PBee, Big Data, Voice Analytics: Digitization is Pushing Results in Policybazaar

One of the signs of adulthood is pondering over which insurance policy to take. However, pushy sales and misinformed consumers often give the insurance industry a bad name. This is where Policybazaar steps in. The online service and its mobile app help the user by providing all the information the user needs to know before buying a policy. The company also supports users in getting their claims, as well as insurance companies fighting fraud.

Policybazaar, India’s leading insurance aggregator website, has been digitizing its processes to provide its customers with a smoother user experience. The Tech Panda spoke to Ashish Gupta, the CTO and CPO of the company about how digitization is helping the company and its customers.

Among Policybazaar’s innovations is the launch of a self-inspection video for renewing lapsed motor insurance coverage. They have also introduced Amazon’s Polly for offering Text-to-Speech (TTS) services and a chatbot called PBee based on Google’s Dialogflow platform. Moreover, they are using data analytics and big data to serve customers better.

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“Being a tech company, digitization forms the bedrock of our business operations. In our decade-long journey, we have disrupted the insurance ecosystem by establishing an online platform for distribution,” says Gupta.

Chatbot PBee

Explaining that Dialogflow aided chatbot PBee has been conceived and developed in-house by Policybazaar.com’s tech team at a nominal cost, Gupta says, “It is the first of its kind chatbot introduced in the fintech industry, which has enabled our sales and services department to enhance the level of service being rendered to our customers.”

Sharing some numbers to highlight the positive impact PBee has had on Policybazaar’s operations, Gupta reveals that their contact center has witnessed a five-times growth since its launch in February last year.

In addition, they have witnessed a 50% reduction in per-call talk time, which has pushed productivity levels of their callers by 200%. At the same time, the conversion rate of their callers has gone up by 25% due to smoother chat customer experience. This is also positively impacting their monthly take home.

“Agents now have to be involved only in 50% of chats, since the rest is handled by the chatbot in a completely automated way. This is allowing our agents to do what humans do best – establish a rapport with our customers,” he adds.

The adoption of PBee has reduced their response time from 25 to 30 seconds in real-time, which has resulted in high customer satisfaction, increasing ratings from 60% to 85%. Policybazaar sales agents, thus, have been able to spare more time on problem-solving and resolving queries.

“With better customer service, the brand image and position of our company has also gone up significantly. It is aiding our ongoing quest of achieving a high degree of excellence in our customer centricity and creation of an efficient labor force is being accelerated by PBee,” says Gupta.

Big Data and Data Analytics

Gupta says that Policybazaar is leveraging the benefits that big data and data analytics have to offer and have incorporated the learning acquired through them to enhance customer experience when using their platform.

They are using insights from big data and data analytics to recommend the right product and add-ons that a customer should consider purchasing. The insights are also used to suggest the appropriate sum insured, which helps increase the chance of a customer getting the policy while catering to inflation at the same time. Through big data, Policybazaar is successfully predicting claims ratios and accordingly profiling customers, thereby enabling efficient pricing of the end-product.

“Analytics also enables us to identify the right time to reach out to the right customer, so that we attain a higher rate of conversion. This has significantly amplified our capability to offer the best available product to our customers,” Gupta added.

Progressive Dialer

Policybazaar is also using the progressive dialer to contact customers. By integrating the progressive dialer with their contact centers, the company has managed to augment their capability. According to Gupta, the progressive dialer has helped Policybazaar service their customers better and increase their overall customer outreach and engagement. It has further enabled them to structure their calling process and streamline their processes to international standards.

Self-inspection Video

Policybazaar has recently also added a self-inspection video feature developed in-house by their tech team. To explain how this helps, Gupta explains the problems that arise in motor insurance, “Policybazaar.com has always strived for excellence in customer satisfaction and achieved tremendous success. The fact that renewables online are done through us is a clear testimony to this fact. In India, nearly 30% of motor insurance is for lapsed policies. In the event that the motor insurance of consumer lapses, insurers insist on conducting a physical verification of the vehicle. Not only is this inconvenient, it’s time consuming as well and takes anywhere between three-five days.”

The self-inspection video feature allows the consumer to upload required documents along with a panoramic video of the car, which can be shared instantly with the insurer, reducing the entire exercise to a matter of a few hours.

“With this innovation we have essentially been able to kill two birds with one stone – resolved the issue of time and convenience for our consumers and reduced the costs involved for insurers to insure vehicles with lapsed coverage,” Gupta explains.

Social Media

Policybazaar leverages the reach of all modern information and communication tools, including social media, to enhance customer engagement. They use digital channels like Twitter and Facebook to track and respond to customer queries or grievances. They also use these platforms to communicate with their consumers and share relevant information with them to build a two-way communication process.

Voice Analytics

Gupta says that the use of voice analytics too has helped Policybazaar improve the quality of services on two accounts. “From the customer perspective, we are able to identify their specific needs and service them better, because now we know what they require in greater detail. On the services side, we are also able to track the conversation our agents are having with our customers. On our part, we use the insights to take corrective measures after identifying the strengths and weakness of our callers.”

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When asked about their process of segmenting their customers, Gupta replies, “Insurance cannot be sold with a one size fits all bent of mind. Each consumer is unique and so are their requirements. Therefore, segmentation and need identification are an integral part of our operations.”

Gupta explains that with the advent of big data, Policybazaar is able to have a holistic and granular view of information. Analytics enables the company to assess small quantum of data or data that was earlier considered ‘insignificant’ and benefit from useful insights. Using these modern tools, Policybazaar has been able to spread their segmentation across three levels.

Policybazaar bases its initial criterion of segmentation on demographic profiles, on which product recommendation is based. At the second level, they evaluate the user’s behavior on the website, which allows them to grasp whether the user is searching for something specific or simply exploring various offerings. Further segmentation is carried out on the basis of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) activities like e-mail and SMS. The entire process is part of the predictive analysis module, which Policybazaar has integrated with their business.