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%
reduction in time to win a client
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X
increase in persistency ratio
“Vymo is used as a tool to monitor Geo movement to ensure the customer visit. We believe that more number of customer visits will give us higher collections Vymo has increased the overall productivity of my team making this vertical a Profit channel to the company.”
Raghava Rao – Head of Loyalty – Shriram Life
“We have used Vymo for loyalty collection. On this I have observed that executives have adopted a digital way of completing the process. Vymo has helped in various was unique ways. A first approach in adopting tablet based loyalty agents. Secondly upgrading from manual to digital process/workflow.”
Bhaskar Banerjee – Head of Digital Initiatives – Shriram Life