Focusing On Remote Fulfilment to Offer Services Quickly & Conveniently: Yashish Dahiya

Adapting to the current Covid-19 situation, Policybazaar is focusing on remote fulfillment to offer services quicker and conveniently to customers. “We are looking at remote fulfillment very seriously. We are working on making sure that remote fulfillment can become as large a percentage of our business as possible,” Yashish Dahiya, Co-Founder and Group CEO, Policybazaar said recently at a webinar organized by Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and MEDICI, a fintech research innovation and advisory company.

Amit Goel, Founder, MEDICI was moderating the session on ‘Braving a crisis with Tech and Insurtech’.   

“Not remote booking because that was already the case but remote fulfillment, examinations, inspections, claims fulfillment. All of that has to become remote,” added Dahiya.

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For instance, Policybazaar and leading insurers have come together to issue life and health insurance policies by doing medical check-ups over the phone. These check-ups are available to prospective customers via a phone call, also known as tele-medical. The move cuts down the risk of a physical meeting between customers and doctors for a medical and lets insurers carry on with underwriting over the phone.

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There has been a significant uptake in the queries and conversion rates of insurance purchases on Policybazaar. The conversion rate at Policybazaar.com increased around 35% over the last three-four weeks.

“If it doesn’t then there are physical legs in the business and the moment there are physical legs, those don’t work in a crisis like this. Nobody ever imagined that there won’t be a physical leg. When I look at the industry, a lot of the industry was offline. That part would obviously struggle,” Dahiya said.

In the pandemic situation, when the country is under lockdown, Policybazaar has made provisions for reducing physical processes as much as possible in the issuance of a policy as well as claims and inspections.  

Policybazaar has a self-inspection video feature that was built to simplify the process of renewing expired motor insurance policies. The thought behind launching this feature was to reduce the renewal time of expired policies from 2-5 working days to a couple of hours by eliminating the need for physical inspection requiring the human intervention of the vehicle. This feature resulted in a 106% growth in lapsed insurance policy revenue and overall motor insurance conversions have gone up by 51%. 

Pandemic Situation Paves Way For Digital Road Ahead

“We have attempted to move as much digital as possible and wherever there wasn’t a physical leg, business is fine. The demand for health insurance is high. There isn’t any fall in demand for motor insurance too. Our attempt has been to move as much fulfillment online including claims. So, I suspect that the industry will come out of this far stronger with digital processes,” said Dahiya.

Dahiya further said that a third of insurance is largely sold through banks. “The pandemic has become a struggle for insurance agents because you won’t let them come inside your house as you used to earlier. There was a long-term trend toward protection products and online insurance buying. Those will play out a little faster in this situation than they would have in the normal course of events,” added Dahiya.

He also said that the company has increased its marketing spends on health and life insurance.

“We are the second-largest marketing spender in the country right now... The reason we have done that is because it's an opportunity for us to take our market share from 10% to 25%. Hoping that we come out of this crisis with more than 25% market share of health insurance and we are hitting the gas,” he added.

(Article edited by: Sunny Lamba)

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