Leadership in the time of a crisis - Part 2 of 2

Top trends for 2020/2021 across the dimensions of customer, distributors, employees and markets…

Employees:

For many, working-from-home for an extended period was an unknown territory or a no-no and for others, working away from office made much more sense. Like all things in life, moderation is the “word”. I don’t believe one way works and we need a mix of working-from-home and working at office.

This situation has also challenged the managerial capabilities of many traditional managers. For long, we have spoken about managing people by objectives vs. time. CoVID forced them to practice this and many came out stronger in my opinion. Similarly, those who wanted to work away from office all the time now value those brainstorming sessions, walkthroughs and so on much more.

For too long I have heard – “Insurance is a boring industry to work in” from young graduates, outside of actuarial science. I doubt any industry will go through the pace of change that insurance will over the next 5-years. This is driven by an existential question on the current model, costs associated, customer needs and the overall need for change now! On top of that, while some of the sexier industries like travel, hospitality and others faced mass closures, layoffs and salary cuts, insurance remained relatively stable, despite some short term capital and profitability challenges. Above all, people are now looking for stronger purpose around their businesses and insurance provides that. We might just see a younger and more dynamic bunch of people next time you walk into an insurance office J

At AXA Affin Life, more than 60% of our staff now are millennials and this number is growing every day.

Some organisations I have spoken to have implemented a set of high impact/smallish projects within 4 and 5 weeks. One of them I know has implemented a dozen within this time-frame. Unthinkable in our part of the world and goes to show, what desperation does to human beings. And this in my view will become the norm. Once a CTO of a large e-commerce firm told me, they have something going into production every hour! As insurers, doing that twice a week is a gigantic task that unsettled many across the length and breadth of the organisation.

At AXA Affin Life, we have a simple philosophy; any project that takes more than 3-months is not approved and in the last 2.5 years, we had only 2 projects that took longer and both occasions were due to governance reasons. And we aren’t talking about small projects here, we are talking about proper full-scale launches covering system development, product, pricing, marketing and so on. The discipline an agile project with a small budget and defined timeline brings coupled with prioritization based on consumer needs and consumer needs only is simply amazing and one will only know it, until one does it. No one better to say that than me as I am also guilty of having worked on multi-year waterfall projects which spent upwards of 7 figures and failed miserably once launched as it only had 1 or 2 lenses – distributor and or/internal!

Neither will agile be about a process, nor will it be what some complex consultant-talk type presentations claim – maturity matrices and concepts and frameworks. Simply put, it will be the veins of the organisation. It will be the way everyone thinks and delivers change!

Remember any new project that goes live today is already outdated from a tech stand-point!!! So, dont spend so much time on it, that it has to be killed on the day of its launch ;)

Customers and Distributors:

Millennials will bring in a whole new dimension to insurance. Many researches have proved that mobile phones are the number one prized material possession of a millennial/zillennial. This clearly will force insurers to “think mobile first”. This means our traditional way of adding one feature on top of another and on and on in response to other competitors will have to come to an end. These complex products cannot be delivered through a mobile and the complexity that this industry thrived on will be fundamentally challenged at its roots. Consumers will buy what they really want, how they want it and not buy what someone sells to them because they feel this is what someone wants.

For the same reason, I believe there will be a clearer division of lines across different channels with some cross-linkages:

(A)    COMMODITIZATION of lower involvement products - Travel, Motor, Home Simple health, protection and so on will move from traditional channels to pure direct or integrated direct channels like tele-assist

(B)    AGENCY 2.0 – A MORE PROFESSIONAL SALES NETWORK - Supported by digital, RPA, big data, Robo Advisors, VR and AI for complex products (Health, CI, Life, etc.).

Agents will be more productive than before as there will be fewer of them selling much more than before thanks to technology and the learnings they had during this CoVID for example. They realize they can sell or almost sell to most customers through a video chat or a call and very little requires direct physical meetings. Advice, trust and relationship are central to this model of business and age old philosophies of requiring physical meetings to evidence these are being challenged by technology and the lack of time and greater social awareness amongst people post CoVID. Hence, I do believe that Agents who are ready to change will thrive in a new world and this may also mean that may even sell a bit of lower involvement products through their digital channels/interfaces. This will help them build up their customer lifetime value and hence, their profitability. For too long, companies haven’t engaged Agents on this side of the world and hence, digital has been limited to digitization of processes. Beyond which it was considered a threat and not complimentary in nature as detailed above.

At AXA Affin Life, our message and intent from the beginning have been very clear – Digital will expand Agency channel and not contract it. As we acquire more customers who buy simpler and lower involvement products through digital channels, we are also aware that as these millennials will become older, richer and demand more complex financial products, they would need advice and hence, there is a massive opportunity for our Agents. In 2019, almost 20% of the sales of our 1^st year Agents (EYE Agents as we call them), came from the leads we provided them. Net result – both Digital and Agency channel grew in tandem and one didn’t substitute the other.

(C)     POWER OF PARTNERSHIPS – Integrate them to our value chain (CX, claims, anticipation, etc.)

While insurance will not be like FMCG with a clear market that they will operate in, insurance will cover a wide array of needs – ranging from upwards millions of dollars for legacy planning for high networth individuals to bit-size products sold as an add along with a primary product. They could be telco who want to sell protection with a connection because they know their customers very well or an e-hailing platform selling bite size covers for their drivers and customers on an on-demand basis.

I wanted to put in something out there using my crystal ball! Thanks to all these partnerships and new age technologies, some part of insurance may move from being charged upfront to being paid at fixed intervals based on usage (similar to any utility bill). E.g. Telematics data for car premium, wearable data for health premium, GPS data for travel premiums, etc.

Insurers will move away from doing everything on their own. This is one of the reasons why many insurers are large, complex and heavy. At the centre of what we do at AXA is specializing and being really good at what we do and partnering with those who are good in other areas. “Beyond Insurance” is a central theme for AXA.

Our vision is to be the preferred health and protection insurer for millennials in Malaysia. In this direction, over the last 2.5 yrs, we have already launched many initiatives for our customers, going beyond the typical health journey!

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• Free tele-consultation and drug delivery with DoctoronCall - Launched in July 2019
• COVID testing at a cost (Recent launch) and rewards platform with BookDoc - Rewards platform and discount programme since early 2018
• Rehabilitative care, mental well-being and psychology support with Naluri since early 2018
• Above all, we are fully digital and #1 digital life/health insurer - This means customers can buy, service and claim with us easily online. We have an eMedical card, customer portal, Whatsapp (Ask Michelle) and chatbot (ATOM) for servicing as well since 2018

And we are constantly exploring newer ways propositions with our 23+ partners!

This has never been more important than today when customers are worried about their health and also other elements around potential global slowdown. So we are going beyond just making it easier to buy or claim with us!

Markets:

Finally, this has been something I have personally been talking about for some time now. And it’s almost a personal favourite of mine. For too long, insurance KPIs that the market looks at have also been very traditional like EPS, profits, etc.

I do believe the time has come to give greater weightage to longer term lead KPIs like (1) # of customers acquired (2) How long are they staying with us? (3) How much more are they being from us?

This will ensure the industry moves to a more customer centric outlook coupled with longer term value building vs. walking a tight rope between short term financials and longer term value building commitments. As Jeff Bezos once said, “This quarterly result has actually pretty much been fully baked about 3-years ago. Today I am working on a quarter that is going to happen 3-years later. Not next quarter. Next quarter for all practical purposes is done already and has probably been done for a couple of years.”

This kind of fundamental change will be needed as the industry captains aim to transform the industry to be more relevant and transformative.

These are just some of my preliminary thoughts. I welcome your feedback and thoughts to learn better.

Disclaimer: These are my personal observations and are not the official views of the organisation that I work for.