Enhancing Customer Experience With PB Meet

India has come a long way now in the world of AI where Virtual and Augmented reality has taken over the spectrum of physical beings but the human touch element still remains at the core of all the conversations and interactions that happen. Since insurance still remains a push product in India, conveying your thoughts to the customer comes as a huge challenge amongst a majority crowd of mindsets that are inclined towards buying insurance as a means of tax-saving rather than protection.

Policybazaar, the company whose ethos revolves around providing transparent information to customers, needed a path-breaking innovation that can help in elevating the customer experience and at the same time opens up new avenues of business.

What is PB Meet?

As an insurtech, our focus has always been to make insurance more transparent for our customers. Our contact centre advisors work endlessly in guiding customers throughout the insurance journey, from offering right products at affordable prices to ensuring a speedy policy issuance process & post-issuance support including claims. We rely upon voice calling to speak to our customers everyday helping them with their insurance buying journey. While we leverage upon voice, we also built a platform for video and screen sharing called PB Meet that supports as an add-on to build credible engagement with customers. Video calling ensures face-to-face communication between customers and advisors identical to real life thereby increasing comfort and giving a personalized customer experience. The combination of video calling and telecalling makes the entire proposition far more scalable and better than offline buying.

PB Meet has helped in earning customer trust and helped advisors in ease of selling while providing a personalized experience to the customer. A telephonic conversation has been a proven method of closing the sales since ages, however with the new age’s rising expectations to seek the most reliable information, the presentation app has hit right on the spot in today’s time where the tech-savvy population is on a rise. PB Meet helped us serve these customers at a massive scale. Digitalization has forced the businesses to adopt innovative ways of achieving customer enrichment while taking the shortest and hassle-free path for them.

Functions performed

During the pandemic, we started a live video calling and screen sharing functionality called PB meet to have a superior insurance buying experience for our customers. This functionality allows better targeting and customer engagement as they build a healthy relationship with our contact centre advisors. It allows customers to connect on a real time basis with our advisors. We share a link (through SMS, Email & whatsapp) with customers to join PB Meet, where an advisor would have already joined the meet. Both advisors and customers can share their computer screens with each other. Another highlight of PB meet is that it is available both on mobile devices and desktops.

From 2015 to 2020, India witnessed significant smartphone adoption, with over 39% of people using smartphones in 2020 compared to 17% in 2015. Today, India has the second-highest number of smartphone users globally (after China). With rising digital infrastructure, growing tech-savvy young population, preference towards online shopping, a large number of people living in tier-2 and tier-3 cities use smartphones. Therefore, we offer PB Meet to our customers both on mobile phones as well as desktops.

Screen sharing between customer and advisor helps customers navigate through the website. We also help customers fill up forms, choose policy options and details that best suit their profile. Another uniqueness of this functionality is that customers and advisors both can see the profile of each other on the window panel. This helps in better communication between the two. Customers can get to know the background details of advisors such as their city, for how long they have been selling insurance etc. Similarly, advisors can know the background of customers such as whether they bought insurance last time through us, call rejection, how many times they bought a policy through us etc.

This way, advisors can interact with the customers accordingly and resolve their queries. There is a video calling option too which helps in giving personalized support. Video calling is an interactive experience for customers as it is easier to understand when you see a person face-to-face and emulate a real-life experience. Initially, the only way for us to interact with customers was through voice, whereas PB Meet is a better option for enhancing customer engagement in a scalable manner.

Prominent Features Of PB Meet:

• Screen sharing
• Video Calling
• PIVC (Pre Issuance Verification Calls)
• One-click join
• Voice recording if talking over the internet using app
• Video recording for PIVC

Tech Stack:

• Node
• React
• STUN/TURN server
• Sockets
• GCP
• Rest APIs
• Mediasoup

Was it easy?

Identifying the problem has always been a mammoth of the tasks but still stays the most relevant step in starting any journey of problem-solving. In this case, the challenge was not to reinvent the wheel but to improve its pace and do it seamlessly. Experimentation came to our rescue in developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and then scaling it as per the evolving customer needs.

However, we were often thrown remarkable challenges including:

1. Web browser compatibility:

The canvas of media devices scales from multiple resolutions to n number of operating systems which again diverges into different versions and hence throws challenges such as uniformity and compatibility. The use case also demanded optimum performance of the application across browsers and hence scaling up capabilities of the application was achieved by implementing a cross-browser adaptive mechanism.
 

2. Delivering a Cohesive customer experience:

Voice quality: For keeping audio and video in sync and providing multiple options of audio connectivity (using PB Meet or syncing the call via dialer), it was necessary that the customer experience never breaks. A packet-loss safe code was implemented to manage all the scenarios at once.

Virtual Background: Since all the advisors were working from home owing to COVID lockdown across the country, it became immensely important for the company to provide a uniform visual experience irrespective of the surroundings of the advisor, and hence Virtual Background option was provided to all the agents.

Low bandwidth: Setting up the application to auto-adjust the broadcast quality based on available bandwidth.

Security and compliances: The application had to prove its mettle as per the guidelines of IRDA. All security checks, data storage, and efficiency were attained and maintained as prescribed.

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Data security

All the meeting rooms that are created are temporary in nature and only exist until the call lasts. They are just created when the 1st peer joins the link and are destroyed as soon as the last peer leaves. These rooms are exclusive of each other and hence even if a user rejoins a link, an entirely new room is created with no connections to the previously held meeting on the same link - This is done to keep the sanctity of the application intact and also avoid any type of potential web attacks.

The room Ids are custom encrypted based on certain business and process parameters so that there are no cross-connections internally or externally. These features make PB Meet robust and trustworthy for information transactions where personal details and discussions of customers are involved. PB Advisor will always be needed to start the call so that we maintain proper usage decorum of the platform. He/she can always control who can have access to the meeting rooms.

Business Impact

We have received a phenomenal response to this new assisted policy buying process. Our customers are able to understand products and their features better with the help of this functionality. We have received excellent customer feedback, with instances of customers buying 5 different policies on a single video call, with average talk time running into over 3 hours.

Future Prospect

PB Meet certainly has a lot of scope in the Insurance industry. Some of the prospects include:

• Claims inspection
• Motor inspection
• Managing Tele Medicals as well as other KYC formalities
• For servicing the existing clientele
• File/media transfer functionality for quick resolutions
• Behavioral studies of the customer
• Scope with Artificial Insurance such as verifying docs in one go, person identification and damage identification

(With inputs from Meet Kapadia, Product Manager at Policybazaar.com)

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