“Last year was a challenging time for the (insurance) market which grew by around 6 percent,” quips Rathin Lahiri, Head - Marketing & CSR, SBI General Insurance on the year for the leading general insurance company. Lahiri added, “However, SBI General Insurance did well and we grew close to 11 percent, which is 70 percent higher than the market. We crossed Rs 14,000 crore in top-line, and profits grew by over 112 percent. We’ve had good growth momentum on our businesses and across all our categories.”
Building Brand Trust & Providing Value
General Insurance, as a category and product, looks at a long-term customer association, typically around 10-15 years, and a very important part of this relationship is Trust – customer trust and brand trust.
Lahiri says, “Once you build brand trust, it becomes extremely easy to upsell the customer to the right value. As the customer’s income grows, their lifestyle changes and we then can cross sell different products across different categories.” He continues, “The second part is delivery, particularly in terms of our customer service and claims. We are omni-channel and possibly one of the widest distributed brands in the country that looks to provide value, because that is very important in a market like India.”
Taking this forward, SBI General Insurance has coined its brand philosophy as "Suraksha Aur Bharosa Dono", with its marketing objective to build on the brand trust by offering comprehensive insurance solutions and building a trustworthy relationship with clients.
Leveraging The SBI Parentage
An important factor for the insurance major is to leverage the trust the comes with being part of the State Bank of India (SBI) family, the Indian banking behemoth. A key data point that helps the insurance arm is that one out of every three Indian has a SBI bank account, this translates to approximately 50 crore Indians, and a high brand awareness and trust factor which comes with being the largest bank in the country.
Lahiri says, “SBI is one of the most trusted brands in India and that becomes a great source of strength for us, for everything, right from customer acquisition etc. versus any other aggregator brand or a pure digital brand. We can bypass the trust part and move into, how will the brand work for me?”
He continues, “Our marketing is tailored towards leveraging the brand SBI and the trust factor. We use this to boost the SBI General Insurance brand and then talk about affordability, value distribution, our hospital network, claims support and how our brand will work for the consumer to deliver as per their specific product requirement.”
Digitization Of Processes To Improve Customer Experience
With India emerging as an aspirational and increasingly digital country, SBI General Insurance reflects this consumer trend by building its brand tonality and voice to be confident, trustworthy and looking to solve all customer queries by providing all information needed in a consumer friendly, snappy and non-preachy manner.
For any brand that seeks to be a market leader in their category, having an omni-channel strategy and a presence at every touch-point wherever the customer is present is crucial and this holds true even for insurance whether the consumer buys the product via banks, through aggregators, on the mobile app or the website.
Lahiri shares three crucial points to attain leadership. He explains, “As a potential leader in this category, you have to be everywhere. Most people in marketing, think only of digital sales, but the first point is a long-term Customer Association. Sales is only the first part, as after sales, the customer policy has to be renewed next year. So, through the year, we need to have customer communication to ensure that he's happy with the customer servicing, which is the second part. Finally, the rubber hits the road during claims processing, which is digital and has to be efficient. As an organisation, we are trying to digitize all the three processes and today, over 92 percent to 93 percent of all these processes are digital.”
With AI being increasingly being used for content creation, SBI General Insurance is leveraging AI not for “personalisation but customisation in terms of messaging,” to address customers in the language they are comfortable in across 16 different languages. Currently, SBI General Insurance is using AI, in the first step, for content creation with checks to ensure that it becomes easier at scale.
Lahiri explains, “We are more importantly using AI in our claim servicing and processes in risk detection and fraud, which is working well for us to speed up the customer experience. This is 100 percent thorough and is like a green channel as the process goes through immediately and 96 percent to 97 percent of the customers actually have a better experience. When we suspect of a potential fraud, we then dig deeper into it. AI has helped us improve not just branding or marketing, but the actual customer experience itself.”
Going forward, Lahiri states that AI will help in better selection and delivery of products to the customer. This in turn will lead the customer, at some point, to only buy the product and features he/she requires, resulting in better customization of products at the customer's end, and better customer experience and affordability, simply put where even insurance can be hyper personalized.
Educating The Consumer
For a complex product like insurance, Lahiri believes that customer education is going to be very important for the next 10 to 15 years, keeping in mind the current median age of India, which is 28, and this cohort is not thinking about risk management or even health insurance as yet.
Lahiri explains, “Given our demographic, education is going to be important in the coming years, because there are different stages of customers at different income levels, different prosperity levels with different levels of risk to manage.” He adds that education is important at the customer acquisition phase to ensure he/she has the right product with the right features. Once the customer is on boarded and as his/her lifestyle changes, the insurance company has to share consistent and the right communication to educate the customer to tailor the product suitably, as per their requirement at that life stage as they grow older and address whatever problem comes up along the way.
“If we successfully acquire a customer, and are able to communicate to him the benefits of insurance and provide a good experience, then they will buy their future insurance needs from us, be it a travel insurance or even when he upgrades from a bike to a car. The cross-sell happens automatically,” he explains.
A challenge is capturing the cultural nuances across multiple languages. He explains, “I would agree that there is some loss of cultural nuances, because, it's very time consuming and difficult to execute. I don't have a solution for it. However, we are trying to ensure that the customer communication at least happens in his/her language and they understand what they have bought, what are the features, the renewal process, the coverage plan, and how to make a claim. That's the stage we are at and there is some distance to go on the nuancing bit.”
SBI General Insurance has been using social media platforms very actively and aggressively and have even been “surprised by the feedback from the content posted.” The insurance company’s strategy has been to keep its communication simple, basic and functional in a listicle format such as why you should take motor insurance to five ways to make a health insurance claim etc. This content has performed well for the company, garnering millions of views at is cost effective.
Lahiri says, “There is a lot of interest from customers across categories in this content. However, one thing which is uniform for all Indians is that we are value conscious and want affordability. Digital and social media platforms are performing extremely well and that is our route into the customer's minds and hearts.”
As part of building value for its customers, SBI General Insurance has started co-creating and co-marketing products along with its partners to reach out and target to a larger base of customers. Looking ahead, on a final note he says, “This year, our ad spends will grow in-line with our top-line.”
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