How Max Life Insurance breaks through the clutter with its ‘three Ps Playbook’ – products, processes, partnership
Max Life Insurance has launched the second largest ESG fund in the life insurance industry in India, which has helped increase its visibility within the millennial client segment.
E.T. Focus
In an interview with EconomicTimes.com, V. Viswanand, Deputy Managing Director of Max Life Insurance, delved into the three Ps (products, processes and partnerships) that the life insurance company, a joint venture between Max India Ltd and Axis Bank, has adopted to differentiate its brand identity in a saturated market. segment.
To understand how Max Life has overcome the confusion, it is crucial to understand that even after two decades of privatization, the insurance and especially life segment has remained quite mainstream in terms of its inability to innovate its product line. -up or taking advantage of the unattended consumer. However, with the general shift towards digitization in consumer services, the emergence of digital native brands and a consumer culture revolutionized by the penetration of smartphones, e-commerce and social media, even traditional sectors such as banking and insurance are rapidly responding to changing consumer needs.
The do-it-yourself (DIY) bouquet of products tailored to individual needs rather than a one-size-fits-all approach is gaining momentum. Walking this terrain of technology-driven innovation is Max Life Insurance’s three P’s playbook. The deputy managing director shared how the company has been challenging the existing status quo in the life insurance market, which has become accustomed to selling donations and money back. V. Viswanand shared how Max Life pioneered the “first permanent term plan,” a term plan that outlives its life cycle. Another key step in adopting the reforms has been taking steps to ensure that customer onboarding and service is improved.
Leverage products, processes, and partnerships to foster customer-centric growth
v Viswanand, Deputy CEO of Max Life Insurance, has broken the three Ps or triple approach, an innovative strategy which he says has allowed Max Life Insurance to emerge as a winner in the crowded life insurance segment. Here’s a look at the company’s diverse product line, intuitive services, technology-enabled customer journey, and commitment to ESG. How the millennial segment is critical to insurers
Fitting to this perspective is the intense task of hearing “consumer insights” from a cross section of respondents, including internal surveys such as the India Protection Quotient or the India Retirement Index Study that have been taking place year after year. to get trends. While protection remains the number one factor driving customers to take out a life insurance product, retirement planning has now become the number one driver of demand. This trend is also in line with the large and growing segment of millennials, who are increasingly drawn to investing to ensure effective retirement planning, as many of them look to work hard, party hard, and retire early. .
While the burgeoning and optimistic segment of millennials is looking to build a retirement corpus from the ground up, a boring, conventional, or straitjacketed product like a 20-year policy or a 10-year premium policy isn’t exactly the right thing. that attracts them Something like Max Life Insurance’s “Smart Wealth Advantage Guarantee Plan,” or the acronym SWAG, which offers flexibility and allows for permutations and combinations with its 90 variants, is more likely to find favor with this tech-savvy and well-versed consumer base. informed. .
Housewives constitute a hitherto ignored and historically neglected segment. Women make up 45% of the Indian population; however, the vast majority of women are not part of the country’s formal economy or workforce and therefore cannot file a payroll or show their Income Tax Return (ITR) to meet the prerequisites of insurance consumers. To fill this gap, Max Life Insurance offers full-time self-employment protection for the stay-at-home mom, who has traditionally relied on her husband’s insurance coverage, getting at most half. One step toward empowering housewives has been to untie this addiction. Longer term, insurers can see growth opportunities by tapping into this segment and paving the way for a more inclusive and insightful life insurance industry.
He also shared how Max Life Insurance has experimented in the fixed deposit (FD) segment as well. The FD market is plagued by tax complexities; a consumer pays tax on their return, so essentially, in addition to withholding tax (TDS), a consumer is burdened with paying tax on their ITR, resulting in a lower net return. To address this issue, Max Life created the Smart Fixed-return Digital Plan (SFRD), a new-age life-saving plan that offers both guaranteed tax-free returns and life protection. Available in three variants to meet new age investment needs, the Max Life SFRD Plan is designed as a simple savings plan to make it easier for customers to make their life investments and prepare to meet their financial goals.
Streamline the online customer journey
Riding the wave of technological interventions, especially taking advantage of new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and robotics, the financial services sector has reinvented products and services. Indeed, new products and services are geared towards the new-age customer, who is digitally savvy and demands nuance, creativity and personalization at every step.
Thus, technology has been a critical tool in unlocking a shape-shifting customer journey. Research shows, as V. Viswanand pointed out, in this day and age where do-it-yourselfers enjoy a cult following, a customer is reluctant to even interact with a call center executive, wanting to connect with an intervention minimum. “So a third of our online shopping journey is not assisted by any human and has been enabled through technology. To that end, we found that the chatbot was a very interesting innovation as people would rather have a chatbot than talk to a person because they feel they are in control and they feel that a chatbot will give them neutral advice,” said V. Viswanand.
Early on, the company found that customers were looking for the innovative “buy now, pay later” model. So Max Life started addressing that latent demand by offering a one rupee upfront payment and take out the policy where the customer can navigate the entire medical and financial spectrum.
Viswanand reported that Max Life Insurance enjoys the top Google rankings for search engine optimization (SEO) keyword searches for life insurance and term insurance and can even beat native disruptive digital tech startups in this game. I eat? Constantly focusing on educating the customer and building awareness at the interface.
The company also conducted fraud prevention medical checks using an AI model to scan model centers, regularly detecting about 3-4% of fraud diagnosis centers. Additionally, features like a common dialer that ensures fewer customer calls and voice-to-text speech analytics to ensure perfect fit to script and better data conversion rates also leverage technology to deliver satisfaction and joy to customers .
The partner ecosystem and the ESG agenda
Citing the example of the SWAG product, V. Viswanand recalled how he was formed through the insights of a banking partner; The “buy now pay later” model was similarly shaped by insights gleaned from a web aggregator’s random comment asking why insurance remains the only product category where the customer must pay first and then the company has the right to take them as such. a life or refuse them.
Reducing the Goods and Services Tax (GST) burden can be key to increasing life insurance penetration in India. This is because the forward prices offered in India overwhelmingly target the salaried affluent class, leaving out the much larger and untapped micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME) population which often underestimates your income to take advantage of a lower tax.
Another critical factor is eliminating taxes on annuities either directly or at least on the principal component and taxing only the interest component as is the case in developed Western economies with much higher insurance penetration.
Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) standards have influenced Max Life Insurance’s decision-making process by making most of the infrastructure digital, from logistics to back office transactions, and thus significantly reducing the carbon footprint. V. Viswanand noted how steps were taken in the company to ensure that the company’s more than 14,000 employees were actively involved in these initiatives. Max Life Insurance also launched the second largest ESG fund in the life insurance industry in India, which helped increase its visibility within the millennial client segment.