ICICI Lombard General Insurance Boosts User Experience with Mobile App

Summary:

Using a mobile platform, ICICI Lombard General Insurance, changes how customers and employees see the industry.

Highlights:

The company’s mobile initiative started simply enough, with a set of basic applications that gave customers a consolidated view of all their policies, a reminder service to renew a policy, and a way to track the status of a claim. From a technology-perspective, an important milestone, he says, was their decision not to pursue app development on the J2ME platform, but to standardize on the Android platform and remain phone-model agnostic.

A road mishap is always a traumatic experience. Whether or not it ends in physical injury, it results in mental agony; agony that’s compounded by dealing with motor insurers. 

Usually, claiming motor insurance follows a standard procedure: Contact the insurance company as soon as possible; seek guidance from a company representative on how to proceed with the claim; finally arrange for the forms and documents required to support the claim.

All of this, typically, can be a long-drawn process. But to be fair, the insurance industry doesn’t sit up all night plotting how to make customers unhappy. It’s just that most systems are so plagued with inefficiencies that claiming insurance can easily turn into a protracted battle. 

Ram Medury, VP-technology, ICICI Lombard General Insurance, wanted to change that. He saw an opportunity to buck the industry’s terrible norm by using a mobile platform. 

Using an app on the tablet, our claim surveyors can pull up case details, take pictures,and complete the entire workflow. This has improved their productivity by 30 percent

“We identified that there were a lot of efficiencies that were waiting to be realized. Clearly, we wanted to enable our organization to lead this change,” he says.

His work has brought real-time insurance servicing to consumers—and is changing the way the industry functions. 

In the Mobility Lane

Mobility is a rising star in the technology firmament, and Medury knew that leveraging it for customer service was a win-win proposition. “Through the mobile platform, we wanted to make insurance servicing as easy as a doodle. This would benefit our customers, our intermediaries, and our internal surveyors. Importantly, it would augment our organization’s customer-centricity by several notches,” he says.

The company’s mobile initiative started simply enough, with a set of basic applications that gave customers a consolidated view of all their policies, a reminder service to renew a policy, and a way to track the status of a claim. “But as we matured with the mobile platform, we re-visited the paradigm and devised new ways to provide customers with more value-added and user-friendly features,” he says.

If, for example, a customer’s vehicle has an accident he can use his Android smartphone with an ICICI Lombard app to initiate a claim process. He simply needs to click on the ‘Claims’ button, which will automatically use the phone’s camera to take a picture of the damaged car. The app then sends these pictures, with a claim request, to ICICI Lombard’s datacenter. At this point, a surveyor can look at the damage, remotely, and take decision on the claim or get a closer inspection done. 

That’s a far call from the industry norm, one that forces customers to become experts in insurance, as they learn the claims process of their insurer and fill their phones with the numbers of multiple representatives. It’s also a great deal quicker. 

Medury didn’t stop there. He ensured his team offered apps that provided the customer with a guide to nearby garages. Similarly, the process of medical insurance claim has also been simplified. If a customer needs to visit a hospital, he doesn’t need to have his entire insurance docket on him, it’s all loaded on his phone. With a simple click of a button, his medical insurance card will appear in a landscape format on his mobile, along with a map pointing him to the nearest hospitals on ICICI Lombard’s list of preferred providers. 

Competitive Edge

Medury and his team also decided to bring the power of mobility to internal users and significantly improve their productivity. 

If, for example, you’re an insurance  sales agent, you probably make calls throughout the day, and end your shift collating data to issue policies. A big challenge is the ambiguity in calculating premiums. So Medury created a ‘quote’ app which helps agents instantly quote premium amounts in sync with the organization’s backend systems, leaving behind calculation errors, speeding up customer service, and improving productivity. 

The mobile app platform also benefited ICICI Lombard’s surveyors. When a four-wheeler is damaged, for example, a fairly comprehensive survey is conducted to process its claim. To shrink the time those processes take, ICICI Lombard’s IT team issued tablets to its surveyors. “Now using an app on the tablet, our claim surveyors can pull up case details, take pictures, tag these to various categories, and complete the entire workflow. This has improved their productivity by 30-40 percent; where a surveyor could survey about six cars a day, he can now do much more,” says Medury. 

Point of Origin

ICICI Lombard has always been fairly bullish on emerging technologies. So it was only natural for top management to embrace mobile technologies just as long as the top line, the bottom line, and the customer were all kept happy. And Medury ensured his business case did all of that. 

“We built a value-based business case grounded in business reality. We also kept a sharp focus on the implementation so that it would pave the way for enterprise value. It was clearly a technology-led business transformation move,” he says. 

What really got management nodding, says Medury, was the solution’s ability to do much of the heavy lifting for the business, thereby increasing productivity, enhancing customer-centricity—and creating competitive advantage.

From a technology-perspective, an important milestone, he says, was their decision not to pursue app development on the J2ME platform, but to standardize on the Android platform and remain phone-model agnostic. For end consumers the choice was to leverage a cross-platform standard that would work across all platforms. Another was to follow an agile development cycle so that they could introduce new features at regular intervals. Key to that strategy was to start with easy features that showcased early and easy wins, whetting business’ appetite for more. 

Using an app on the tablet, our claim surveyors can pull up case details, take pictures,and complete the entire workflow. This has improved their productivity by 30 percent

“We constantly monitored usage, collected feedback from the field force, created awareness of the capabilities of the mobile application, and did frequent site visits. We also revisited our solutions strategy often and fine-tuned it based on the feedback. We ensured that the solution was in line with the user expectations,” he says. 

Medury’s efforts paid off as the company realized massive efficiency gain. “With our mobility app we have seen significant productivity improvements in internal processes and workflow timelines. As far as our consumers are concerned, we are now clocking more than a few thousand downloads of our app. The user experience has been the strong driver enough for the word-of-mouth publicity of our mobile apps,” he says.