An insur­ance provider unlocked the full poten­tial of its dig­i­tal plat­form — and increased online appli­ca­tions by 48%

Key results

About the client

Our client is an insur­ance provider that was formed out of a part­ner­ship between two con­glom­er­ates: a glob­al finan­cial pro­tec­tion and asset man­age­ment com­pa­ny oper­at­ing in over 60 coun­tries, and one of the largest nation­al banks in Thai­land. The com­pa­ny has been under­writ­ing life, acci­dent, health, dis­abil­i­ty, and med­ical insur­ance for a world­wide cus­tomer base since 1997.

The chal­lenge

Our client had been achiev­ing tremen­dous growth year on year, with an aver­age of 50,000 poli­cies sold every month. How­ev­er, this suc­cess had cre­at­ed a bot­tle­neck in pro­cess­ing. As a result, the qual­i­ty of appli­ca­tions had become more dif­fi­cult to man­age. Rework­ing those appli­ca­tions also added to the workload.

The com­pa­ny devel­oped a dig­i­tal plat­form to reduce appli­ca­tion errors, auto­mate pol­i­cy issuance, and to bet­ter man­age infor­ma­tion. How­ev­er, this pre­sent­ed some addi­tion­al challenges:

• The roll­out and imple­men­ta­tion of the dig­i­tal plat­form suf­fered set­backs due to tech­ni­cal issues and low user uptake.
• Train­ing and imple­men­ta­tion was large­ly focused on the tech­ni­cal aspects of the new plat­form. Not enough atten­tion was giv­en to the changes it would bring to the way of working.
• There was also a per­cep­tion prob­lem inter­nal­ly. The plat­form was regard­ed as an “IT ini­tia­tive” instead of a tool that could sup­port and com­ple­ment sales. More con­cern­ing was the wor­ry that the plat­form would neg­a­tive­ly impact sales.

What we did

A brief analy­sis of the plan showed us that buy-in — espe­cial­ly from Sales — was required to over­come the neg­a­tive per­cep­tion of the dig­i­tal plat­form. As a response, we brought in the Head of Sales Sup­port and Heads of Sales for each region into the trans­for­ma­tion project.

Iden­ti­fy­ing prob­lem sce­nar­ios and areas of improvement

We car­ried out our Focus Process® over a three-week peri­od to map out all “as-is” sales process­es and to iden­ti­fy the behav­iour­al chal­lenges and process con­straints in using the dig­i­tal platform.

At the same time, we iden­ti­fied all pos­si­ble sce­nar­ios that could hin­der dis­trib­u­tors from effec­tive­ly using the plat­form. From there, tem­po­rary workarounds were designed and devel­oped to enable usage.

Sys­tem soft­ware devel­op­ers were brought in to address bugs and workarounds. Fol­low­ing this, a for­mal process was set up to effec­tive­ly com­mu­ni­cate these fix­es and enhance­ments. The users became more motivated.

Answer­ing the ques­tion: ”What’s in it for me?”

We worked on new train­ing mate­ri­als to get dis­trib­u­tor buy-in for the plat­form. These mate­ri­als answered a key ques­tion that kept pop­ping up in the ini­tial roll­out: “What’s in it for me?”

We also pre­pared a com­pre­hen­sive check­list to ensure that all activ­i­ties were car­ried out in a sys­tem­at­ic and coor­di­nat­ed approach.

Set­ting up a new sys­tem of control

A com­pre­hen­sive man­age­ment con­trol sys­tem (MCS) was devel­oped to ensure prop­er plan­ning, report­ing, and mon­i­tor­ing of per­for­mance. We designed dash­boards that pro­vid­ed details on per­for­mances for each region, line man­ag­er and down to indi­vid­ual sales per­son­nel. This allowed man­agers to:

• Mon­i­tor per­for­mances and dri­ve cor­rec­tive action through the ranks to improve usage levels.
• Exe­cute a struc­tured coach­ing and per­for­mance review mech­a­nism to sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly engage all distributors.

Cus­tomis­ing train­ing sessions

To ensure max­i­mum knowl­edge reten­tion, we imple­ment­ed a “just-in-time” train­ing method­ol­o­gy. Ses­sions were set up one week before the project went live in a region, and had cus­tomised con­tent for both end-users and coaches.

Results

Along­side the key results that were obtained after the pro­jec­t’s imple­men­ta­tion, the com­pa­ny also obtained a blue­print for the sys­tem­at­ic roll­out and buy-in of any future IT imple­men­ta­tion for its dis­trib­u­tors and end-users. The stream­lined train­ing course and coach­ing mech­a­nisms devel­oped dur­ing the project also lay the foun­da­tion for future change man­age­ment ini­tia­tives for the company.