ICICI Prulife is an active player in the Indian insurance industry. The company adds a million new policies every five months, handles 28,000 crore worth of funds – the largest in the country – and boasts of a head count of close to 20,000. All these vouch for the pace of the company's business expansion, not to mention the growth of innovative IT initiatives that facilitates such growth.

Biztech2.0 spoke with Anita Pai, Executive VP, Customer Service and Technology; and Sumit Puri, Senior VP and Head, Customer and Distribution Systems, on the IT initiatives at ICICI Prulife over the past year.

Could you mention the main IT initiatives at ICICI Prulife in 2007?

One very big initiative that we took in 2007 was a drive to get information across to customers through mobile phones. Our customer service agents have been enabled with a mobile application that allows them to pass on information to customers regarding queries related to insurance policies. They can also send the information via SMS.

On the customer side we have enabled an SMS information pull functionality, so if a customer wants to know about his fund value or the next due date for premium payment, he can get it by simply sending an SMS. Another initiative is our partnership with mChek for paying insurance premium via mobile. Policy holders having an Airtel connection can avail of this service.

We are constantly evaluating different payment methods to offer customers, as insurance is a lifetime engagement. We have about 40 payment channels and a lot of them are technology-enabled. Currently, out of the total renewal premiums that we collect monthly, about 65 percent is through the electronic mode. We collected almost 100 crore of premium through the website payment gateway in nine months. A direct debit option is offered to the customer too.

What customer service initiatives have been enabled through the website?

The website has been a critical source of communication with customers. So we decided to make all premium-related statements available on the website. Customers can take printouts of these premium receipts. Moreover, since we're approaching the financial year-end there's a need to provide documents to show savings. The customer can take the necessary printouts for this too.

We've also started mailing fund statements to customers on a monthly basis. There have been about 3 million SMS hits in less than three months since we introduced the service. Recently we went live with a web chat facility – customers can use this to know more details about a service. ICICI is the first in the Insurance industry to come up with such a service.

We reengineered our CRM software in January 2008. Before the reengineering, each organization entity had a similar screen interface and had to toggle through many screens to solve a customer query. Now the screens are customized according to the needs of the entities, such as call center, operations, branches etc. This facilitates fast navigation and quick response. The initiative comes under the purview of the SOA.

One initiative – quite an innovative one – that helped us control costs is an application that gives us an end-to-end solution for all our traveling needs: from approval to booking for travel, hotels and so on, all within the budget allocated for employees.

How does mFund enable ICICI Prulife in the fund management process?

ICICI handles about 28,000 crore worth of funds, the highest in the country. We had outsourced the fund handling to Deutsch Bank. In 2007 the IRDA asked us to manage the funds in-house. We began doing this with a fund management application called mFund.

On the risk management side, earlier we had a small homegrown system for underwriting (the process of evaluating the risk profile of the customer). It provides consistency instead when done manually. We use the blaze engine from Fair Isaac for this service; the engine automates the rules on the basis of which underwriting is done.

We recently launched a function on our website that enables policyholders to switch their funds into a different fund that deals with equities. If, due to market conditions, the policy holder wants to invest, he can do it in real-time on the website.

What are the IT initiatives to serve internal customers?

The employee count on April 2007 was 15,000 and now we are about 20,000. As a result the employee transactions with the company is huge. Ninety percent of the employee requirements – such as expense reimbursement, monthly salary, leave approvals, traveling, performance management etc – are processed automatically through applications.

What is the typical procedure as-it-happens on the mobile device to pay the insurance premium?

Just SMS the policy number and the premium amount. There's a gateway that forwards the request. It comes to us in the form of a batch file; we decrypt it and send an acknowledgment to the customer. The batch file is processed daily.

How does the web chat functionality work?

We needed a very stable chat engine for running the web chat service. The chat is administered on a domino-based chat engine. More importantly, the customer service associate should be able to handle queries accurately and consistently. As we start evaluating the audit trails, we will be further able to sharpen our agents’ call handling skills.

What is the greatest challenge in implementing simultaneous IT projects?

Every IT project has a gestation period of 3-4 months. While we are setting the pace on one project, some other project could come in that's even more urgent than the one under implementation. So we have to prioritise and complete the projects. It definitely puts the pressure on the IT team because they have to implement the current projects, plan for the upcoming ones and ideate for the future.

When implementing a number of projects, how do you deal with the problem of selecting solutions to be compatible with the current systems?

The technology stack is very well defined. We evaluate a new product against the current architecture before we buy it. The challenge currently is more to do with the scalability aspect. Considering the kind of growth we're experiencing, we need to ensure that our systems and applications are scalable to meet the demand. About a million policies are added every five months, so how do we assure that the system is able to accommodate all this customer data? We use tools like load testers to keep the threshold limit of the system in check. We will also meet IRDA regulations as and when they are introduced.