Reena Vivek, COO – Zurich Global Life MEA commented, “At Zurich, we are conscious that even though our customers are looking to buy protection and savings products, their expectations in terms of the quality of the overall interaction is often driven by experiences outside of the insurance or financial services industry. Therefore in the last few years we have focused on engaging with our customers to understand these expectations, and have invested our efforts in designing a journey that addresses their specific needs. Since a large part of that experience is also shaped by our distribution partners, we actively solicit their input into this activity and also make sure that we support them with the right tools and capabilities to deliver that superior experience.”
“Design Thinking” approach
Zurich has adopted a service design approach which begins with in-depth research to understand the challenges that customers face in the current interaction model. The reason behind this approach is to ensure that they only develop things that they know customers want, based on a deep understanding of their needs, motivations and behaviour.
“As expected, the need for digital enablement and online capabilities ranked highest amongst the feedback, and we made this a key part of everything that we delivered to the market in 2015”, Reena Vivek said.
Zurich also used Zurich Community®, its proprietary online customer insights portal, to reaffirm some of its findings and the results from Zurich Community® also confirmed customers’ desire to engage in a more seamless manner with both the financial adviser and the insurer, and to maintain an open channel of communication.
‘Making life easier’ through a seamless customer experience
Each of the changes introduced by Zurich was aimed at addressing specific gaps in the market and clearly differentiating their offering from that of their competitors.
Digital enablement
– The Zurich ‘Quote and Apply’ solution is the only app in the Middle East, that allows an Adviser to provide a customer with a quotation for his protection and savings needs, and complete and submit the full application in real-time. The platform supports features such as e-signature and secure image capture to facilitate a fully paperless sales process. This means customers and financial advisers do not have to go through the time consuming, labour intensive process of filling up lengthy application forms and couriering them to the insurer for processing.
– Zurich’s customers now have access to an online portal ‘Zurich International Online’ (ZIO) which offers real-time policy valuations with graphs, charts and data analysis. It provides the customer and the financial adviser with comprehensive policy information, including payment history, alerts for missed payments and answers the two biggest questions that clients have:
- How is my investment performing?
- What is it worth right now?
The responsive screen designs ensure that ZIO is now available to customers across multiple devices.
Simplification
We found that one of the reasons for life insurance sales being low, or for that matter customers being underinsured, is that people want to avoid the cumbersome process of visiting a hospital or clinic to complete their medical examination. Zurich has a commitment to the market and we want to ensure that individuals have the right amount of protection in order to ensure that their loved ones are taken care of, in the unfortunate event of a bereavement. So we decided to find a solution for that problem and introduced the Home and Office Medical Service”, Reena Vivek said.
The innovative ‘Office and Home Medical Service’ is for the customer who applies for a Zurich protection policy and thereby requires a basic medical examination to be completed. Under this facility, a qualified nurse will visit them to complete the checkup at a location and time of their convenience, and the results will be available to the Zurich underwriting team within 24 hours.
This is just one example of the many process changes that have been introduced by Zurich in the last 12 months to simplify the customer journey. Others include the ability to complete simple transactions instantly over the phone, customer and adviser SMS updates for key policy events, support to customers who are going through a withdrawal process to outline other options that may be available to them and many more.
Reena Vivek commented, “These recent service enhancements, many of which utilise the ever demanding need for seamless online integration, personalisation and value for money, have been built with customer needs in mind and also benchmarked externally with our competition. Having said this, we are not resting on our laurels and continue to focus on the need to deliver today whilst also building a sustainable business for tomorrow.”
