How Bajaj Capital boosted its mobile workforce productivity

With the advent of new technologies a number of companies in the financial are seeking to enhance their operational efficiencies across functions. Bajaj Capital Insurance Broking is one such company.

For more than a decade now, this Delhi-based insurance broking company has been providing a range of insurance products across India and serves over six lakh customers. It provides information about health insurance products along with specialized advisory on any type of insurance solutions, and also helps customers adequately insure themselves and their assets..

Rachit Mongia, executive VP, Channels at Bajaj Capital, claims that they ensure maximum level of their clients’ satisfaction by providing them with accurate information about every insurance product. “Our motto of running the business is—giving right advice to people, and showing them right choices and right insurance policies for their families for a better future,” Mongia said.

One of the fundamental aspects of the company’s business is its collection process, which involves collection of know-your-customer (KYC) documents, electronic clearing services (ECS), money and other related documents. This entire process is completely dependent on its field agents, runners or collection agents who are based across the country and work in tandem with the customer care unit of the company. “The runners typically have to visit customers personally in order to guide them with the insurance products and our process,” said Mongia.

In addition to collecting documents, collecting cash from customers is also a critical part of Bajaj Capital’s business practice. It typically relies heavily on paperwork and admin work, which has increased over the time with the expansion of the business and increase in the number of customers. With a large team of field agents, sales personnel and collection managers, spread across various geographies, operational inefficiency in day-to-day business became a problem that needed redressal.

Key challenges

The major operational challenge for Bajaj Capital was tracking and managing the time of runners and field agents on a routine basis. The company believes that an efficient collection process helps in customer acquisition and customer retention, but tracking, managing and controlling such a huge number of runners and field agents became a tedious job for the backend employees.

“We sell insurance products, which majorly involve visiting customers for collecting their documents and cash, but there were no proper means to track and manage our field agents in terms of the actual number of customer visits and the time taken for that,” said Mongia.

So there was a lack of visibility and transparency in collection agents’ operations, which led to the inability to fulfill customers’ needs. As the company’s target customers were spread across diverse geographies, there was a rise in the cost of the field operations.

“There were several lapses during customer visits, and therefore we used to keep a check on these agents over calls. However, the model of tele-calling wasn’t accurate enough and those lapses were impacting our field operations and business process,” said Mongia.

Shift in customer centricity

With the given situation, the company needed a solution to track and manage its runners in order to bring in transparency into the business process. “We basically needed a game-changer to help our legacy business in adapting the changing consumer behavior. We wanted a configurable mobile solution to optimize the day of our runners,” said Mongia.

The company decided to implement a SaaS mobile workforce management solution. Post the implementation, the collection agents started receiving all their customer details, such as address, payments and documents on their mobile application, from the customer care department. “The field agents can now immediately save customers’ data directly on the app from the field itself, which made the entire sales process smoother and quicker. And now we can track each of these field agents based on the data gathered,” said Mongia.

“Geo-tagging of customers’ photo at the time of the visit is another key aspect of the solution, which helped us a lot. This acts as a proof against any false claims or lapses by customers as well as by field agents,” explained Mongia. “This helped the runners to be prepared according to the customers’ requirements, and by automation of the sales process, the effective sales time has increased.”

Benefits

With the field management solution, Bajaj Capital can now regularly check and analyze the feedback on services and make changes accordingly. In terms of business benefits, the solution helped the company to lower its idle time by 55 percent and reduce information loss about leads and follow-ups by 68 percent. It also helped in decreasing the time spent at customer’s address by 58 percent and increasing in the number of customer visits by 66 percent. The company is now able to track their field employees on a real-time basis.

According to Mongia, the average number of collections per agent per day has moved up by 75 percent. Earlier, the average number of visits per collection agent was three, which has now gone up to five. “Our average travel expense per agent has been now come down to Rs. 4000 from Rs. 6000,” he concluded.