Predicting real-time insurance needs with hyperpersonalization

SBI General Insurance maximizes customer lifetime value with SAS^® Customer Intelligence 360

Research shows that personalized customer journeys improve customer service and can increase a company’s revenue by up to 60%. But for insurers that provide everything from home, life and auto insurance to crop insurance and cyber-risk protection, the opportunities to personalize promotions for every customer can be overwhelming.

Consider SBI General Insurance, one of the largest general insurance organizations in India. With nearly 1,000 branches and 4.5 million policyholders, the company has a lot of customer data to manage. At such a scale, it was difficult to access the information needed to create personalized journeys for its customers.

SBI identified a need for personalized and contextualized marketing to reduce policyholder churn, increase revenue and improve customer engagement. Unfortunately, SBI didn’t have the technology to bring this vision to life. Its data was siloed, and the marketing team had limited visibility. The company couldn’t access customer information like policy life cycles, channel engagement and products used. Because the data resided in a variety of places across the organization, it often took up to three weeks to merge analytical insights with customer data.

In response to these challenges, SBI began seeking a comprehensive solution. The company wanted a single view of its customer base to streamline customer data and address marketing challenges.

Hybrid cloud solution meets goals and regulation requirements

SBI turned to SAS. Together, they implemented an enterprise customer engagement hub built on SAS Customer Intelligence 360. With this SAS solution in place, SBI streamlined its marketing technology into one platform and provided advanced features like open data models, predictive models, streamlined marketing planning and more.

The enterprise customer engagement hub provides a unique end-to-end solution to manage personalized customer experiences across SBI’s channel ecosystem, including mobile apps, online visits, call centers and direct mail.

“Insurance is a business of promise – a promise that we understand the needs of our customers and are there when they need us,” says Pushan Mahapatra, President of Strategic Investments and Head of Open Market. “At SBI General, we have the opportunity to bring these two strong values together and offer our customers a perceptive engagement built around relevance to the customer and not only to us.”

A hybrid cloud solution allows SBI to host its customer data on-premises while benefiting from the Software as a Service (SaaS) offering from SAS. The architecture ensures that SBI’s data management practices comply with India’s data residency mandate, which requires the company to store its data within India. SAS’ unique hybrid architecture allows data storage within SBI premises as well as on SAS Customer Intelligence 360 software – hosted on AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region – to meet all requirements.

“SAS Customer Intelligence 360 on AWS provides us with a complete 360 view of the customer, which enables us to seamlessly orchestrate customer journeys and offer omnichannel personalized experiences to our customers in real time,” Mahapatra says. “Our endeavor through the customer life cycle management program is to make the customer experience our DNA of service and the value of our promise by how we engage with customers across their life stages.”

Overall, SBI has infused analytics capabilities and intelligent business planning into its standard business processes. This significantly reduced the previous lead time of nearly three weeks and has improved time to market for all campaigns by about 400%.

Improving conversions, engagement and retention

SBI’s marketing team uses a custom solution from SAS to orchestrate campaigns in real time across various touchpoints. Providing contextualized campaigns to SBI’s 4.5 million policyholders is expected to drive operational improvements and revenue growth.

“The SAS Customer Intelligence 360 suite gave us the platform to build and use our ‘customer one-view’ and marry it with analytical insights to develop hyperpersonalized engagements with our vast customer base to maximize the customer life cycle value,” says Sujatha Aroon, Head of Business Transformation and Strategic Projects. “The unique ability of the platform to mesh the new-age digital journeys and our traditional engagements through agents, call center, messages and more in real time will give us the ability to initiate a contextual engagement when the customer is at our channel, and not offer them something ex post facto. This is a positive step in driving higher ROI from this program going forward.”

Current predictions suggest that SBI will see a 4%-8% increase in conversions, a 20%-25% improvement in customer engagement and retention increases between 4%-7%. Additionally, projections predict a fourfold increase in operational efficiencies thanks to the centralization the solution provides. Combined, these changes are expected to produce a 50% increase in core revenue within one year of implementation.

While these results are impressive, it is simply the beginning for SBI. With full visibility into data, analytics, customer engagement and impact measurement, the customer life cycle management team is poised for continued innovation and success.