Mohit Rochlani, Director – Operations and IT, IndiaFirst Life Insurance Company Limited
Though the impact may not be visible to the extent today, it is definitely there, and I believe nobody will remain untouched.
Insurers are also tackling this situation with respect to specific challenges faced by their customers, employees, suppliers and partners. The growth and profitability of insurers may be under stress for short term, but the immediate need is to address employee safety, business continuity and enterprise wide risk management concerns.
Adapting to the new normal is the key. However, there is still hope that the situation will be back to normal sooner than later. All the factors may not be under control but still organisation need to function to its best possible capacity.
We at IndiaFirst Life invoked partial BCP in mid-March & then extended it to full BCP during last 10 days of March, which still continues. We had our own set of challenges. Nevertheless, we managed to mitigate most, if not all, with minimal impact on services.
We enhanced our WFH solution capacity to four times by additional deployment of required system resources and enhanced the capacity thresholds to maximum. We also invested in a good number of rental end-user devices to extend the WFH solution to maximum number of employees. We did specific changes to access thick client-based applications remotely without compromising on any information security policy.
We managed to keep our call centre operational through specific routing and access. All our internal meetings moved to virtual collaboration solutions which were already available with us. The usage of these tools has been extensive during lockdown period.
The sales related applications & enablement tools are already web based and we haven’t faced issues in relation to access, availability or functionality. However, for customers our focus moved to self-service options, which were tuned to handle additional transactional traffic. We ensured that any and every information required by our customers or distribution channels are available virtually.
The last mile connectivity has been a challenge, which has impacted the speed of operations. This challenge is global across all industry and geography. The dependency is on telecom and broadband providers also as their network is under tremendous stress due to the unprecedented situation.
Now, the organisations including Insurers will have to make a long-term approach or plan to tackle the impact of Covid-19 on overall economy. It has to be at all levels across processes.
The workforce must adapt to virtual platforms and make it part of life. We have to ensure employee engagement through various virtual solutions.
This situation also provides an opportunity to look at product innovations specially on protection products. Apart from distribution network, the customer behaviour may also change as the interactions over virtual platforms will increase. New ways of engaging customers will be in demand. Further all the processes & technology must think contactless transactions as well as servicing needs.
Above all, the risk management will be in demand and data security measures will increase leading to higher spends on data security.
This is “New Normal”, however the definition of “Normal” is still evolving!
